Civil War and Revolution

in America
Will Barnes

Institute
for the Critical Study of Societies of
Capital

Civil War and Revolution in America

W. Barnes
ICSSC Publication
1999
Revision, 5/2006
Authors Note and Apology to the Reader:
Research for this work was carried out from May 1993 through February 1999.
Actual composition was undertaken from October to December 1999.
Revision includes inclusion of maps and the new Theses on Racial Apartheid, a rewrite of
the discussion entitled Lenin in America as well as attempts to eliminate grammatical,
syntactical and spelling errors.
This much said, the largest parts of this work were composed while sitting at a computer, and
typographical errors and misspellings may be numerous.
The author welcomes a large public readership: This work is privately published, is to be freely
distributed and is not subject to sale.

Contents
List of Maps
Preface
The Creation of the Black and White Races: The Prehistory of Slavery in English North
America
Introduction.
Opening Remarks: "Irrepressible" Conflict? Slavery, the Conflict of Contradictory
Societies
Antebellum Origins.
A Preliminary Note on Political Parties
1. The Republican Party's Prehistory. The Jacksonian Democracy
2. Free Soil and Slavery: The Republican Party at its Origins, 1854-1860
Civil War
3. Theories of the Constitution in Relation to the Course of the Civil War and the
Question of Slavery, 1861-1864
4. Problems of Army Leadership (I): Democratic (Pro-Slavery) Leadership in and the
Failure of Leadership of Union Armies in the East, 1861-1863
5. The Copperhead Movement and the Revival of the Pro-Slavery Northern
Democracy, 1861-1864
6. Problems of Army Leadership (II): Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of
Northern Virginia
7. Problems of Army Leadership (III): Grant and Free Men in Union Armies East and
West, 1863-1865
8. A Newly Freepeople and Black Soldiers in the Civil War
9. The Logic of the War and Emancipation. Summary and Results
Postbellum Outcomes
10.The Immediate Aftermath of the War: Winning the War and Losing the Peace
Lenin in Ameica
Conclusion
Civil War Outcomes: Foundations of a Centralized State and the "Progress
of Freedom"
Eleven Theses on American History and the Civil War
Theses on Racial Apartheid, the Origins of Sunbelt Capital, and the Re-Ascendancy
of Southern Property in the American Polity

Appendices
Appendix I. Benjamin Butler and Political Generalship
Appendix II. A Note on Union Army Bigotry: A History of the XI Corps, Army of the Potomac
with Special Attention to its Role in the Battle of Chancellorsville
Order of Battle: The Union Army of the Potomac XI Corps at Chancellorsville
Map Credits
Bibliography

Maps
Antebellum North America Settlement Concentrations and Class Geography
Preface
1. The Tidewater Region of the Virginia Settler-Colony, circa 1676
Antebellum Origins
Chapter 2
2. [MF/1 001-1]1 The Old West (featuring the Yankee Corridor and the Butternut Belt), circa
1850
Civil War
Chapter 5
3. [MF/1 031-1] Western Virginia, early 1862
4. [MF/1 009-1] The Seven Days, June/July 1862.
5. [MF/1 007-1] Antietam, 16 September 1862
Chapter 6
6. Stone Wall at Fredericksburg, December 1862 (diagram).
Chapter 7
7. [MF/1 011-1] Shermans Atlanta Campaign, 1864
8. [MF/1 013-1] The Mississippi River at and above Vicksburg, 1863
9. [MF/1 015-1] Grants (Mississippi) Overland Campaign, May 1863
10. [MF/1 017-1] The Virginia Overland Campaign, May/June 1864
11. [MF/1 019-1] Petersburg and its Environs, 1864-1865
Postbellum Results
Chapter 10
12. [MF/1 021-1] Upland Concentrations of the Southern Yeomanry, circa 1850
Appendices
Appendix I
12. [MF/1 023-1] Bermuda Hundred, May 1864
Appendix II
14. Chancellorsville I, 2 May 1863, 8:00 am
15. Chancellorsville II, 2 May 1863, 5:00 pm
16. [MF/1 025-1] Chancellorsville III, 3 May 1863, early morning
17. [MF/1 027-1] Gettysburg, northern environs, 1 July 1863
18. [MF/1 029-1] Chattanooga, points of entry from the west, late October 1863

1The bracketed numerical designations refer, first, to the map directories (Map Files 1 or 2) in which the maps are

located, and, second, to the number of each map in the directory. So that, for example, MF/1 001-1 designates map
directory no. 1 (MF/1), map no. 001-1 which is the map featuring the Yankee Corridor and the Butternut Belts of the
Old West.
Note that viewing these maps requires Microsoft Word for Windows 2000 (or later) and Windows Picture and Fax
Viewer, a program bundled with Windows XP Home (or Office) Edition.
Maps are not available in the website version of this text. They can be obtained from the author upon request at
wwbarnes@yahoo.com.

Preface
The Creation of the Black and White Races
The Prehistory of Slavery in English North America.
Outside the worlds of native life, the contending parties making up the "civilized" world on
the North American continent, shaped [first] by commodity exchange and [later by]
commodity production, have fought two civil wars. ...
The transactions of their daily lives penetrated and enveloped by the commodity form, by
the abstract exchange of equivalents, civilized men of this continent invariably developed
a concept of equality for which a man's life is free from arbitrary constraints imposed by
other men. ...
Thus, nearly two centuries apart, the failure of the first civil war to solve the problem of
bondage, in the end led to the second, a revolutionary war mediated by a concept of
emancipation, in which bondage was overthrown.2

Opening Remarks
Though worked over by numerous historians, reflection on the succession of events that has
come down to us as "Bacon's Rebellion" can still render productive insight. In fact, Bacon's
Rebellion is seminal for any perspective that seeks to comprehend the relations of class and
race in American history in order to transcend the historically formed reality of bourgeois
society. Understanding the Rebellion requires that we have a sense of the historical context in
which it arose. Thus, before briefly sketching out the course of the Rebellion, we shall begin
with an overview of the Virginia colony in the seventeenth century.

2Anonymous, On Civil War, 4.

Part I
Labor, Natives and Classes in the Colony up to 1676
Work in the Early Colony
The initial thrust of English colonization was one outcome of latter sixteen century capitalist
development which had dispossessed and marginalized masses of rural peasants. By the
early years of the seventeenth century, a great fear of excess population made up of the
newly forming "dangerous classes" pushed its way into awareness of various ruling class
groups. Aristocratic statesmen and publicists began to formulate schemes for "planting" this
excess population, as new settlements, in areas of a "New World. In so doing, these men
were fully conscious the Spanish empire already had a secure foothold in that world. It was in
this context, at a time when James I chose not to have the English State take a lead in empire
building, that private men with royal authorization formed the Virginia Company.3
The early history of the colony of Virginia, inseparable from the history of the Virginia
Company, has been reconstructed and recounted elsewhere. For our purposes, developments
within the colony can be viewed along two axes. There is first is the domain of productive
labor which is determinate for the entire history of the colony and beyond; and, the second is
the settler relation to native peoples. Both can be dealt with relatively briefly.4
The Virginia Company period of the history of the colony went through distinctive "phases"
before the dissolution of the Company in 1624. Originally, the primary type of labor practiced
in the colony was a form of tenancy. Unemployed laborers recruited (largely in Bristol and
London) to the colony were apprenticed for a period of seven years on the English model. The
Virginia Company was the sole employer and owned all the lands within the colony, and it was
these lands tenants worked. Land was, in principle at least, worked collectively. All produce
was gathered together and placed in a Company store. Such produce was to provide the
basis of self-provisioning. Surpluses were to be sold. Expected profits from the sale of
agricultural product were to accrue solely to Company subscribers. Profits, so it was
anticipated, were to be divided out among the stockholders at the end of a seven year period.
There were, though, no profits to divide out. In fact, the colonists could not even manage selfsufficiency.
Very early on, settler-colonists had been inspired by a desire to find mineral wealth (gold) in
which Company planners had greedily expected to trade. The hope was shortly abandoned.
Laborers who worked company lands settled into and for a number of years unsuccessfully
attempted to grow a variety of marketable crops. These crops - including hops, pitch, tar, silk,
wine and woad - were staples badly needed in England. Still others staples were planned.
Their production, however, required large investments of time and money. But investors
lacked patience and were unwilling to invest. Company merchants had responded to the
failure to turn a profit, and the need for constant provisioning, with what might in effect be
called an investment strike.5
3For excess population, Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White

Race, V. 2, 11-12, 49; Welsey Frank Craven, White, Red and, Black, 61-62; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery,
American Freedom, 21, 30-31.
4For the history of the Virginia Company, Craven, White, Red, and Black, and especially his The History of the
Virginia Company.
5For the early "gold quest," Craven, Ibid, 67-70.
A comparison of the subscriptions to the Virginia Company with those of the great companies will exhibit to what
extent company merchants were unwilling to invest. Between 1609 and 1619, the Virginia Company raised a mere
37,000 in direct investments. In roughly the same period (1609-1621), many of the same merchants backing the
East India Company raised over 2,000,000 for its joint stock. Investors in the Virginia Company subscribed for
stocks at 12 each. A share entitled them to an one-hundred acre tract of land. In the early seventeenth century, the
Merchant Adventurers had a minimal subscription of 200, the Levant Company between 200-300. Robert Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution, 70, 97. Brenner comparatively examines the withdrawal of investment from the Virginia

Merchants of the great Companies based in London were unwilling to further invest in the
Virginia Company as long as it remained an unprofitable undertaking. In 1614, 1616 and again
in 1618, financial insolvency led governors to experiment with new forms of labor beyond
Company control. These experiments resulted in the creation, first, of private plots, and, then,
large private tracts. By 1618, the model of privatized tracts of land had been generalized: The
foundations for a thoroughgoing privatized agriculture outside Company control had been laid.
It was at this time that the viability of tobacco as a staple was recognized. By the end of 1618,
that is, rather rapidly, the settler colony took shape as a tenant economy producing tobacco
for export. Still, these first tobacco sales could not cover the costs of previous outlays, and
investment continued to lag. A revolt broke out among London shareholders. The revolt was
part of a larger Parliamentary struggle that pitted Edward Shadys' European Protestant
sympathizing, "gentry party" of free traders both against the Crown with its pro-Spanish
foreign policy and the great Company merchants. In the ensuing struggle, Company
merchants lost control of the Virginia colony. The Virginia Company was reorganized under a
new charter. The Great Charter of 1618 established a number of new governing bodies, that
at once created relatively autonomous organs in relation to London merchants and centralized
authority within the colony.6
The Governor and his newly formed Council utilized their new found autonomy to dispossess
the colonial tenantcy. Contracts drawn up in London between Company backers and future
tenants were disregarded. The new arrivals were no longer to be tenants sharing half their
product, but servant laborers - tenants still but highly oppressed ones. New arrivals were
shifted from public Company work to labor on privately owned plantations, and they were
drastically reduced both in provisions and in future earnings. This occurred without their prior
knowledge or consent. The Governor and the Council, largely ruthless veteran officers (see
below), were the specific agents of this dispossession because they were its specific
beneficiaries. Tenants were "rented out" to them and their confederates to work on huge tracts
of lands that, for the public services they so willingly rendered, they were at the same time
awarding to themselves.7
Apprentices had become farmers, but as farmers they had been reduced to an oppressed
tenantcy. This reduction was not foreordained: In English experience, the development might
have ended with independent farmers producing for a market, or in the transformation of
farmers into free, albeit waged agricultural workers. But before the Company was dissolved in
1624, farmers would become indentured serviles.
Settler Colonists and Native Peoples
"In the beginning, ... all the world was America." Then men relinquished the state of nature,
freely contracted together, and entered civil society. That was not the way it began, in
Company, Ibid, 109-112.
6For the English struggle the Virginia Company was caught up in, Brenner, Ibid., 211-218.
The "Great Charter" of 1618 created three new bodies. These were the Council of State (made up the Governor's
appointees), the General Court (made up of the Governor and his Council) and the Legislative Assembly. The latter
was formed by the colony's Council and the House of Burgesses, a supplementary body that met intermittently and
jointly with the Council. The Governor himself remained an appointee of the King.
For most of the decade of the 1640s and again after 1659, the Governor and his appointees were Crown loyalists. At
the highest level of the State, they directly articulated and defended the King's interests. The House of Burgesses
constituted a truncated legislative body, until 1663 largely an adjunct to the Council. The House was an elected body.
In all periods of enfranchisement, narrow or enlarged, small planters were largely represented by their social betters
in the House: Its membership was invariably selected from among the well-known men, wealthy planters, men
appointed (by the Governor) to the country courts, whose productive position the mass of freemen aspired to (even if
they did not admire their social superiors).
7For dispossession of the tenancy, Allen, Ibid, 2:75-84.

America. ... America clearly began not with primal innocence and consent but with acts of
force and fraud. Indians were here first, and it was their land upon which Americans
contracted, squabbled, and reasoned with one another.8

The second axis along which the development of the colony can be viewed is the settler
relation to native peoples. Arguably the initial intent of the colony's founders involved a
commitment to civilizing, largely identified with Christianizing, the "savages" of the American
"wilderness. If, however, Company planners and settler-colonists alike did design to convert
the natives to Christianity, their primary orientation was to secure returns on investments.
Broadly speaking, both intents, grasped in light of English ethnocentric assumptions, were
indistinguishable when reduced to social practice. Both led, first, to violent confrontation with
Indians who resisted and, second, to settler atrocities. In fact, settler bigotry, if not racism,
toward Indian peoples grew up on the basis of English military and gentlemanly parasitic
practices: As Indians retaliated against theft and pillaging, a practice of settler dispossession,
enslavement and murder emerged.
The settler relation to the natives began with food. The peculiar structure of work in the colony
made food provisioning problematic. A large number of the settlers in the early history of the
colony were exempted from labor in the fields. These included gentlemen and ex-soldiers, and
craftsmen. The former did not work; the latter did not do agricultural labor. For this reason, and
because no thought had been given to provisioning in the colony's original design, little food
crop was put into the ground. (Funds for the gratis provisioning of the settlers were
extraordinary difficult to generate: It was conveniently assumed, and continued to be against
all evidence to the contrary, that the settlers would become self-sufficient.) In an
extraordinarily myopic as well as arrogant manner, settler-colonists expected native peoples to
work for them. When they wouldn't, the colonists attempted by force of arms to take food from
native communities. The resultant forays led to theft, pillage and murder, and created deep
mutual suspicions. In the two years following a major Indian counterstrike against the
Jamestown settlement (22 March 1622), these forays and massacres were repeated all over
again more brutally and on a far wider scale. (To the extent that settler-colonists entered into
treaties it was done with the avowed, but hidden aim of luring natives into complacency in
order to strike them unawares). It was during those following two years that settler mass
murder, enslavement and plundering greatly reduced the Chesapeake Indian populations,
which on the whole never exceeded 8,000, and drove those who survived the assaults from
the immediate Tidewater environs. Still, the settler-colonists could not (as late as 1623) grow
enough corn to feed themselves, but as an emotionally diseased, ruthless and compulsively
acquisitive lot, they nonetheless were able to mercilessly exploit servant labor (some to even
work) in order to grow tobacco for export sale itself for the sake of wealth accumulation.9
8Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children, 3. Emphasis added. (The internal citation is from Locke's Second

Treatise on Government.)
9For lack of work among the colonists, Allen, Ibid, 2: 73, 84, 86. Sixty of five hundred colonists survived the winter of
1609-1610, Morgan, Ibid, 73. For the practice of assaults on natives to steal food, Ibid, 72-75, 81; for duplicity and
mass murder, Ibid, 99-100, 121.
As ubiquitous as it has become since the time of Calvin, at its extreme (which is what all compulsion tends toward),
the personality driven by the fabled "Protestant ethic" is emotionally malformed and perverse, if you will, diseased. It
synthesizes the vicious cruelty of the military officer and the calculated abstractness of the merchant. What else could
you say of men who threw captured Indian children into a river to drown them and then for good measure shot their
brains out (Morgan, Ibid, 130)? This personality only stands in sharp relief when it appears in opposition to peoples
whose emotional integration did not presuppose the internalization of the repressive institutional structures of "King,
Law and God." (See the section "Servile Revolt," below.)
The Powhatan had a name for this emotional malady, wintiko, referring to an evil spirit or person who terrorizes or
cannibalizes others. More generally, the wtiko disease designates "greed and gluttony, along with the cruel using of
others' lives without remorse, a compulsion which destroys one's own potential and is "a form of sickness." Jack

The operative term in describing settler-colonists in relation to native peoples is ruthless. Men
formed by productively competitive, hierarchically organized, class divided societies regularly
experienced brutality and knew as a matter of course how to be brutal. Much of their cheating
behavior, vicious and even murderous, was an uninhibited elaboration of taken for granted
behavior that structured daily life not only in England, but on the continent. The conditions for
"uninhibited elaboration" of brutality and cruelty were institutionalized in inter-State relations
during the period of early European colonization: At the time of the original English "plantings"
in the Americas, the colonies lay "beyond the line, that is, outside the territorial limits of
European treaties: The entirety of the area west of the furthest most western point of the
Azores (the meridian at 30W longitude) and south of the Tropic of Cancer lay "beyond the
line. Thus, the creation of a "line" was not haphazardously happenstance, but settled policy.
The definition of this area where international law was no longer even formally operative was
first worked out in 1559 by Spanish, French and English diplomats in the Treaty of CateauCambrsis. It was codified in the Treaty of Vervins in 1598 between the Spain and France,
and adopted in 1604 and again in 1630 in treaties between the Spanish and English. Thus, in
the Americas, "might" was right: International law simply did not exist. Trade, commerce,
settlements and land were, accordingly, open to any and all deprecating acts of piracy.10
Living "beyond the line" meant, however, more than ignoring European treaty obligations.
Because no peace obtained "beyond the line, the expression also tacitly suggested only a
very certain type of European would be found venturing forth into waters beyond where
societally specific behavioral norms held sway. English adventurers, it should be noted, began
their pursuit of colonial ventures at that moment when pirating in the Caribbean and along the
tropical coastal waters of the Americas was at its peak. The two groups of men, adventurers
and pirates, were not only variations on the same type, rough and contentious, crude,
impatient and pragmatic, and cruel, brutal and even vicious. In America, both living "beyond
the line" and the isolation of plantation life itself allowed settlers who pursued the dream of the
creation of vast wealth to divest themselves of all internalized prohibitions. As noted above,
they attempted to simply take by force food from and engage in retaliatory mass murder
against Indian communities. During the course of the century, moreover, they would exploit
"their" (Indian and Africa) slaves and English servants "more shamelessly than was possible
with the underprivileged labor class in Western Europe. In the Virginia settler-colony, planters,
in particular, lived without the restrains and inhibitions typical of settled English society. It is in
this double context of personalities and the very special meaning the "New" World carried for
adventurers that we situate the savage dispossession of Indians, and with that a most fateful
development for the future of the nascent colony itself.11
Following the 22 March 1922 Powhatan led assault of Chesapeake Indian warrior bands on
Jamestown, the logical outcome of fifteen years of settler encroachment, the colony's leaders
instituted a variant of martial law: A line of defense was established around the settlements
closest to Jamestown, settlers were ordered to abandon their holdings outside this line and
take refugee within it. Planting could only go on within this perimeter. Rents were fixed at a
high rate. Hunting outside the line of defense was banned. Though the Indians had killed
roughly a third of the settlers, and had managed to destroy settler crops and some stores, an
artificial food crisis was created: The political-planter leadership first bought up all the
Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, 33, 26.
10For the original meaning of "beyond the line." Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 12. Also Carl and Roberta
Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 3 and Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 8; for acts of
piracy. Dunn, Ibid, 11.
11For personality characteristics of these two types of men, Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race
Relations, and the South, 207-208, 224-225; for their frequent identity in Jamaica, Dunn, Ibid, 157-158; the citation
concerning shameless exploitation, Ibid, 12.

available corn and thereafter began to raise its price. At the same time an effort was made to
set a lower exchange rate at which tobacco could be sold in the colony to sea bound
merchants. The results were, of course, predictable. Within eighteen months the price of corn
had risen eight times, tobacco prices had halved. This was a prescription for hungerexacerbated disease, starvation or indebtedness. All occurred, the last in the form of debt
servitude. It was these measures that assured dispossession of colonial tenants. With the
voracious demand of planters for labor, they further guaranteed the viability of indentured
servitude.12
Settler-colonists could not even support themselves. Augmented beginning each spring by
new arrivals and limited provisions, they continued to starve winter after winter for at least the
first fifteen years of the colony's existence. In May 1619, the population of the settler colony of
Virginia was recorded at 5,909. By February 1924, the number of settler colonists had been
astoundingly reduced - largely as a consequence of the actions of leading, cornholding
planters - to 1,218 souls. This was despite the influx of some 5,009 immigrants during this
period! Twelve years later, immigration had continued apace and indentured servitude had
become an established reality. Yet the "natural population growth" of the colony had done
precious little to overcome the earlier catastrophe demographical collapse: In 1636, the
population of the Virginia settler colony was still roughly five thousand.13
Great Planters
In the years between this demographic collapse (1624) and the arrival of William Berkeley
(1642), the colony's first great planters, basing themselves on indentured servitude as an
established fact, began to emerge.
The dispersal of settlements along the Chesapeake and inland on the James led to a practice
in which larger planters acted as factors for London merchants, bringing tobacco to makeshift
wharves constructed on inland bays - points at which ships could unload and load. This
practice centralized the sale of tobacco in the colony. By 1633, this practice had also
combined in the single personage the roles of planter and merchant. It was from this new
identity that the first truly great planters emerged and the earliest fortunes in Virginia were
formed. (At least until Berkeley's arrival, these merchant-planters were also men who
dominated the royal Council.) Though the population of the settler colony did not begin to
stabilize until after 1640, the fortunes were not lost. In a society where women generally lived
much longer than men, these fortunes accrued to the wives of wealthy planters, and were
transmitted through remarriage as newly arrived younger men, English gentlemen,
consciously sought out widowed women.14
Following Berkeley's appointment as Governor, the colony of Virginia was "planted" a second
time, so to speak, this time for the economic opportunities in agricultural production that it
offered the younger sons of aristocratic English families who had no hopes of inheriting an
estate. They and their families were also the Royalist losers in the Civil War (1642-49). These
men (the sons), who would come to make up a sizable stratum of the Virginia ruling oligarchy
12For responses of the colony's authorities to the Indian strike, Allen, Ibid, 2: 84-96, also Morgan, Ibid,, 112-114.
13For early population figures, Allen, Ibid, 2:76 (Table 5.1), and Lenore Bennett, Jr., The Shaping of Black America.

45.
14For the first great planters, Welsey Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 237, the
same author's White, Red and, Black, 23-24, 91, and Morgan, Ibid, 177. Rough population figures are presented by
Morgan (Ibid, 106, 159): With an immigration averaging approximately 1,000 persons a year from 1625 to 1640, the
colony had about 1,500 settler residents in 1625, 2,600 in 1629, 8,000 in 1640, 14,000 in 1653 and 25,000 in 1660.
Widows did not remarry just once, but several times. For transmission of merchant planter fortunes, Morgan, Ibid,
145, 165-167, 304, and Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia" in James Morton Smith (ed.),
Seventeenth Century America, 99-100.

of great planters, were consciously and successfully recruited by Berkeley in his twenty-seven
years as Governor. Some of the gentlemen were related to earliest investors in the colony
(during the Company period) and, on the basis of this association, quickly came by large
tracts of land. Others, once established in the colony, pursued opportunities (and among the
male settler population theirs were the best) to marry amongst the colony's small population of
women. Often they would court and marry the widows of recently deceased wealthy planters
thereby marrying into recently established fortunes. (Among subsequent generations, it was
de rigueur for members of the leading, wealthy planter families to intermarry.)15
As wealthy planters, they organized the economic life of the colony, utilizing predominately
indentured but also slave labor. They not only dominated the colony's productive life but also
held official positions within the colonial State. Though the State would only become politically
and socially effectual after 1660, the manner in which planters had organized it was
intertwined with the vestry system, a council which directed the temporal affairs of the church.
This interlocking took place in situ in the personages of small local oligarchies made up largely
of the recently arrived, well-connected young men who established their estates in areas
known as the outsettlements (that is, beyond the defensive perimeter of rather dilapidated
forts upstream on each of the major rivers - the James, York, Pamunkey, Rappahannock and
Potomac - that empty into Chesapeake Bay). These local magnates, men who had quickly
become wealthy planters in their own right, at once dominated the State at county level and
the vestry system at the parish level.
The great planters dominated the offices of the State beginning with the governorship,
because they dominated the practice of daily life through control of servile labor, tenantcy and
agricultural waged labor on their plantation estates. Throughout the seventeenth century, the
colonial State at its center never effectively intervened in determining social practices: Planter
estates and farms were located on the Chesapeake and along the great rivers such as the
James. But plantations and farms were not situated atop each other. They were isolated, and
isolation enhanced the social control of the planters. While the colonial State was centered in
Jamestown, the Governor had no active armed force, apart from the settler colonists
themselves. But planters and farmers were engaged in the tasks of tobacco production
(clearing, planting, weeding, etc.) The means of communication were either face to face or
written, and the latter were dependent upon an equally undeveloped means of transportation:
Planters had horses, the rest of the settler colonials walked or paddled a canoe. In other
words, the colonial State had no effective way in which to exercise control of social life. (As an
indication of the weakness of the State at its center, Berkeley in particular, and others before,
made efforts through his office to get planters to diversify their monoculture, but to no use.)
Prior to the English Civil War, great planters, concentrated in the Council, could not, moreover,
culturally hegemonize a mass of smaller planters who were at any rate hostile to them.16
Politically, an array of official positions had been formed at the county level. These position,
including judges of county courts, county customs collectors and commissioners, sheriffs,
vestrymen, militia officers, surveyors, etc., were all appointed by the Governor. By the time of
the Rebellion these county institutions had come to be dominated by country families of
autonomous local magnates, the wealthy planters of the outsettlement estates, that is, the
newer generation of recently arrived planters from well-established and well-connected
English families. (These same men were also county representatives in the House of
15For the prospectless younger sons of the Royalist aristocracy forming the basis of Berkeley's recruitment, David

Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed, 210-218, Bailyn, "Ibid," 98-99, and Blackburn, Ibid, 219-220; for intermarriage,
Fischer, Ibid, 219-222.
16The one feature of fundamentally productive power the colonial State did offer the largest merchant-planters was
the ability to either control tobacco prices or to reap massive profits from a monopoly control established elsewhere
(i.e., by the Crown).

Burgesses.) County-based political institutions (sheriffs and the courts) were the means
employed by planters to control labor, to legitimize that control, and to regain it in those cases
when a planter and his overseer had lost it. Here, then, political power meant social control of
labor: The colonial State at the country level was effectively utilized by planters in the various
localities to buttress their social power. Truly lucrative only after the Crown instituted its
mercantile trade policy (1660), colony wide offices (with their prerogatives and opportunities
for peculation) attached to the Governor and his coterie. Here, political power meant access
to wealth.
Berkeley, a Royalist out of favor during the years of the Protectorate, was reappointed
Governor (in anticipation of a restoration) in 1659. With the formulation and development of
the distinctively mercantile policies of Charles' Restoration government a split began to
appear in the ruling planter elite. This fissure was implicit in the very difference of official and
productive positions of the two developing factions in question within the colony. Yet it was
Charles' trade polices that would widen this split and bring it out into the open. The
enforcement of those policies for purposes of insuring revenue collection required close
supervision by the Governor and the award of the aforementioned colony wide posts (such as
those concerning tax collection, customs regulation and the bestowing of land grants) to those
were demonstrably loyal, i.e., to members of the Governor's inner circle who loyalty (based on
patronage and kinship ties to Berkeley) was motivated more by self-interest than by allegiance
to the Crown.
Social Division
In the more settled life that began with Berkeley's first appointment as Governor, the Virginia
colony was nonetheless rift with social division along distinctive, hierarchically arrayed class
lines.
First, there was division among planters as a class. The small local oligarchies of planters
based in the counties formed an "out" faction within the body politic, a group that, because
they had only recently arrived, did not participate in more lucrative legalized pillaging, yet
because they had come from moderately wealthy English families, were generally educated,
and could afford to purchase land, servants and slaves, they had expectations that exceeded
their prospects. Their very outsettlement status revealed the possibilities of a rift: The great
planters around Berkeley had huge tracts of the best land in earliest settled Tidewater areas
(e.g., James City, Warwick, Charles City, Henrico, Isle of Wright, Norfolk, and Northampton
counties). This, taken together with the monopolization of emoluments and privileges that fell
to Berkeley's coterie as Crown's representatives in the colony, put the longer established
planters at odds with local magnates. At the same time, their outsettlement status put recently
arrived wealthy planters into closer contact with the persons and concerns of the settler
masses, particularly small, propertied freemen who farms reached out beyond the
outsettlements to the Indian "frontiers.17
Second, underneath the wealthy planters, life was lived abysmally close to the edge.
Immediately beneath the great planters, a mass of small planters (and a small stratum of
artisans, such as smiths, carpenters, masons, coopers and tailors all formerly servants),
together with large numbers of tenants and agricultural waged laborers, made up middling
groups. All were freemen. Tenants and agricultural laborers were former servants who had
won their freedom. Few had been able to afford land. Beneath the middling groups were
indentured servants and slaves. Slaves, a decidedly small population before the end of the
century, were occasionally Indians but mostly Africans (not "blacks"), and their status, though
17For the factionalizing of the colony's planter ruling group, Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,"

96-105.

altogether lacking the elaborate legal rationalizations that would be achieved in colonial
America in the next fifty years, was permanent but not hereditary (though it would come to be
so). Indentured servitude, however, at least when entered into voluntarily was in principle, that
is, contractually, temporary (although there were cases of lifetime English servants). Many
servants had, however, come involuntarily. The latter most often consisted of the unemployed
- vagabonds, beggars, derelicts and convicts as well as prostitutes and marginally employed
individuals who unfortunately happened to be in a wrong place at the right time. These people
were essentially kidnapped, while others were conned into emigrating, and still others coerced
by legitimate authority.
Hunting up and delivering potential servants to a ship for transport was a lucrative and thriving
business in England, particularly in Bristol and London, for most of the first ninety years of the
seventeenth century. In Bristol, the business involved the entire structure of municipal
officialdom. Officials connived with the port city merchants to stretch the law in order to
increase the numbers of accused criminals to be transported to the Americas. The entire ugly
business spawned a detailed division of labor, the most important personages in which were
ship captains and merchants and their hired agents or recruiters known as "spirits. All these
groups taken together formed a layer (one among many) of history's hidden criminals.
Africans made up a small number of servants, but, like the rest of the settler colonists,
servants were overwhelming English. (Some Irish prisoners, soldiers who had fought against
and lost to Cromwell's forces, were involuntarily brought over to the colonies). The class of
servants made up the vast majority, some seventy-five percent, of immigrants to Virginia
colony in the seventeenth-century.18
Indentured Servitude
[A World in Which the Norm of Violence was Socially Accepted]
For all its libertarian inspired upheavals, seventeenth century England, the country of Hobbes
in which life was "nasty, brutish and shorte, was a divided, rigidly hierarchical society.
"Gentlemen, and not merely the historically constituted aristocracy, expected and received
deference from their social inferiors. When they didn't get it, or, more broadly, when official
authority was contravened, punishments of various sorts and degrees of severity were
routinely utilized. Whippings, the use of stocks, and imprisonment were common practices. It
was a world in which the "rich and powerful savagely exploited the poor and powerless. This
world, the one from which the early settler colonists embarked, was one of "pre-modern
values, one that lacked the concepts of 'cruel and unusual punishments,' equal rights, and
exploitation; it was a world that instead took for granted natural human inequality and the
routine use of force necessary to maintain it. In short, it was a world with few ideological
constraints against the use of forced labor." Radical social doctrines that proclaimed the
universal rights of man, took a fundamental human equality for granted, and contemporary
international conventions condemning war crimes and genocide as well, are all based on a
humanism which had its intellectual roots in the French Enlightenment. That Enlightenment,
the French Revolution which illuminated the practical possibilities for realization of
Enlightenment objectives, and nineteenth century radical social doctrines which proudly claim
both as their ancestry, had, of course, yet to come into being.19
18For Bristol, Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 14-15. In mid-century in Barbados, it was clearly the case that the

most indentures were brought over by way of kidnapping. (In fact, an euphemism, to "barbadose," sprang from the
frequency of the practice.) See Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 69; for the figure on the immigrant population to the
Virginia colony, Craven, White, Red, and Black, 5. This figure does not include slaves.
19Citations from Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 6.

It is not that the system of indentured servitude developed in the Virginia settler colony is
offensive to our modern, refined sensibilities (worked over as they are to take slightest affront
at "violence" in our backyards while exhibiting a quite extraordinarily insensitive to the
brutality, mass murder and ecocide on which our form of life rests), that it was, in the liberal
sense, "inhumane. Indentured servitude was straightforwardly brutal and cruel. Few
contemporaries would have denied this assessment; it is just that from their perspective such
treatment was unavoidably necessary to discipline the lower classes. Failure to exercise
rigorous control was irresponsible and inexcusable. ...
The cruelty of indenture was exacerbated by the historically specific form of tobacco
production itself. Produced for export with a view to profitability, and with a reputation for poor
quality from the beginning, planter overseers closely supervised servants the entire year
round, including the off-season when land was cleared and fenced, and trees were felled trees
and cut into boards for casks. Similarly, close supervision was maintained at every stage of
production, from sowing, weeding, topping, worming and striking, to harvesting and curing: If
the labor was carelessly executed, "poor work would not show up until much precious time
[had] ... passed, until, in other words, the damage was already done. But this supervision and
inspection created within servants anger and resentment - as well it should have. Disciplining
"lazy, "indolent" servant practice made the entire situation extremely volatile.20
Indentured servitude was developed by planters under conditions of estate isolation (far from
the norms of English or any other society) and of "constant labor shortage, a shortage
resulting from constant expansion of cultivatable acreage, the latter deemed essential by
planters confronting declining tobacco prices. Moreover, as we shall see, indentured servitude
was the foundations upon which slavery rested. Slavery, in a legally undeveloped form, was
its contemporary and direct linear descendant.21
It should come as no surprise, then, that not all servants were set free and acquired land. In
the first place, servant immigration to the Virginia settler colony increased land concentration:
Under terms of the headright system, any settler who could pay his Atlantic passage was
awarded by colonial authorities with fifty acres of land. But since some seventy-five percent of
seventeenth century, immigrant Virginia colonists were indentured servants, it was ship
captains, merchants or merchant-planters (largely merchants with mostly uncultivated land
holdings) who were paying that passage (in return for servitude) and receiving, for each and
every indentured servant (whether or not they survived transAtlantic passage), land grants. In
the second place, and even more basically, throughout the seventeenth century most
servants never became freemen. There is evidence to suggest nearly half died before the
term of servitude expired. Exposed to disease in a population group lacking the requisite
historically constituted physiological immunities; consuming nutritionally poor food, working
long, hard days; subjected to whippings, mutilations or beatings of other kinds, servants often
died, and when they didn't they were wont to run away. If caught, servants faced further bodily
punishment and extension of their terms of servitude. Those that were eventually freed largely
wound up as agricultural laborers on the estates of the bigger planters, without wives and
without property. The merchants and planters who most often financed indentured servants, it
should be noted, wanted labor, dirt cheap, strong labor. Women apparently did not qualify as
such.22
20For the year round tasks, Morgan, Ibid, 151; for close supervision, Thompson, Ibid, 29. Thompson suggests that

plantation agriculture generally, whether in the historically past colonies of the Americas or the contemporary colonies
of central Africa, the southeast Asian mainland or the archipelagoes of southeast Asia, exhibits a discipline that
approaches military regimentation. Ibid, 217, 267, 275-276.
21For labor shortage citation, Morris, Ibid, 415
22For the headright system of land distribution, Craven, White, Red and Black, 9-10, 11, and Ralph Davis, The Rise
of the Atlantic Economies, 84-86; for the chances of becoming a freeperson, according to Thomas Wertenbaker (The

[Absence in English Law]

English common law and practice did not, however, know indentured servitude. This practice,
developed sui generis in Virginia, was "quite original and distinct" from English practice. It
became characteristic of all mainland North American colonies engaged in commercial,
plantation agriculture (Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina). The
only bondsmanship English common law recognized and English practice exhibited was
contractual and temporally limited, the apprenticeship largely of children for a trade. Otherwise
English labor was free and waged. In Virginia, on the other hand, "apprenticeship was merely
a highly specialized, "favored" and relatively rare "form of bound labor, of indentured
servitude. Colonial indentures knew neither distinction of age nor gender, and, while
ostensibly contractual, they were proprietorial in practice. Those bonded were limited term
chattels existing purely and simply for the exploitation of their labor. And restrictions on the
temporal length of indentures were honored more often in the breech, i.e., indentures were
regularly extended beyond the original term - a practice that was legally developed,
elaborated and enforced. English apprenticeship involved mastery of a craft skill, colonial
indentures involved the domination of human beings.23
[Discipline: The Master-Servant Relation]
In disciplining a servant, a master expressed both his compulsion to wealth accumulation, and
his unshakable conviction that the lower orders were good only as serviles, that they would
work only if threatened with "correction" (punishment in some form). When related to the
objective formation of profitability, discipline is little more than a less distasteful manner of
speaking about intensified exploitation. Exploitation was increased by extending the period of
labor (extending the length of the term of servitude), and through more detailed and intensive
supervision. And servants (and later slaves) were horribly exploited. Quantitatively, this can be
seen from a brief review of their productivity. In 1619, a servant tended a thousand tobacco
plants; in 1623, two thousand plants; in the 1640s, six thousand plants; and after 1660,
perhaps five to six times as many plants as in the 1620s. As a consequence, in 1627, tobacco
production was roughly half million pounds; in 1669, it had risen thirty times, to 15 million
pounds. While some of the increased productivity was due to increased numbers of serviles in
the tobacco fields, these achievements of exploited servile labor (tending to qualitatively
greater numbers of plants) were accomplished without any technique innovation! Unrelenting
exploitation of servile labor allowed planters to withstand the pressures of low tobacco prices.
Thus, a planter rule of thumb might have gone something like this: The more serviles

Planters of Colonial Virginia. New York, 1922: 98. Cited by Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2:351
n33), the chances of a indentured servant who had won his freedom acquiring land were one in seventeen to twenty
(5-6%) by the late 17th century. Of course, scores of thousands of servants emigrated in the course of the
seventeenth century. Some, in other words, did become freeman, and acquired land. For the typical fate of servants,
Kolchin, Ibid, 6-10; for the ratio of female to male emigrants, statistically expressed in the fact that in the years of
greatest seventeenth century emigration (1649-1660), women emigrated to the Virginia colony in a one to four ratio to
men, Craven, White, Red and Black, 14-16, and Fischer, Albion's Seed, 228-229.
23For the novelty of indentured servitude, Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America, 310; for
apprenticeship as a form of bound labor (including citation), Ibid; for proprietorial character of indentures, Ibid, 432; for
the shift in the practice and meaning of mastery, Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South,
230.
In England, the Somerset case (1772) legally affirmed that hereditary slavery as distinct from villeinage had no
precedent in English history or law. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 376-377,
471-473, 476-478, 482-484, 489.

engaged in labor, i.e., the greater the planter, the securer he is in the face of declining
prices.24
Getting a flavor of this "disciplining" will allow us both to see how exploitation produced
oppression, and to grasp the essential internal connection of indentured servitude to (and see
in the latter) the foundations of slavery.
Begin by reviewing the planter-enacted legal framework that was created to support and
sanction disciplinary practices. Treated as chattels, servants were alienable, in Virginia
virtually without restriction and, to be sure, without the consent of servants themselves. Upon
arrival at the docks of the great planters, they were herded out onto ship deck much like cattle,
stripped naked, displayed for prospective buyers, and examined and fingered and questioned,
all in the interest of the seller and buyer. They were bought, sold, and lent out for wages
(usually paid in pounds of tobacco, since tobacco functioned as a universal equivalent in a
colony virtually without coin); put up as loan security, lost and won in card games and, given
away as prizes. There are, in the colonial record, registered exchanges of servants for cows,
horses and tobacco. As chattel, upon the death of a master, servants shared the fate of his
estate. They were distributed among his heirs, otherwise disposed of according to the terms of
a will, and claimed by creditors as payment for debts. For all this, great planters of Virginia
considered servants their most valuable chattels.25
Driven by a lust for profitability, planters sought to squeeze extra time, and, accordingly, extra
labor, out of their servants. One way masters did so was to regularly go before a magistrate
(i.e., another planter appearing as representative of Law) to charge a servant with "illegal
absence. Since servants could not leave the master's plantation or farm without a pass, such
an absence could simply mean the servant was not readily accounted for. In most cases,
though, it meant the servant had runaway. Courts were obliging: They bound the servant over
to the master usually for twice the time of the absence plus extra time equivalent to the planter
expense in recapturing the runaway. (After 1662, this time was more than doubled during
harvest or in the case where the servant should require efforts at apprehension.) Servants
were also corporeally punished, as evidenced not just by sentencing but also by the regular
schedule of fees paid country sheriffs for capture, pillorying and whipping runaways. (Virginia
sheriffs received twenty pounds of tobacco for each captured and punished runaway.) The
statutes enacted by planter masters reveals that particular care was taken to prevent servants
and others from aiding other servants who had sought to or had runaway, especially English
servants aiding African runaways. Shipmasters who transported servants or slaves out of the
colonies for re-contracting elsewhere, or planters who hired servants already contractually
bound, were subject to huge fines or required to make good the labor time lost to the original
master. But the most severe penalties were, of course, reserved for other servants: Servants
who advised, "enticed" or otherwise aided a runaway were often subject to whipping and
branding, as well as extension of their terms of servitude. The planter elite who drafted the
laws sought, to be sure, to insure that other planters understood and respected property
rights. But in regard to servants they exhibited a real fear of "conspiracy, i.e., of a revolt
against the conditions of servile labor. They sought by a typical combination of punishment
24For labor productivity, Morgan, Ibid, 109, 142, 127. Morgan says 2,000 plants weighed roughly 500 pounds (109),

and that in the 1640s, a man, viz., a servant, could produce 1,500 pounds of tobacco (142). He further states that
"later generations," which we have dated as after 1660, "would be made to tend five or six times the number of
tobacco plants that the servants in the 1620s tended" (127); for productivity expressed in millions of pounds of
produced tobacco, Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 256.
25For the character of a servile sale and purchase, Lenore Bennett, Jr., The Shaping of Black America, 50; for
servants won, lost, and as prizes, Ibid, 52 and Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 128; for their
distribution according to terms of a will, as debt payment, Morris, Ibid, 409-410, 412; for valued status, Morgan, Ibid,
175, 176-177.

and extended servitude to prevent it. This treatment, it should be noted, was a far more
exacting than English penalties for apprenticeship absenteeism.26
Throughout the English colonial world, masters legally sanctioned themselves to mete out
bodily punishment on their own in order to discipline "unruly" servant labor. (It goes without
saying, the same would later hold true for slaves.) The most typical form of punishment, the
whipping, was applied not only in cases such as theft, but in directly work-related activities
such as minor crop destruction or slowdowns. In a world which altogether lacked moral and
legal restraints on the coercion of labor, the planter sense of what constituted disobedience
had evolved into a highly refined sensitivity, so that, for example, disciplinary punishment,
euphemistically termed "correction, extended not merely to refusals to obey "lawful
commands" of master (mistress or overseer) but to "unjust complaints" against masters (not to
mention the more violent act of laying ones hands on a master). There were, of course,
beatings inflicted on servants (and slaves) for countless petty infractions such as, in the case
of one planter, of "going to bed before he returned home. Beyond beatings, planter murders
of servants were not uncommon. Suicides, too, were unusually high and this in part has to be
attributed to planter executed murders. In precious few instances, the planters were charged,
and only in rare cases convicted.27
Under terms of indenture, masters also provided food and clothing to servants. The planter,
contracting to provide food, clothing and lodging, had to absorb these additional charges
against his income. Servants, like the slaves they often shared them with, constructed their
own dwellings, primitive huts, out of material to hand. Planters regularly limited their servants,
like slaves, to a single daily meal, and more often provided them only with corn and water.
Corn, to be palatable, had to be beat on a mortar and boiled (eaten as mush or cooled,
hardened and eaten sliced), and servants were forced to do this after dusk, that is, after
completing a day's work along and with slaves in the field. Corn was easily stored,
considerably cheaper to produce than allowing servants to round up cattle and hogs that ran
wild in wooded areas, and did not have the added disadvantage of wasted labor time in
chasing down these animals. The latter could be and were at any rate profitably exported to
the West Indies. Clothing, it appears, like adequate nutrition, was also in short supply. Often
planters failed to adequately cloth their servants, especially in the winter when, for example,
blankets and shoes were required to protect otherwise exposed arms and legs, and bare
feet.28
Female servants suffered a particularly oppressive burden. To begin, the proprietary interest
of the planters in their indentures extended to the very body of female servants. There is good
evidence that the planters of the Virginia colony considered male assertive sexuality a virtue
26For illegal movement without a pass, Bennett, Ibid.; for sheriffs' payment, Allen, Ibid, 2:127-128; for penalties for

enticement, Morris, Ibid, 425-426, 429-430; for comparison of English and Virginia colony penalties, Ibid, 437. Early
Virginia colonial law (e.g., the Dale Code of 1611), later superceded, affixed the death penalty to bondsmen who ran
away to Indian settlements. The legal record attests to several known executions of captured runaways. Ibid, 454.
27For disciplinary punishment, Morris, Ibid, 462, 468, 482 (citation).
With regard to "going to bed ," the planter was William Byrd II (son of the Byrd who appears in the narrative to
follow), great planter, member of the Virginia colony's Council of State from 1709 to his death (1744), and Council
president during the last two years of his life. Byrd's wife, Lucy, pathologically an infant terrible, was noted (by Byrd in
his diary) to regularly vent her anger on servants to point of burning them with a hot iron. Ibid, 468.
Cases of compulsive planter abuse can be found in Morris, Ibid, 485-497, and Allen, Ibid, 2:144-147.
For charging and convicting planters, Morris, Ibid, 485-486 (citing examples from the tobacco colony of Maryland),
487 (suicides and prosecution); for a particularly egregious case, that of Henry Smith of Accomack Co. (Virginia
colony) tying beating, rape and murder altogether, Ibid, 491-496. It should always be remembered that ... an
impressive number of masters led drunken, dissolute lives and were brutal and sadistic in behavior toward their
workmen." Ibid, 482.
28Allen, Ibid, 2:138-139; Morris, Ibid, 492, 497.

and prided themselves on possessing expansive sexual appetites. A master typically believed,
or often acted as if he believed, he had every right to whatever unrestrained sexual
satisfactions he deemed women or girls indentured to him might provide. Of course, it is
doubtful that these women or girls often felt the same way. As a result, rapes were
commonplace, and generally went unpunished. In fact, some planters were suspected of
seeking to impregnate servile females for purposes of further extending their servitude. This
once again suggests the male predatory behavior of the planter class was at once recognized
as "customary" (i.e., no matter how barbaric some members of society found it, it remained
acceptable) and was legally codified. It was the great planters, gentlemanly, Royalist and
aristocratic, who set the tone. Servants were forbidden by law (1643) to marry. The burden
indentured women and girls bore was multiple: Laws against "fornication" were enforced
against servile females almost exclusively. The requisite punishment, a whipping, was done
publicly to enhance the lived humiliation. If there was an issue, the child was deemed a
bastard, and labor time lost to master for child birth and rearing was added onto the female
servant's length of indenture (while the child was automatically indentured to age twentyone).29
It was in the extension of indentures that the servants' servile status most closely approached
slavery. Referring largely to inter-group contact "offenses" such as marriage, "fornication, and
bearing "bastard" children, the record shows second and third offenses brought increasingly
longer extensions of servitude, servants whose status extended twenty-five years, forty years
and even to life.30
Indentured servants did not take all this lying down. As Theodore Allen relates, the only
reason we know about their abuse is because courageous men and women, against all odds,
took the masters to local magistrates demanding fairer treatment. The legal records of the
colonial Virginia counties suggests servants constantly fought back against abuse, lack of
food and clothing, and crimes of sexual violation. The laws restricting servant mobility, speech
and defensive action suggest the same conclusion. This resistance only makes sense against
the background of England-based life experiences and expectations, and against this
background servants were a social group ripe for revolt.31

29For planters' sexual appetites, Fischer, Albion's Seed, 300. See the account based on Byrd's diary (the same

William Byrd appearing in fn. 26, above), Ibid, 300-303; for rapes that generally went unpunished, Ibid., 304; Allen,
Ibid, II, 131; for suspicion of impregnation, Fischer, Ibid, 303; for the penalties meted out to newly mothering servants,
Allen, Ibid, 2: 130. The statute fixed the added length of servitude at two years - obviously, time far beyond what any
planter allowed for these activities, hence, a boon to the planter in additional productive labor.
30Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South, 232. (Thompson is paraphrasing from James C.
Ballagh, "White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia," John Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science,
13th Series (Baltimore, 1913), no. 6-7.)
31Allen, Ibid, 2:143.

A Note on "Indolence"
In divided societies, it is always and everywhere the case that the masters (or lords or
bosses), sitting atop the hierarchy of labor repressive regimes of production, characterize the
practice of "their" serviles (and, of course, the serviles themselves whether slaves, indentures
or waged laborers) as "lazy" or "indolent. Because servile labor, so it argued, is animated by
slovenly work habits (which is, of course, characteristic of the brutish behavior of serviles), it is
in constant need of close supervision and regular disciplining.
While mastery itself, particularly in nakedly compulsorily labor regimes, often forms the master
as lazy, haughty and overbearing, the notion of indolence, when examined with a view to its
origins, reveals more about the nature of work that the character of the servile.
Etymologically, indolence comes from the late Latin indolens. Indolens is fashioned from
the Latin in and dolens, where the former functions to invert the meaning of the latter, here
the participle of dolers meaning to feel pain (as in doleful), so that indolens means
insensitivity. Now, from the perspective of its origins which is, we would argue, experientially
based in work as compulsory (or alienated) labor, the meanings of the in as inversion (as
opposition or, dialectically, as negation) and the participle dolers as to feel pain should be
held apart while bearing tacit reference back to the subject of labor: Here, then, indolence
would refer us to someone who characteristically wishes not to feel pain or to avoid pain.
Now this is clearly akin to the etymological sense of "labor" as toil or renunciation. For, its
nominal form, "labor" comes from the middle English, old French and Latin (each, though
derived, early on exemplifying a form of labor typical of divided societies in the West, namely,
waged-labor, serfdom and corve labor). It originally meant hardship or pain. It, "labor, was
probably based on "labi, meaning to slip, to totter. Thus, the middle English, "laboren" derived
from the old French "laborer" which itself came from the Latin "laborare" meaning to work as
in toil, and had the further sense of being afflicted or burdened with liability, with a limitation, or
more to the point, it meant to undergo, and to suffer the pain (e.g., of childbirth).32
It is in the West that the distinction between work and labor finds its most refined
development. Work is understood as fulfillment, as self-activity and self-realization. It is the
proper domain of the activity of artisans, craftsmen, and, in a historically more recent sense,
artists. "Labor" is toil or renunciation, the emotional-somatic repression of sensuality and
desire (and, correlatively, the constitution of body armor), and deferred gratification. It is
properly the domain of serviles. It is, then, historically and etymologically fitting that those
whose experience of self-activity means to undergo pain, self-renunciation, and a loss of self
to an other who is master, should seek to not feel or avoid that pain, that is, to be "indolent.

32Webster's New World Dictionary, entries for "indolence" and "labor."

A Note on the Creation of Surplus English Populations (Peasant Exploitation and

Differentiation). Backdrop to Indentured Servant Migration.
In England, the country gentry of landlords and prosperous farmers (with financial assistance
from merchants) was the agency that transformed the English social order by driving it down
the path of agricultural capitalist development. One manner in which this development can,
retrospectively, be grasped is in terms of the relation of population growth to food production.
Population had climbed steadily in Europe since the plague years of 1348-1349. From 1550 to
1620, at which time growth temporarily ceased, the population of England doubled from 2 to
5 million people. South and southeastern England was one area of demographic density in
Europe, and it was in such areas that the historical problem of food production was most
acutely felt. (It was also the area that would provide the mass of the indentures of the Virginia
colony.)33
English peasants, secure in their tenures (leaseholds were usually for three lives, copyholds
for a lifetime with, normally, right of inheritance by the next of kin), historically evinced little
desire to produce corn (the basic foodstuff throughout Europe) beyond family needs, that is,
for a market in commodities. Nor did such security generate any desire to innovate, to develop
novel techniques that might increase corn production. Outside of the Netherlands, the only
manner in which agricultural productivity was increased was through putting more acreage
into production. In England, the needs for dramatically increased food production against the
background of a growing population formed an opening into which an ambitious gentry and
the well-to-do village peasant inserted themselves: Intense class struggle had created a
situation in which by the mid-sixteenth century old seigniorial relations had tendentially
disappeared. The customary right of the cultivator to the use of the land he occupied as well
as the lord's right to a portion of the peasant's product or his services had largely given way to
land ownership, feudal obligations to private property in land. Ruthless efforts by lords to drive
peasants off the land merely appear now as a historical process that transformed the lord into
a landlord, in England a feudal lord into a country gentleman, and the peasant, assuming he
could produce for a market, into a farmer whose occupancy was determined by short-term
leases. In fact, the struggle at the heart of this process produced a sharp differentiation of the
peasantry, creating a tiny stratum of successful capitalist tenant farmers when measured
against the similarly created mass of impoverished tenants and agricultural wage laborers.
Converting customary tenures into leaseholds for which producers were pitted against one
another, this struggle destroyed peasant security. The other side of this struggle was efforts by
landlords to put more acreage into production. This was achieved by enclosing areas, called
"commons, used by peasant villages as pasturage for their animals and as a source (wood)
of cooking and heating fuel. Enclosure was achieved by draining fens and marches, by
clearing heaths and by cutting down forests. The Civil War triumph of the Parliamentary party
on the bayonets of Cromwell's New Model Army can, from this standpoint, be grasped and
explained as victory of country gentlemen and capitalist farmers (and new merchants, see
below) over the old order of lords and peasants (and guild-protected craftsmen), and, of
course, over the political apex of that order, the Stuart monarchy.34
At mid-century, under Cromwell, enclosures were vastly accelerated. Copyholders and poor
freeholders - most with only a faltering grip on a tiny plot - were expropriated; rural wagelaborers and tenants were pushed off the land. In the south of England, an area of great
population density, successful Cromwellian reclamation projects and enclosures had a
devastating impact. The displaced, social pariahs - some ending up in London employed as
33For population growth, 1550-1620, Davis, Ibid, 194.
34For leasehold lengths, Ibid, 198; on methods of enclosures and the struggles surrounding them, Ibid, 103-104, 108-

124, 196-202, and Brian Manning, The English Revolution and the English People, 112-138.

wage-earners and some criminalized, and others facing the likely prospects of such a fate, on
average very young men, leaped at the chance to own a piece of land even if it meant four to
five years of indentured servitude in return for a passage to America for which they could not
pay. (Merchants, who along with ship captains paid for the servants' journey to English
America and sold them to planters on arrival, also jumped at, promoted and planned their
shipment across the Atlantic. No merchant, transporting sugar or tobacco to England would
care to partially deadhead the return passage to the Americas: With manufactured products
brought to the colonies, the servants as merchandise spread the costs of transportation
across a wider number of commodities.) Together with the younger sons of smaller,
moderately successful capitalist farmers who confronted the likelihood that their family
holdings would not be large enough to subdivide, the displaced poor freeholders, tenants and
laborers voluntarily opted to immigrate to Virginia by temporarily become bonded men:
Emigrating under pressure of the development of capitalist agriculture in the English
countryside, these groups made up one (voluntary) portion of the largest wave of migration
(1649-1676) to seventeenth century Virginia and composed the social groups of servants,
men (and women) bonded to indentures for a specified period of time.35

35For the age of indentured servants (three of four were between fifteen and twenty four years of age), Fischer, Ibid,

231; for the role and profitability of merchants in the transAtlantic transport of indentured servants, Abbot Emerson
Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 35-42.

Part II
Problems of Production in the Settler Colony Prior to the Rebellion
Several features characterized the productive activity of seventeenth century Virginia settler
colony. The first feature was that it was, economically speaking, monocultural. The second
feature was that tobacco production was pursued on the basis of distinctively modern
commercial, large-scale agriculture (instead of e.g., self-sufficient small farming). This feature
was a result of the original purpose in founding the colony and the character of the planters
and their relation to merchants. It had little, if nothing, to do with the nature of the product. The
third feature of colonial activity was that monocultural tobacco production was conducted
under a complex of conditions (only one of which was competitive) that at once led to
recurrent crises of overproduction and to soil exhaustion. Consider each of these features in
turn.
Production in the Settler Colony
[Tobacco Monoculture]
First, the colony of Virginia engaged in production of a single major staple for export, tobacco.
Though the colony was founded in 1607 under the guidance of the Virginia Company, it took
settler colonists a decade to discover no other exportable agricultural crop or natural resource
could in the short term be profitability produced. Production of other staples badly needed in
England were attempted. These, however, required large investments of time and money.
Prior to 1618, the colony was an investment without return, that is, it was a rather
straightforward loss for English investors. After 1617, planters recognized that a return on
investment in tobacco could be made within a year on the basis of the very first planting.
Thereafter, the preference in practice for tobacco became and remained dominate.
Nonetheless, tobacco was not an overnight success. The King, James I, opposed its
production considering it harmful and immoral since smoking tobacco was a crude uncivilized
habit known to have originated among the "savage" natives of the Americas as a means of
making themselves insensate; moreover, Virginia tobacco itself was at the outset of very poor
quality: It had to be sold to smokers who were new to the habit and who could not discriminate
poor from good quality. (As a result, English merchants simply re-exported it.) Thus, for a
number of years after the first Virginia plantings, poor quality led the investors to hold out for
other staples.36
In 1619, the first royal impost on tobacco appeared. It was steep largely because of James'
moral distaste for the "drug" (and in this both the next Parliament and his son, Charles I,
would concur). There was an irony here: James' two grandsons, Charles II and James II,
would in the 1660s, 1670s and 1680s become addicted, not to tobacco itself, but to the
revenues the impost on its sale generated for the Crown. This duty was higher on tobacco
than any other colonial export that would later be imported from anywhere in the English
Americas and would remain so throughout the century. For the century following James' death
(1625), the impost on tobacco made a huge contribution to Crown revenues.37
Prospects for agricultural diversification were dealt a fatal blow in 1622. In March of that year
an attack on Jamestown and surrounding settlements by allied warrior bands of thirty-two
Chesapeake Indian nations killed a full third of the settler colonists. The subsequent attrition
from artificial food shortages nearly wiped out the Virginia colony. When the news reached
36For problems of producing alternative staples, Welsey Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth

Century, 115, 123, 124, 140; for Crown objections to tobacco, Robin Blackburn, Ibid, 149.
37To what extent this moral disgust, overtaken by the Crown need to maximize revenue bearing imposts, structured
later imposts can be seen in comparing the duties on tobacco and sugar. In 1668-1669, West Indies sugar imports to
England value at 180,000 paid custom duties of 18,000, while tobacco imports valued at 50,000 paid 75,000 in
duties. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 300 n.14.

home in 1623 the chances for raising staples other than tobacco were dashed: The
destruction of the settlement highlighted the central financial problem of a colony that offered
little prospects for a shorter term profitable return outside tobacco production. Accordingly, the
colony's Virginia Company backers and planners turned away from pursuit of a plan for a
diversified economy. Instead, they agreed to meet the King's demand for a revenue on this
staple in return for a monopolistic control of all tobacco brought back to England. In so doing,
they satisfactorily resolved on a long-term basis the problem of marketing tobacco, and they
effectively conceded to Virginia planters the monocultural future of agricultural production in
the colony.38
[New Merchants and the Distinctively, Modern Capitalist Nature of Production]
The second feature of the productive practice in the Virginia colony concerned the role of
merchants. When factional struggle inside the London-based Virginia Company broke out
once more in 1624, James I refused to renew the Company charter. Pursuing his absolutist
ambitions, the king placed the colony under direct royal administration. The Governor was
thereafter his appointee and responsible directly to the Crown. This decision of James,
sustained by his son Charles I (who succeeded his father following the latters death in March
1625), had a serious impact on the men who had hitherto financed, albeit grudgingly, the
Virginia Company. Company or "mere" merchants had operated in a strictly commercial
fashion. They were the great London traders who controlled the Mediterranean, Near East
and Far East as well as northern European trades. They contributed funds, "subscribed, to
their Companies as a form of investment. Subscriptions to a Company underwrote the
financial outlays involved in the purchase of merchandise for sale and trade, in contracting a
captain, crew and ship, and, in the case of the Virginia colony, recruiting skilled and
unemployed workers to populate the colony. Company merchants were paradigmatically
traders who make their fortunes outside of production, that is, from the practice of drawing
money-wealth strictly from circulation, i.e., from the money-mediated exchange of products
which they organized and facilitated on the model of merchant activity in the late feudal
society of the West. They refused to engage in productive or infrastructural investments.
Basing themselves on their royal or State-sponsored charters, Company merchants used their
monopolistic privileges to reduce commodity availability, thereby constraining trade, and to
limit their memberships: Shortages or scarcity of valued commodities guaranteed large profits
that were distributed among a restricted membership.39
When Charles, following his father, again refused to re-charter the Virginia Company, he
removed in one fell swoop the monopolist privileges of the Company merchants. Already
dominant in the Mediterranean, Near and Far East through monopolistic organizations such
as the Spanish, Levant, East India and Russia Companies (as well as western European cloth
market through the Merchant Adventurers), Company merchants consequently lost what had,
at any rate, become a flagging interest in the colonial Americas. Thus, Charles' action at the
same time created a space in which small traders could get involved in overseas trade. These
38For the effect of the Indian attack on tobacco production, Ibid, 140, 147.

In the 1620s, some thirty English ships arrived each year in early autumn following the later summer tobacco harvest
and preparation for export transit. This annual appearance was a high point, since all trading with England for
manufactured goods was carried out at this moment. Of course, any correspondence with and gifts from relatives,
friend or business acquaintances were also conveyed at this time. By 1668, it would take more than eighty English
ships to haul off the tobacco harvest (Morgan, Ibid, 242).
39Membership restrictions were generally twofold; first, enormous sums were required as minimal subscriptions to a
Company; second, domestic merchants were required to abandon retail shops as a condition of entry. The latter
condition was designed to keep them from underselling Company merchants in the home market.
For the traditional character of the Virginia Company, Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 56, 57, 83-84, 93,
94.

men, new merchants, frequently hailing from outside London, were small traders closely
connected to or often operating London-based retail trades as, for example, grocers,
druggists, drapers, etc. As such, they were alert to the new demand arising for tobacco and
other exotic products, i.e., for products which, it was believed, could be produced as
agricultural staples (especially tobacco and sugar, but also indigo, dyestuffs, and cotton) in the
"New World. They sought to build their fortunes on the basis of profits generated from trading
clothing, foodstuffs, tools, building materials and indentures (and later slaves) for such
staples. With Charles' action, these men could now engage in a trade provisioning the Virginia
colony, while acquiring merchandise, staples, they could retail at home.
If we take the term "new" merchants to include not only shopkeepers and retailers but mobile
traders and ships captains (since these merchants had not infrequently been ship masters) as
well as English domestic merchants, we come to understand that their organizing and
coordinating skills were particularly important for their investments. For they invested not
merely in inventory for targeted clientele, but made productive investments in plantations and
in the ships that carried the merchandise they traded. Slaving and the cargo ships that carried
enslaved men and women from the western coast of Africa to Americas were, as morally
abhorrent as they appear to us, complicated activities requiring methodical planning and
skillful handling of a workforce of seamen. These activities brought together aspects of
production and distribution which had previously been separated. Plantation agriculture itself
was distinctively novel. It involved a qualitative increase not only in the numbers of laborers,
but it entailed labor of a specific, new sort, namely, closely supervised serviles. In anticipating
in an agricultural setting the industrial factory, this regime of labor differently significantly from
manufacturing (handicraft) production which usually was farmed out to individual laborers
working out of their homes. A capitalist form of economic rationality appeared for perhaps the
first time in the organization of labor. The labor process itself, organized, in the form of work
gangs whose toiled for long hours during large parts of the year at bodily demanding tasks,
constituted a regime of labor that achieved a new order of exploitation. Finally, this exploitation
was multiplied by the rationalization of tasks and their simplification in tobacco production (and
sugar as well). Rationalization also hinted at much more modern developments. Thus, the
new merchants did not at all stand outside all productive activity simply seeking to extract
money-wealth from the exchange of goods. From another standpoint the triangular trade in
which they were involved (first, England-English North America-English Caribbean, later,
England-English colonial America as a whole-west Africa) linked up with and developed the
central dynamism of English economic activity: It reoriented English commerce away from the
export of manufactured cloth goods toward import of exotic substances (tobacco and sugar
primarily) to meet the growing demand of the first, if nascent, capitalist economy in world
history.40
[Overproduction]
Third, agricultural monoculture created a problem of dependency for the Virginia colony
planters. Economically, little or no diversification meant they lacked, productively speaking,
40For new merchants, Brenner, Ibid, 113-193, and Robin Blackburn, Ibid, 227, 232-233. The identity of merchant and

ship captain were often inseparable, the former having been occupied as the latter in an early part of his career. Ibid,
223, and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 99. Williams states (Ibid) "the term 'merchant,' in the eighteenth
century context, not infrequently involved the gradations of slaver captain, privateer captain, privateer owner, before
settling down on shore to the respective business of commerce." So too for the seventeenth century context. For the
novelty of agricultural plantation production, Blackburn, Ibid, 227-228, 332-335. In respect to the development of
capitalist rationality, sugar plantations, because they were capital intensive in way that went far beyond the primitive
instruments utilized in tobacco production, were also well in advance of tobacco plantation.
The dynamic role and centrality of new merchants in the seventeenth century English economy is a guiding theme of
Brenner's work.

insulation from the vagaries of competition, monopoly and war that buffered the seventeenth
century market for tobacco. Thus, with the rise or, more likely, fall in the market price for
tobacco so went the livelihood of the mass of Virginia planter settlers. By 1625, the market for
tobacco had spread to all major urban centers of Europe and into the Near East. The Virginia
colony, though, was not its only producer. Not only had Virginia planters to compete with the
product of the English colonies of Providence Island and Bermuda but with Spanish colonies,
Trinidad, and Caracas and Vaniras (Venezuelan points of export) as well. Tobacco prices
declined in 1620, and after 1625 it became virtually impossible for planters to get favorable
terms of sale. The price a pound of tobacco fetched for Virginia planters followed a general
course of decline right up to 1630. It had recovered greatly by 1635, fell dramatically in 1638
and fluctuated only slightly until 1660. Thereafter, it began a decline right up to the time of the
Rebellion (1676) and beyond (1682). For at least two decades after 1660, the price of tobacco
never amounted to more than ten shillings per hundred weight of tobacco.41
In the latter 1620s and the early 1630s, expanding plantation production in the Chesapeake
region as well as the West Indies had glutted existing markets. Overproduction here was
largely a consequence of plantation-based economies (and individual planters whose activity
helped form those economies) competing for market shares, each producing more to
compensate for declining prices. But this was only one manner in which overproduction
developed. In 1640s and 1650s (as earlier), English governments attempted price fixing in the
domestic market to support or boost the Virginia colony's prices. However, large quantities of
poor quality tobacco still produced in the colony haunted the planters, and competition from
banned production of English (home) tobacco merely intensified the problem. More
fundamentally however, the English Civil War reduced the annual number of ships involved in
trade. Thus, though the serviles-based productive capacity of the colony was not great (in
1640, the productive population of the colony was maybe a fifth of that in 1676), there was a
much larger quantity of tobacco available for export relative to the number of ships that could
carry it to England. In 1666 and again in 1672, during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch wars
respectively, Dutch blockades, and the plundering and burning of English shipping, would
effect similar conditions, as overproduction relative to the mechanism for market distribution
occurred. Though in latter two cases, it should be noted, price was not as much at issue as
the lack of any income in a colony isolated by war.42
In 1633 (until 1643), Charles I, largely at the insistent behest of new merchants, excluded
foreign (i.e., Dutch) merchants from the Virginia trade. The Dutch, much to the delight of the
mass of settler-planters and chagrin of English colonial merchants, could and did pay more
and sell dearer than their English counterparts. Additionally, Charles, fully cognizant the
41For prices from 1620 to 1625, consult the table compiled by Russell B. Menard ("A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco

Prices, 1618-1660," 404-405, and Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland, 444-448, Tables A-5, A-6); for
prices up to 1660, "Ibid, 404-408; for the ten shilling per hundred weight price, Morgan, Ibid, 204 n.29, 207 n.42, 302.
Morgan, using county court records, comes to the same conclusion as Menard's figures suggest: The prices planters
received for tobacco varied only slightly between 1640 and 1660. He also indicates that it is impossible to construct a
reliable annual index of Virginia tobacco prices for the entirety of the seventeenth century. This is because prices
were paid to planters by way of two different methods. One method, "at the first penny," had the merchant prepaying
the freight and, presumably, entailed payment based on actual market conditions, i.e., payment was made after the
merchant had disposed of all or at least part of the planter's tobacco. The other method was an "advance," that is, the
merchant estimated the price his market might bear and offered the planter partial payment upfront. (Presumably, in
this, by far and away the vast majority of cases, the planter was responsible for freight costs.) The available records
do not state which method was utilized. Without this knowledge, the two methods are incommensurate, and,
accordingly, a price index cannot constructed. Morgan, Ibid, 136 n.7, 204-205 n. 29. (See also Menard's discussion in
his Economy and Society, "Appendix III. Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618-1740," esp. 442.)
42For the prices that exhibit price decline in the 1640s, Menard, "Ibid," 406-408; for price controls in the domestic
market, Craven, The Southern Colonies, 238, and Morgan, Ibid, 134-135; for colony population in 1640 and 1660,
Ibid., 136; for the effects of war in 1666 and 1672, Ibid, 240-241, 242.

Virginia settler colony did not produce significant amounts of tobacco to merit intense scrutiny
by a Crown interested in the revenues a direct levy might generate, but desperate for
revenues to shore up his "Personal Rule" (i.e., governance without Parliament in the absolutist
style), required that all colonial products had to be exported to England only. These imports
were then subjected to a customs duty at the English port of entry. Thus, the Crown policy on
the tobacco was a mixed blessing for the largest merchant-planters, and a disaster for the
mass of small planters.43
During the Civil War (1642-1649), planters as a class attempted to establish distance between
themselves and English commercial rule. In 1643, Berkeley issued a decree essentially
asserting Virginia autonomy in commercial matters by making it legal for any Dutch merchant,
factor, or others to trade freely for merchandise with settler-colony planters. (This law was
promulgated in the face of 1633 Crown policy in part still maintained by Parliament.) Planters
had much to benefit from such a stance. With English merchants engaged in supplying
Parliamentary forces, commerce between England and Virginia (and elsewhere) was greatly
reduced. This did not slow trade but instead created a diversification of buyers, and among
them of course, were the Dutch. The 1640s were largely a period of unparalleled prosperity for
the mass of Virginia planters. For example, in early autumn 1648, of thirty one ships that
entered Chesapeake loading sites, twelve were English, twelve were Dutch and seven were of
New England origin. The Dutch paid far better prices, a full one hundred percent more, since
their marketing system was superior and fetched higher prices for Dutch distributed tobacco.
(Later planters, bitter over trade restrictions, would fondly remember their trade with the
Dutch.) Parliamentary hostility toward the trade with the Dutch during the late 1640s and early
1650s was deepened by the Royalist allegiances of the Council and leading planters (among
whom was ex-Governor Berkeley), not to mention their free trade preferences. In 1651,
Cromwell's Rump Parliament sent commissioners accompanied by an armed contingent to
secure the colony's loyalty.44
Prior to 1649, Charles was, in our view, correct. The Virginia settler colony did not produce
significant amounts of tobacco to merit intense scrutiny by a Crown interested in the revenues
an impost might generate. This was largely because the population of the colony was too
small. Malarial fevers killed countless colonists. Susceptibility to these fevers was great, both
because of historically constituted immunological weaknesses and also because of a diet poor
in protein and vitamin C. (Scurvy-engendered anemia itself contributed to this susceptibility.)
As the diet of settler colonists began to improve somewhat, servants in particular lived longer
lives. Thus, the Tidewater settler colonial population became denser. Since roughly seventy
43Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 133, 585.

The problem of Crown revenues was deeply rooted in English history: "A particularly fruitless war with France (15431551), perhaps more than any other historical event or sequence of events deprived not only the Tudor monarchs, but
also all subsequent English monarchs, of their (financial) independence: In order to pay off the costs of waging this
war, and before it had even ended, Henry VIII (who had undertaken the war) and, following him, Edward VI had sold
off or given away to local gentries most of the monastic and chantry properties seized from the Church of Rome at the
outset of the English Reformation (1530s). For lack of the same funds, Edward disbanded the mercenary force
making up the English army at the end of the war. Disbandment was possible both because Henry had broken the
power of the large feudal magnates and because of the peculiar, insular position of England vis--vis the rest of the
continent. The war, then, left the English Crown without an independent source of revenue to finance its wars, to
administratively build up its State and to maintain a standing army; and, accordingly, it left the monarchy to the device
of calling a parliament into being on every occasion it needed to raise large amounts of revenue." W. Barnes,
Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War, 24. This was the situation James I inherited when he assumed the
English throne in 1603. He exacerbated his financial problems by his inordinate generosity vis--vis his courier coterie
and his own profligate consumption: By 1618, Crown debt totaled 900,000, while his (Parliamentary granted
subsidy) ranged from 130,000 in the early years of his reign to a mere 55,000 by its end (Brenner, Ibid, 201).
Charles' situation was thus even worse by the outset of his reign (1625).
44For free-trade preferences among settler-colonists, Craven, Ibid, 240, Morgan, Ibid, 147; Brenner, Ibid, 586, 588.

percent of the population was actually engaged in tobacco production, the demographical rise
after 1640 resulted in increased production. As we shall suggest below, exploitation increased
apace and thus, productivity also increased sharply. The first to note this increase, or at least
to recognize its implications for new personal wealth, were the Puritan (or new) merchants of
London who militated in the Rump Parliament for trade restrictions on colonial imports. The
upshot was the Navigation Act of 1651.
By 1660, the population of the colony had reached roughly 25,000 people, an increase of
about 17,000 people since 1640 or a tripling of the population. As many as three-quarters
were serviles, indentured servants or slaves. European markets had also grown. But
production expanded more rapidly and overproduction resulted. A problem in the price
formation of tobacco, basic to the 1676 Rebellion, now begin to take shape. This problem was
monopolistic control of distribution, hence price (as developed on the basis of the Navigation
Acts), that in turn was exacerbated by competition-driven overproduction.
[Monopolistic Control, Overproduction and Crises]
It is important to recognize that planters never entered into a direct relation with the tobacco
consumer. Unlike modern corporations which have developed massive marketing and
distribution apparatuses, the settler colony's planters were entirely dependent upon
merchants. Accordingly, after 1660 (and in a more limited way between 1633 and 1643)
monopolistic trade restrictions (to the extent they were enforced) determined the price of labor
(since English merchants set the price for indentures - the dominant form of servile labor up to
the 1690s), provided the same merchants with exclusive carrying privileges (hence allowed
them to set freight rates without regard to competition), and allowed the Crown to collect a
duty on all imported tobacco. The effect of monopolistically formed prices was to drive planter
returns on investment downward. If a good year exhibited the colony's full productive capacity,
the resulting prices could be disastrous. In 1666, huge amounts of tobacco never left the
colony. Instead they remained sitting on wharves unsold. In 1668, the first ships from England
arrived following the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch war. A total of eighty ships loaded
tobacco, yet, as the Council secretary remarked on seeing the fleet, planters collectively
produced in two years what England could carry off in three. The great planters understood
that the dynamics of competition-induced overproduction could greatly exacerbate the
situation created by Crown trade restrictions. They repeatedly attempted, unsuccessfully, to
either fix the price of tobacco or limit its production.45
While it is difficult to say with certainty in these years whether monopolistic control was
fundamental for the formation of tobacco prices, there is evidence to suggest it may have
been. In the years between 1663 (when Parliament required that all European goods bound
for English colonies pass through English ports) and 1673 (when the Third Navigation Act was
enacted requiring a duty on any colonial exports moving through other colonies), Virginia
planters shipped their tobacco to Boston or New York. From either of these destinations, it
was reshipped to the Netherlands where it brought better prices than English merchants paid.
If overproduction was simply a consequence of planter competition, that is, if planters
throughout the colonies of the Americas increased the volume of their production in order to
make up for declining prices, then it would have been impossible to get a better price simply
by finding a different marketing agent.46
45For the tobacco left on the docks in 1666, Morgan, Ibid, 193; for the remark about productive capacity, Ibid, 242.

Legislation to control tobacco prices in one form or another was enacted in, for example, 1629, 1632, 1639, 1666,
1680, 1683. Morgan, Ibid, 134-135, 193, 284, 288 n.59.
46For Virginia planter efforts to get around trade restrictions prior to 1673, Morgan, Ibid, 277.

While monopolistic price formation may have been basic to overproduction in the period
leading up to and beyond Bacon's Rebellion, it is more important to note that its deleterious
effects on planter livelihood were far more serious when occurring together with competition
driven by the desire of each planter to produce more to compensate for falling prices. This
much is nonetheless certain: For the years 1660 to 1684, the immediate period prior to the
Rebellion, competition-driven overproduction, the attempts by each planter to make up in
volume for falling prices, was not the basic production problem for planters of the Virginia
colony. Nor was it this form of overproduction that on the eve of the 1676 Rebellion led small
planters to fall deeper into a debt they had steadily incurred for years. This debt, wherever its
roots lay, was not, to be sure, shared evenly; and the crisis, however it took shape, resulted in
a massive polarization along class lines.47
[Overproduction, Class Geography of Planters, and Planter-Settler Engrossment of Indian
Lands]
If competitive pressures did not always, generally speaking, drive planters to attempt greater
tobacco production to compensate for falling price, expanding production still had as a
consequence overproduction in whatever the specific form it took. To resolve the problem of
overproduction the great planters made efforts to limit competition from small planters and to
thereby restrict production. As we shall relate below, the great planters practiced engrossment
of lands through their control of the colonial State. They legally attached all the best lands in
the Chesapeake first, then upriver of the great waterways. Additional production by small
planters (whose numbers began to grow after 1660) would only add to the problems of
monopolistically determined price. Forced far upriver, these newly freed men (former servants)
both risked costs of production that would be unbearable and faced the danger of Indian
attack. Yet it was not just great planter engrossment which drove settler colonists into
confrontation with native peoples. These confrontations just as certainly followed as a
consequence of soil exhaustion, itself a product of the method of cultivation adopted by all
planters. Three to four years in a tract repeatedly under cultivation depleted the soil so
extensively it could not be replanted in the following years. Virginia settlers followed the timehonored English method of expanding production (or, as the case, was here, of opening new
tracts for planting). The method was simply to bring new acreage under cultivation. With falling
incomes, a single crop and new soil readily available (assuming Indian settlements could be
expropriated), settler colonists had no incentive to practice even the minimal kinds of soil
conservation techniques (e.g., crop rotation, fertilization) that their English counterparts
engaged in. When the soil was exhausted, planters just moved onward and attempted to push
Indians aside (by plundering, expropriating, and murdering or enslaving them). Of course,
settlers and their (latter day) apologists saw no need for conservation practices. Edmund
Morgan, for one, suggests the notion of soil exhaustion is a misnomer: The method of planting
(one that entailed deserting a soil that was, because practiced as large-scale commercial
agriculture as opposed to, for example, merely unfertilized and fallow, quickly depleted of
nutrients) "made sense" and was appropriate to "a country were land was more plentiful than
labor. The question of whose land it was (the Indians), what was entailed in acquiring it
(violent expropriation and genocide), and, finally, who would work it (serviles) and how their

47The perspective of competition-driven overproduction, adopted by Allen (The Invention of the White Race, V. 2) and

derived from Marx's analysis of the nineteenth century world of capitalist production, is a retrospective projection of
conditions that had yet to obtain for, much less to shape, the Atlantic economies for the whole of the seventeenth
century.

labor would be come to be acquired (kidnapping, trickery and violent enslavement), is, to be
sure, not raised.48
As a staple produced for export, tobacco was too bulky and far too heavy to transport
overland, but at the achieved level of productive and technical development it could easily be
transported by way of water, assuming the waterway was broad and deep enough. English
ships would anchor alongside wharves constructed on great planter estates on the inland
bays or great rivers from where English manufactured goods, clothing and food were
unloaded for sale and the tobacco was loaded for the return to England.
Shortly after 1648, well-to-do English settlers began to move inland: Beginning at their mouths
on the Chesapeake, they colonized the four other great rivers - the York, Pamunkey,
Rappahannock and the Potomac. Isolated farms, estates and settlements formed along these
arteries; and new counties, merely formal territorial units that were essentially adjuncts to
plantation estates, were established. This isolation was crucial: Between 1624 and 1660, such
isolation largely left planters to shape social relations according to this own needs with limited
intervention from the Crown and its colonial representatives.49 On the one side, it assured the
planter mastery of serviles were nearly absolute; on the other side, it secured extensive
economic control for greater planters over small ones.
By moving inland, the great planters forced small planters farther upriver or into the interior
away from the riverways, thus beyond those points where merchants ships could travel. The
former were thus able to render the latter dependent upon them (since small planters had not
the means to get tobacco to English merchants ships) or made it altogether impossible for
small planters to cost effectively produce tobacco in the first place. Once on the frontier, small
planter settler colonists repeated the pattern of the first fifteen years of the colony's existence,
a pattern that had itself been repeated in the 1640s and 1650s: They came into conflict with
the Indians because they sought lands occupied by native peoples. Possessing firearms,
which in English hands functioned as elements of an aggressive technology of assault and
murder, the settlers were always in position to get the better of the Indians in an open
confrontation. The natives either fled from their lands or fought back, but in either case their
numbers were decimated as they were driven deeper into the interior. Thus, they were cut off
from crucial forms of their livelihoods (collecting oysters, hunting fish in the riverways and
adjacent streams; collecting fruits and berries in the adjacent woodland).

48For English methods of expanding acreage under cultivation, see "A Note on the Creation of Surplus English

Populations" above. For Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 141-142 and n. 32, 172. For a work that
purported to center itself on the relation of slavery to freedom, it might have been more fruitful to analyze settler
colonial agricultural practices in terms of the destructiveness inherent in the system of social relations decisively
shaped by the relentless pursuit of profit on the one side, and the class psychology based on emotionally mutilated
personal formation on the other.
49The fifth or other great river was the James. The extent of following the waterways was not merely nominal: By
1651, for example, settlers had already moved eighty miles up the Potomac. However, under pressures of
overproduction crises and declining tobacco prices, most of this land would be concentrated into the hands of the
great planters within a decade. Morgan, Ibid., 219-220; for the relation of counties to plantation estates, Thompson,
Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South, 345. Isolation was (and is to this day) characteristic of plantation
agriculture, and not just in the Virginia settler colony. Ibid, 239, 318.

A Note on the Politically Determined Basis of Monopolistic Control the English Navigation
Laws
Charles II was ever mindful of the fate of his father. Like his father, this Charles Stuart was a
Catholic-leaning king in an anti-Catholic country. Like his father, his opposition was
Parliamentarily centered. Like his father, he sought at all costs to avoid the financially imposed
necessity of regularly calling a Protestant Parliament into session; yet he needed a reliable
source of revenue to operate independently of Parliament. In the context of a struggle with the
Dutch for naval supremacy, this political necessity brought a full blown mercantilist policy in
England into being.
By 1650, Spain, financially exhausted by an eighty year effort to hold the Netherlands, was no
longer a great power. The Dutch, French and English merchants had, by 1620, began to
compete for colonial territory especially in the once Spanish-dominated Caribbean. By midcentury, the Dutch had emerged as a dynamic trading power. This massive presence of the
Dutch in Atlantic trade would figure into all calculations of the revolutionary army which had
overthrown the Stuart monarchy.50
In 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride, an officer in Cromwell's New Model Army, led a contingent of
soldiers into London and forcefully removed recalcitrants from the English Parliament. The
remaining members constituted a "Rump" which, acceding to the establishment of a
Protectorate headed by Oliver Cromwell, functioned as a revolutionary legislative organ of
army power. In 1650, Parliament legislated an Embargo Act that forbade all commerce with
English colonies with Royalist leanings (Barbados, Antigua, Bermuda and Virginia) until
commissioned task forces could compel submission. Such were the beginnings of trade
restriction imposed by the mother country on its colonies. In 1651, legislation (the First
Navigation Act) was enacted to secure for English merchants and the English State the
benefits of the commercial activities of English colonies in the Americas and the West Indies
by limiting Dutch trade with them. These limits were achieved, first, by confining the
importation of goods in the areas of greatest merchant activity, the Lowlands, Baltic, and
Mediterranean, to ships hailing from the areas of origins of the goods in question or to English
ships. This was aimed directly at the Dutch as the mid-century's great trade intermediaries.
And, second, limitation of Dutch trade was achieved by allowing only English bottoms to carry
imports into England from Asia, Africa and the Americas. Novel elements appeared in this Act.
It was implicitly, in a class-based (i.e., merchant supporting) manner, nationalistic. It also
broke with the conception of limited, if not static economic activity of restricting imported
merchandise: Though the Act restricted Dutch trade, it encouraged without any limitations
English trade (import or export). The Act, thus, embodied a tacit, albeit mercantile, recognition
that internal demand was dynamic (or, at least, growing). Hitherto, trade restrictions had been
confined to exports. They were based on the conception dear to the older guild-based
merchant adventurers companies that scarcity of goods (achieved by restricting the quantities
of merchandise available for purchase) increased their value and, concomitantly, the
merchant's profit.51
The trade restrictions enacted by the Rump Parliament were largely wartime measures. In
1660, the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles II was restored to the English throne. The
Crown together with a new, largely Royalist Parliament had to decide whether to repudiate the
past trade actions of a revolutionary, republican government and whether wartime measures
were appropriate in peacetime. Charles did not hesitate. He opted for imposts generating
50For the decline of Spain as a great power, see the discussion "Domination of Castile and Antagonism with

Catalonia" beginning at n. 129 in "Community and Communism in Spain" appearing as Addendum III to our
Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Epoch of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Relation. Urgeschichte. (2000).
51For nationalist-based, Cromwellian era trade restrictions, Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws, 38-49.

revenues. Riding the good faith generated by his line's restoration and backed by London
merchants, in the very same year Charles got a compliant Parliament to essentially
reformulate the 1651 enactment with the legislation of a 1660 Navigation Act, supplemented in
1662 with the Act of Frauds. The latter act concerned imports originating in Europe and was
aimed at Dutch and Hanseatic competitors. These acts enumerated specific commodities that
were subject to importation restrictions. Machinery for enforcement was established in
England through institution of custom houses, through creation of a registry for all foreign-built
shipping seeking to unload in English ports, and on the basis of a determination of ships as
"English" (i.e., requiring the presence of an English captain and a crew three-quarters
English). Merchandise entering the country illegally was subject to confiscation. Restoration
legislation was elaborated in 1663 with the Staples Act. Thereafter, colonial trade with the
Dutch was forbidden. Allowing the colonies to trade "freely, the acts stipulated that only
English ships could trade to the colonies, and they required that seven commodities (tobacco
and sugar included) from the colonies had to be carried in English bottoms only. Furthermore,
the new enactments slapped a duty on all commodities leaving the colonies for England. The
duty for tobacco was two pence per pound imported. (Re-exported tobacco would see a return
of seventy five percent, 1 pence per pound, of the impost to merchants.) Corresponding
administrative machinery for enforcement was accordingly established: The expansion of the
planter-dominated, lucrative State positions in the Virginia colony (such as county customs
collectors) is to be dated from this legislation. To complement this legislation, in 1663 the
Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa was founded. English ships were mandated as the
only legally sanctioned carriers of slaves imported to the English colonies. To close a
loophole, in 1673, a Third Navigation Act was enacted. It established a duty on any colonial
exports that moved through other colonies to foreign destinations without passing through
English ports. This act was aimed specifically at improving collection of imposts on tobacco.52
These trade restrictions marked the development of thoroughgoing mercantilist practices. The
major beneficiaries were the Crown to whom duties were directly remitted; the new English
merchants (who were rapidly becoming great merchants and were later, after 1675, to be
institutionally concentrated in a Crown policy making body, the Lords of Trade and Plantations
and) who both fixed the prices of colonial commodities and the freight rates for carrying those
commodities; and in the case of Virginia, as we shall see, the ruling planter elite of the colony.
Beneficiaries there were, but mercantilist trade practices were not, however, without
dangerous consequences. The English went to war with the Dutch three times in a twentythree year period over the Navigation Acts based restrictions. The first war took place from
1652-1654, the second from 1665-1667, the third from 1672-1674. The Treaty of Breda
(1667), concluding the Second Dutch War, secured direct access for English merchants to
African slaves. But it would not be until 1674 that English colonies on the American mainland
began to acquire slaves directly from Africa.
Thus, it was believed, revenues from tobacco, sugar, and slaves would secure for the Crown
its financial independence.53

52Ibid, 51-62.
53Allen, Ibid, 2:198, 339 n. 116.

Part III
The Rebellion
Narration of its Course
Servants to Freemen
If, out of the scores of thousands of servants who emigrated to the Virginia colony during the
course of the seventeenth century prior to 1676, roughly 11,350 were freemen (including
planters), then the chances of becoming freemen were indeed slim. Although there is not
unanimity over just what the chances of mere survival among servants were, it is clear that
somewhere after 1650, perhaps as late as 1660, those chances of survival improved. In our
view, this improvement was directly related to the vast increase of wild cattle and hogs in the
forests in and about all areas of settlement. These domestic animals had been brought over
from England, roamed forested lands in and about the settlements, and were generally left to
fend for themselves. They were protected in large measure both by the many years a bounty
on wolves was in effect, and by the murderous decimation of the native populations. The
former, which as animal predators threatened livestock animals, were killed by settlers for the
bounty (and, of course, to protect livestock); the latter, who viewed the meat of slaughtered
cattle as a healthy addition to their diet, were enslaved, murdered for their lands and died as a
consequence of infection by European diseases.54
Almost all the great planters exported cattle and hogs to the West Indies (Barbados, Jamaica,
etc.), often in exchange for African slaves. While far too many planters didn't particularly care
to feed their servants meat, some did. Servants themselves, when they could without being
apprehended (there was an enactment against it), slaughtered livestock to radically, if only
temporarily, improve their diets. Overall nutritional improvement in diet accounted for a notable
increase in the life spans of enough servants over the years to create, once there terms of
indenture expired, a population of freemen.
As freemen, these former servants still had little better chance of owning land than they did
before their servitude ended. By the mid-1670s, it is likely that far more than half were
unpropertied. Some were able to achieve tenancy, clearing and planting the lands of great
planters. But not many, since the latter as a group neither cared for the increased production
nor the competition that under then current market conditions could only drive down prices.
More sought employment as waged laborers on the same estates. And some lived essentially
transient lives, armed with a musket living in wooded areas off the roaming livestock.
The latter group in particular frightened the colony's authorities. They were considered
"dangerous, a "wild" lot, and the 1670 disenfranchisement was aimed essentially at them. In
fact, though, all unpropertied freemen were unstable: They were without land, and the vast
overwhelming majority of them had neither wives nor families. The familiar anchors of
plebeian sociality were, in other words, missing in the lives of the group of ex-servant freemen
as a whole. Estimates put their numbers at anywhere from a conservative forty percent to a
full three-quarters of the (statistical) group of freemen as a whole (excluding great planters).
54The figure of 11,350 includes only those who were tithable: It includes all property owners whether they labored or

not, and the unpropertied who were working. The figure is heavily biased toward males. Admittedly rough, the figure
of 11,350 freemen has been arrived at thusly: Using Berkeley's estimate of 40,000 people in the colony in 1676
(Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, 109), an estimate which is as good as a 1674 population estimate of 36,000
based on Morgan's analysis (Ibid, 413) of tithables, we note roughly 2,300 productive slaves in a total servile
productive population of about 13,650 (for 1674, Morgan, Ibid, has a tithable population of 13,392). If, again following
Berkeley (cited in Allen, Ibid, 2:168), the population of freeman was equivalent to that of English servants, then the
number of freemen was about 11,350. This figure is more or less consistent with those authors (Morgan, Allen,
Craven) who put the ratio of unpropertied freemen to slaves at about 5:1. For estimates of the numbers of slaves in
Virginia circa 1676, see fn. 84, below.
The calculations for the mere survival of servants, often with regard to the first year of "seasoning," range from as
many as 67 out of 100 to a few as 20 out of 100. For a review of this discussion, see Allen, Ibid, 2: 322-323 n. 180.

Propertied freemen (small planters) were not much better off. Most of them pushed far upriver
on one of the great waterways in attempts to farm free of great planters. These men were "on
the frontier. They, accordingly, risked possible confrontation with Indians. They were also hard
pressed to get whatever tobacco crop they could grow and harvest downstream to merchant
ships carrying the colony's annual output to England. As one planter remarked, three-quarters
of them were in danger of sinking back into servile status. As a whole the mass of settler
freemen, oppressed (with the exception of the transient group) by the burden of taxation and
infuriated by great planter peculation, formed a large volatile population within the settler
colony by the mid-1670s.55
Narration of the Rebellion 'til Spring 1676
By the mid-1670s, the settler colony of Virginia had come under a great deal of strain.
Planters were constricted by Crown mercantile policies that forced them to sell their produce
strictly to English merchants. At the same time, and largely as a result of the monopolies
based on these restrictions, the smallest planters in particular had suffered from depressed
tobacco prices for the past decade and a half. In consequence, the dynamics of the settler
colonists' plantation monoculture produced class polarization. Pushing small planters beyond
the outsettlements led to unavoidable conflict with Indians as plantation agriculture undercut
native forms of life and activity. Bacon's Rebellion would exhibit both dynamics at work.
Nathaniel Bacon, Jr. was a wealthy, recent arrival in the colony of Virginia. Bacon was wellconnected: He was cousin to the wife of the colony's Governor, William Berkeley, and was
related to a member, his namesake, of the Governor's Council of State. In fact, he himself had
recently been elevated by Berkeley to membership on that august body. In spring 1676, vain,
ambitious and impetuous, and arrogant if not haughty, Bacon, like his fellow outsettlement
great planters, found himself aggrieved by Berkeley and his coterie's exclusive control over
the economic life of the colony. He, a true English gentleman, and other soon-to-be rebels
such as Giles Bland resented the parvenus (lesser men who had emigrated earlier) who as a
group by and large had a tight hold on the mechanisms of State revenue extraction. He was
perhaps also angered by the refusal of the Governor, a man grown short-tempered and
inclined in his old age to rule in the absolutist manner of the Stuarts, to restore to him and his
partner (William Byrd I) a monopoly on the fur trade with friendly Indians. Bacon and his
comrades set about to exploit fears generated by recent, tension laden native-settler
encounters. The British colonies to the north had been at war with a coalition of Indian nations
in what historically is known among settlers and their descendants as King Philip's War: The
Virginia colony was rife with rumors of Indian deprecations on its frontiers.56
There is evidence to support the view that Bacon, as an outsettlement planter, had his ears to
the ground. That is, he had heard the rumbling storm of discontent that was about to break,
and was offering the Crown loyalist planter faction headed by Berkeley a diversion to held off
a brewing revolt. If his efforts to take advantage of settler fears of natives were originally
intended as tea and circuses for the settler masses, a diversion designed to deflect them from
55For a discussion of the mass of freemen, Morgan, Ibid, 215-234 (225, for the great planter remark about the

abysmal prospects facing small planters).

56King Philip was the name the English gave to the Wampanoag chief Metacom who organized the Indian nations
fighting the Massachusetts Bay settler-colony.
The following sources on the Rebellion have been consulted: For contemporary accounts, Charles M. Andrew (ed.),
Narratives of the Insurrections, 1676-1690: 15-41, 47-98, 105-151 (respectively, Thomas Mathews, "The Beginning,
Progress and Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion (1705), Anon., "The History of Bacon's and Ingram's Rebellion" and
John Berry and Francis Moryson, "A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion in Virginia by the Royal Commissioners,
1677"); for the historians accounts, Wilcomb Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon's Rebellion
in Virginia; Welsey Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, chapter X; Theodore W. Allen,
The Invention of the White Race, 2:205-217; and, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 250-270.

assaulting great planter wealth and power, its success was possible for two reasons. First,
diverting anger arising from great planter oppression to murderous violence aimed at Indians
could confuse issues because settlers genuinely feared and hated Indians. Second, the
totality of the colony's previous history of settler-natives relations had already long ago
constituted a mechanism for diversion, viz., a recognizable practical model for canalizing and
satisfaction of vicious, indeed murderous settler appetites.57
Responding to a series of settler provoked Indian counter-raids and murders, on 26
September 1675, a combined force of Maryland and Virginia militia regiments surrounded a
Susquehannah fort on the Potomac River. Inviting five chiefs out to discuss the settlers'
"grievances, the latter murdered the chiefs who they claimed had authorized raiding parties
into Virginia against the property of the colony's settlers. The militia settlers proceeded to lay
siege to the fort. The assault was resisted and, after a siege of several weeks, the surviving
Susquehannah slipped out unnoticed during the night. In January of the following year, a
Susquehannah war party killed thirty-six settlers in a retaliatory raid on a colonial settlement
near the falls between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. Amidst the settler hysteria over
Indian incursions onto "settler territory" and the fears generated by King Philip's War,
Nathaniel Bacon, Jr. seized this moment as an opportunity to inaugurate a struggle among the
colony's great planters. Bacon wanted to pursue a war of extermination against the
surrounding Indians, particularly those Indians committed to friendship by treaty. These
"friendly" Indians were, at any rate, easy prey since they had recently been disarmed by order
of Governor Berkeley.
Berkeley, on the other hand, considerably older (seventy) and while temperamental, was
mindful of the perilous historical juncture at which Crown interests stood: If only at this
juncture, the Indian nations of North America held the balance of power between rival colonial
powers, England, France and Spain. Accordingly, Berkeley and the Crown-loyalist ruling
faction pursued a policy aimed at preserving the small groups of Indians both for trade and,
most importantly, in order to better use them as spies amongst, allies against, and a buffer
between settlers and the real native enemies, those aligned with the French or those simply
hostile to invading settlers as such. These Indians bands (Doegs, Pamunkey, Nottoway and
Meherrin) would serve as a shield, then, to protect planters, that is, to allow them to pursue
tobacco production without distraction. In trade (skins and fur pelts for weapons and
ammunition primarily), they were sources of easy profit, and they could also be called upon,
and this was embodied in treaty as a requirement, to return captured runaway bondsmen. The
policy was first formulated in the peace treaty signed in 1646. That treaty with the defeated
Indian nations of the Chesapeake and environs led by Necotowance was the outcome of
settler victory in a 1644 Indian initiated conflict.58 The treaty was important for the
developments of 1676 because it fixed the boundaries of the colony, boundaries which, of
course, had been regularly violated since the treaty signing. What had happened was that
great planter engrossment drove small planter encroachment. The latter settled on the
frontiers ever closer to hostile natives. This encroachment had led to the clearing of land for
farms far beyond the old treaty boundaries, in the West largely coterminous with the waterfalls
lines on the James and Pamunkey Rivers along which the estates (outsettlements centers) of
the planter "country families" faction were situated (see Map 1).
57For diversion, see Morgan, Ibid, 257-259, and the sources he cites.

If Bacon consciously pursued an Indian war to distract the mass of settlers from their otherwise legitimate grievances
against colonial Power, it changed nothing: In particular, neither the genocidal orientation of the settler masses nor
transformation of an Indian war into a servile led civil war was contingent upon Bacon's motivations. If Morgan's
assessment is correct, then in the latter case Bacon's actions merely delayed the outset of civil war.
58Craven, White, Red, and Black, 56.

Factions within the Planter Class

Amidst the outsettlement gentlemen who had grievances aimed at Berkeley as well as the
Indians, Bacon was a sort of first among equals. These gentlemen numbered among
themselves Richard Drummond, Richard Lawrence, James Crewes, Anthony Arnold, and
Joseph Ingram - Bacon's specifically military "genius, his successor and widely
acknowledged rebel leader following his untimely death. This group (Bacon included)
achieved some coherency and formed the effective rebel leadership. Each member of the
group is often referred to as one of Bacon's "lieutenants. Yet Crown loyalists considered
Drummond every bit as much a villain as Bacon. Each led rebel forces in his own right and
had serious objections to the colonial States domination by Berkeley and his Council. Bacon,
Drummond, and Lawrence, and Charles Scarborough, William Kendall, William Byrd I
(Bacons partner in trade), and Thomas Goodrich were all great planters. Small planters (e.g.,
John Isles, Richard Pomfrey, William Scarborough, Robert Stoakes, Richard Turney, Thomas
Whaley and John Whitson) participated at lower leadership levels. There were other planter
leaders as well, such as Giles Bland, a great planter who as collector of Crown customs in the
colony had been discharged by Berkeley, refused to step down from his office and led a more
or less independent challenge to the Governor, and Giles Brent, a great planter who again
operated more or less autonomously with his own force of followers in the colony's northern
counties. The great planter rebel opposition to Berkeley and his coterie rested on local
oligarchies of country families, planters with outsettlement estates, whose power grew from
their domination of the State at county level and the vestry system at the parish level.59
Berkeley's coterie, let's call it the "Spring Green" faction after the name of Berkeley's estate,
based its power largely on position in the Council, and in the final analysis on representation
of Crown and great merchants' interests that the Governor and his Council at once enforced
and benefited from. Most significantly, these interests could be summed in a single term,
namely, the Navigation Acts. Monopoly control of the transit of colonial imports and exports
made for monopoly profits, that is, made the Bristol and London new merchants rich, while the
royal impost on tobacco provided the Crown with an annual revenue that reached 100,000
by 1675, more income than was received in duties from all other colonial products combined.
Charles, with his absolutist appetites and his crypto-Catholic ambitions, simply could ill-afford
to horse trade with a Protestant Parliament in order to insure adequate revenue. Better to
meet royal expenditures by whatever non-parliamentary means were available or could be
created. In this context, Berkeley was able to engage in peculation of different sorts and to
undertake monopolistic practices of his own. As a matter of fact, the entire rotten polity of the
settler colony amounted to a personal feeding trough which the great planters fought over.
The Governorship was the most lucrative post, followed by Council secretary and its
membership, collector of the King's customs in the colony, and county customs collectors. For
example, in 1661 the Governor prohibited anyone from killing unbranded cattle roaming in the
forests. He claimed them for himself as a prerogative of his position. Beginning in 1663
Berkeley received a ten shilling duty on every hogshead of tobacco (roughly five hundred
pounds) shipped to other colonies. But, perhaps, another more detailed example illustrates
this situation best. In 1675, a ship with a foreign registration entered Virginia colony water in
violation of the Navigation Acts. The captain had hijacked the ship in order to sell its cargo
(valued at 12,000) on his own account. The captain and several commissioners of
Northampton Co., wealthy planters one and all, conspired to unload and sell the contraband
cargo. Upon hearing of the incident, Berkeley, in turn, had the ship and its cargo seized to be
held for its owner. But the ship's appearance in colony waters was illegal. John Stringer,
customs collector for the Eastern Shore (composed of two counties), suggested a court be
59For the rebel planter grievance, Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia, 103.

formed to try the violation. Such was done. The shipment was now legally plundered:
Berkeley, Stringer and, of course, the King, each were entitled to one-third the proceeds
realized on sale of the cargo.60
Settlers could only marvel at and speak cynically amongst themselves about these forms of
aggrandizement. Some forms were particularly offensive. Among the latter the most foul to the
body of propertied settler colonists as a whole was the monopoly on the fur trade exercised by
the Governor. In 1675, Berkeley licensed two men, Bacon and Byrd, to handle that trade
exclusively (largely beaver but also other, e.g., otter, skins) in return for a huge fee paid to
him. (The license was revoked in the following year.) All other planters, great and small, were
excluded from the trade. Berkeley was blamed for the lack of access, and also condemned as
a "protector" of Indians. Thus, anger was simultaneously vented in two directions. But the
Governor's practices, affirmed and supported by his Council, provoked dissatisfaction in
addition to other, productively more central issues. The steady decline in tobacco prices,
which had been continuous since roughly 1660, and, accordingly, the downward pressure on
incomes, was attributed (largely correct in our view) to monopolistic practices. Thus, the
remedy was for planters to exercise control over the terms of sale of tobacco. Best suited to
these objective would be the capacity to trade with anyone, not just the English, the planters
wished.61
The conflicts within the ruling planter elite of the settler-colony were explosive since they
involved Crown interests on the continent (dynastic ambitions in relation to other colonial
powers), the forms of surplus extraction (Crown tobacco revenue, merchant superprofitability,
and planter incomes), the political structure of the colony, and, little anticipated, the potential
transformation of productive relations since resolution of the conflicts would entail the
recruitment of masses of men to enforce a victor's settlement.
Settler Psychology
Amidst the free settler masses, a panic producing surge of fear could be mobilized anytime by
an emotive evocation of hitherto undetected imagined or real Indian movements: The
skirmishes with Indians had produced a fright approaching hysteria on the part of those living
on farms on or beyond the isolated outsettlement plantations. Yet the colonists' war parties
against Indians never involved masses of men. Thus, for example, the largest party may have
included roughly one thousand men. (Compare this to the figures given the following spring,
1677, by Crown's commissioners who put the numbers in revolt against colonial Power and
involved in the civil war at 15,000 or more settlers.)62
Among the hundreds of those settlers who did join Bacon, the overwhelming majority of them,
small planters (but also tenants, agricultural laborers, and a few ambitious and volunteering
servants of planters inside Bacon's faction), felt, like Bacon, an undisguised contempt, hatred
and fear for and of Indians. The Indians, at any rate, had what these settler-colonists wanted,
60For the cases of cattle and the ten shilling fee (later transformed into a 200 per year addition to the Governor's

1000 annual salary), Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 205; for plundering the ship cargo,
Ibid, 202-203.
61The fee for monopoly rights on the fur trade consisted of eight hundred beaver skins the first year, six-hundred
every year thereafter. Prior to 1661 enactment (by the House of Burgesses), the fur trade required no special license
and had not been restricted. The licensing of the trade, which meant its banning for the settler masses, was
ostensibly legislated to avoid an Indian war, one provoked by the settler masses, which the Colony's planter elite was
not itself prepared to undertake. See Craven, Southern Colonies, 367.
62"[by] all hands, so also by the Governors owne report, that above fifteen Thousand, there are not five hundred
persons untainted in this rebellion." The commissioners figure is contained in a letter of 4 August 1677 to Thomas
Watkins cited by Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, 109.
By "Power" let it be said that we mean institutionalized social relations of command and obedience, incarnated first
and foremeost as the State.

what they never had (as English farmers), or had lost and (in America) regained but had
inadequately enough of, namely, land. For some settlers, land meant an opportunity for
independence; for the rest, increased lands meant a larger tobacco crop to offset the low
prices and the taxes that threatened to crush them. In this way, land (or additional lands)
meant limited (or greater) independence from the great lords and the English Crown, and from
the nemesis that confronts every marginalized farmer, poverty.
The aforementioned panic producing surge of fear was inseparable (and only analytically
distinguishable) from guilt. Guilt was the consequence of intended theft and murder. But the
stakes were high, since all settler hopes and dreams rested on land acquisition. Guilt was
unacceptable. It was expelled, projected on to natives in fantasies of losing a farm or wife to
Indian retaliation. In a panic (i.e., experiencing said fantasies), the settler masses
simultaneously experienced a surge of fear that fed by those fantasies produced an overflow
of aggression aimed at natives. The aggression girded them for the murderous action to
come. (At the same time, the vicious activity of settlers not only strengthened, but fixed, a
malformed identity: Aggression and brutality, guilt and fantasy fears became formative for a
characteristic, settler personality.) Assuaging the fantasy fears of loss, savage assaults on
unarmed Indians provided, beyond the prospects of land, the satisfactions that appeal to
emotionally malformed social scum everywhere in history: They took perverse delight in the
unprovoked brutal murder of Indians. Such murder provided, after all, a displaced, if
psychologically unacknowlegeable, fight-back against their social betters. They had
grievances, real ones, against gentlemanly Power, but as long as that Power appeared stable
they would not voice their grievances for fear of retaliation. They hated and despised their
social betters, but could not acknowledge it, for it was from their social betters that these
farmers, tenants and laborers took their models. They hated and despised because, like the
dangerous classes of servants and slaves underneath them, who they hated, despised and
feared (precisely because servants and slaves personally represented their worse fate,
collapse of their life-chances into a station they were in grave danger of falling), they were
loathed and scorned (and feared). Loathed and scorned by those above them, marginalized
farmers hated and despised and feared the stranger, alien, the socially and culturally "other,
the Indian(s). Indians, of course, were easy to hate and despise because they stood outside
of the human community as settlers understood it. The settlers hated and despised Indians
because a practically reduced hatred of Indians offered so much more, namely, land; and
because Indians were so much easier targets than the servants and slaves below them (who,
as investments, were protected, at any rate, by their planter masters).
The settler masses knew no alternative social arrangements. Land was all they have ever
known, and Indians had what land had not been engrossed by the great planters. Their social
betters had provided the model here too, greed and unlimited accumulation was an unalloyed
good. So they lied, cheated and stole because that's how their land was taken from their
fathers and their fathers fathers (under guise of law by wealthy men). They had no scruples
when it came to getting land. Who, amongst their social betters, had ever demonstrated
scruples in dealings with them?
Such, hatred and simmering resentments resulting in brutal and murderous violence, was the
rich legacy of a divided, highly stratified society the settler colonists everywhere in the
Americas bequeathed the native inhabitants.63
63Unfortunately, these criminally violent emotions and, in contemporary terms, the genocidal practices which they

issued in find subtle contemporary legitimatization in far too much of the literature on early colonial America. Thus,
Morgan (Ibid, 39) states with reference to the much earlier English response, the destruction of all the corn (stored
and growing) of an Indian village upriver from the Roanoke Island colony in retaliation for the theft of a silver cup, "If
the theft was ignoble, the English reaction was scarcely godlike." "Godlike" refers to an alleged native expectation of
the English. There is in Morgan's remark the assertion of equivalence between two different orders of crime, namely,

Narration (continued) through June 1676

Berkeley had raised additional militia, reinforced garrisoned forts and ordered construction of
new ones along a line formed by the outer farming and plantation outsettlements to secure
settlers from feared Indian atrocities. These measures, it was rumored among the small
planters, would cost - perhaps a new tobacco tax.
Thus, Bacon's proposed war of extermination against Indians nearest the outer settlements
was hailed by the farmers as a cheap alternative, offering at the same time the prospects of
pillaging and the slaking of a blood lust. In early May 1676, Bacon raised close to five hundred
men and headed off, employing here a term later made infamous by the United States cavalry,
into "Indian country. The bulk of these men were farmers, tenants and agricultural laborers
with some servants (of the Bacon-led planter faction) who had volunteered for or had been
drafted into the force. Berkeley, in turn, had taken a larger force into Henrico County but
Bacon and his supporters had already departed. The Governor declared him a rebel and
stripped him of his seat on the Council. Otherwise, Bacon and the atrocities that he would
perpetrate were to be tolerated by Berkeley.
Bacon's forces had located an Occaneechee fort on the Roanoke River in southwestern
Virginia (present day south central Virginia). The Occaneechee had materially assisted
Bacon's hungry and exhausted force, and, moreover, successfully assaulted a nearby band of
Susquehannah on the settlers' behalf. But Bacon wanted a large stockpile of beaver allegedly
possessed by the Occaneechee, and his men, having come all this way, wanted to kill some
Indians themselves. Under a flimsy pretext, Bacon ordered an attack on Indians outside the
fort, and then the fort itself. Outside the result was a slaughter, murder, and the capture of
(female and child) prisoners for slaves. Vastly outnumbered, the Occaneechee inside also
suffered heavy casualties. Thus, Bacon achieved his first "great victory" against friendly
Indians, those who had assisted him and his men in their moment of need. As news of the
event found its way back to the English settlements, Nathaniel Bacon's popularity among the
settler masses soared.
In early June, Berkeley was compelled to open a new colonial Assembly following an election
in which he had likewise felt it necessary to allow recently (1670) disenfranchised freemen,
unpropertied tenants and wage-earners included, to cast votes. (Berkeley, it should be noted,
had governed through his own creation, a malleable "Long Assembly" - no doubt, ironically
modeled on the English Long Parliament if only as its negation, since its convocation in 1662.
That Assembly had sat without election, though obviously not continuously, until 1676.) Bacon
had been elected one of two burgesses from Henrico County. The proclamation declaring him
a rebel notwithstanding, he, accompanied by a body of guards, sailed down the James River
to Jamestown in order to claim his seat. On the night of 6 June, Bacon was seized by a force
authorized by Berkeley. A crowd of "several hundred" men, Bacon supporters, gathered in
Jamestown to see no harm came to a man who, having led a massacre, had won a "great
victory. On 9 June, he was brought before the General Assembly. On his knees, he
confessed in writing his offenses. The assembled burgesses requested his pardon, the
Council of State concurred and Berkeley granted it. The next day, he was reinstated in his
petty theft and a genocidal act. When all is said and done, such an assertion rests on the dubious, and never
demonstrated, assumption of English cultural, i.e., technological, economic, social, political and moral, superiority in
relation to native peoples. The assumption, ever if adequate in its assessment, does not justify expropriation, mass
murder, and genocide. Yet such assumptions guided all English encounters and dealings with Indians throughout the
colonial history of the Americas. The few settlers who recognized that native peoples preferred their traditions and
forms of life to anything the English had to offer were precisely the ones who abandoned the English colony to join
native communities. (Similarly cavalier is Hemming with regard to the native peoples in their relation to Portuguese in
what is now Brazil. See John Hemming, Red Gold. The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians.)

seat on the Council. As a great planter, his allegiance to the State and Crown was
(temporarily) secured: Never had there been a question about his crimes against native
peoples. (Instead, the typical cant, screaming to the heavens about "the many outrages, cruell
murders, and violent incursions dayly committed, perpetrated and made by the barbarous
Indians, a projection of settler colonial acts, was proclaimed.) Now, however, Bacon
demanded a State-sanctioned license (a commission as a general of militia forces) to murder
Indians - friendly or no. He received his commission, but with restrictions applicable at
Berkeley's discretion. Not acceptable. So several days later, Bacon left town and returned to
his estate. Meanwhile the Assembly, now dominated by big men playing to small planters as
well as numbers of the latter themselves, got down to its business. It passed some twenty
acts, of which eleven were aimed at codifying a protest against the increasing concentration
and centralization of power in the hands of Berkeley and his coterie.64
The "June Assembly" constituted a democratic revolution carried out legislatively on behalf of,
and in part by, the colony's middling groups against the aristocratic-Royalist planter elite. But it
should be noted that the first three acts legislated by the assembly had, not fortuitously, aimed
at more effectively prosecuting war against all Indians. Such was entirely consistent: The
same social groups whose activity produced this democratic achievement most vociferously
proclaimed their support for Bacon's Indian policy of plunder, theft, enslavement and mass
murder. Virginia was a settler colony, and the minimal condition of settler democracy was the
uncompensated expropriation of Indian lands. Said minimum only functioned, however,
abstractly, that is, as a historically reconstructed condition of the intelligibility of settler practice
in relation to Indians. That practice itself was invariably characterized, as it would be
throughout colonial American and later United States history, as one predicated on deceit and
outright falsehoods, one that in fact was carried out in generally the most cruel, brutal, and
usually if not always murderous manner. In history, it is universally the case (whether
precapitalist statelets and Statist empires or the nation-State specific to the capitalist world)
that State formation entails genocidal practices directed against peoples who occupy the land
to be transformed into the territorial basis of Power. 65 The development of a colonial-settler
State in British North America was no different. Native oppression, expropriation and genocide
formed the presuppositions of settler democracy.
Disease
In the Americas, it often asserted the vast majority of native peoples perished as a consequent
of disease. In its most egregious form this claim raises disease to the status of a cause
64These measures, enacted by outsettlement planters together with small men of property, sought largely to

decentralize Power and its corruption by returning it to local settlements, by permanently extending the franchise to all
freemen, in limiting the impact of taxes (especially those levied to conduct the business of the Assembly itself) by
more equitably distributing them and locally overseeing their levy, and by granting a general pardon for all offenses
committed in the past four months. The Statues-at-Large; being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First
Session of the Legislature in the year 1619. Compiled and edited by William Waller Hening. V. 2, 341-365. Hereafter
the 1969 edition will be cited in the following format: Volume number, Hening, page number. Thus, this reference here
would read "2 Hening 341-365.
65Pierre Clastres, "de l'ethnocide. (Originally appearing in the Encyclopaedia Universalis. Paris, 1974. Published
posthumously in 1980 in a collection of his essays edited by Hlne Clastres and entitled Recherches
d'anthropologie politique. Citations that appear will be from the latter publication.) Clastres mistakenly identifies
ethnocide with the destruction of the culture of a human group, and genocide with the murder of members of the
group in whole or part. This narrow concept fails to grasp that genocide consists in the practice, regardless of
intention, of the destruction of the identity of a people as a people. Genocidal practices are realized in the removal of
native populations from their lands, by undermining productive activity (e.g., killing the game on which as a people
they depend), and through forced assimilation (e.g., banning rituals, customary dress and diet, religion or use of a
native tongue) into an oppressor society as well as in acts of mass murder. For further elaboration, see the fourth
critique in our Community and Capital.

independent of both outright and less openly genocidal practices. To boot, it also abjectly pays
homage to the civilization which so triumphed.66 Mass extinction was, on this view, a tragic,
unintended consequence of immunological weakness. But for settler-colonial populations
(primarily Spanish, Portuguese, British and American) that over five centuries regularly and
consistently engaged in practices of enslavement taken together with starvational
underfeeding of enslaved Indian populations, forced marches and internments, and settler
expropriations that destroyed productive native livelihoods (i.e., burning native corn fields and
crop stores, the slaughter of pony herds to prevent Indians from pursuing hunting, the
extermination of buffalo herds as official U.S. Army, i.e., State, policy, etc.) as well as a
catalogue of massacres, i.e., mass murders that in some cases out-nazi-ed the Nazis,67 it is
absurd and ludicrous, not to mention criminal, to claim disease as a sociologically neutral,
biological fact bore the burden of native deaths or that settler and settler State practice and
policy aimed at and achieved anything other than the destruction of native peoples as
peoples, at genocide.
Openly genocidal practices and disease were demonstrably inseparable. 68 Moreover, because
natives peoples outside the Aztec and Inca tributary formations were largely agriculturalists,
gathers and hunters, the subjectively empty regimentation, task repetition and discipline of
laboring, not to mention the brutality and cruelty of the task masters, were foreign to them. As
Blackburn notes, the labor, and the conditions of labor (e.g., gold mining in cold streams for
hours on end), which settler colonists everywhere in the Americas forcefully imposed on the
indigenous peoples greatly increased the risks of contracting diseases and weakened
whatever immunities they may have possessed.69 In North America, it is rightfully suspected
that from very early on the use of disease (through the distribution of infected blankets) was
part of a conscious practice aimed at murder of Indians in order to remove them and their
institutional presence from coveted lands.70
Without doubt, diseases were devastating almost beyond belief. Livestock pathogens and
parasites could at any time kill any number of Englishmen, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or
Frenchmen in a typical outbreak, e.g., of small pox, but while numerous individuals died (as
many as 7% of European populations in typical small pox outbreaks at the time of the
"Conquest"), the English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French as demographic groups
survived. With one hundred percent infection rates, losses of one-quarter, one-third, or even
66Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1986).

Crosby pays lip service to "maltreatment, "cold, "hunger" and "overwork, but his explanation belies it (199-200,
285). For homage, Ibid, 307-308.
67Ward Churchill, Nits Make Lice: The Extermination of North American Indians, 1607-1996 in his A Little Matter of
Genocide: Holocaust and its Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, 1997): 140-157. For an
exemplary case of outnazi-ing Nazi practices, Churchill cites Davy Crocketts account of a 3 November 1813 attack
on a Red Stick town at the Tallussahatchee River in which 186 fighters were trapped and surrendered (after the town
occupants, women, children and old men, had been murdered), and were killed to a man. Churchill notes the
account of this battle concludes with the troops [Andrew Jacksons] eating potatoes fried in the fat of their fallen
victims [emphasis added]. Ibid, 216 textual note. Churchill cites Crocketts A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett
of Tennessee (Knoxville, 1973 reprint), and James Atkins Shackford, Davy Crockett: The Man and the Legend
(Lincoln (NE), 1994) as his sources.
68David Stannard, American Holocaust. The Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992), xii, 53-54, and Ward
Churchill, Ibid.
69As Ward Churchill notes in a speech recently aired on Pacifica's "Democracy Now" (10.14.99), among western
anthropologists, the term "horticulturists" is reserved strictly for Indian or native agriculturalists. Because agriculture is
the foundation on which early or ancient "civilizations" rose, politically "primitive, i.e., anti-Statist, native communities
could not be so engaged. The term, if not racist, is blatantly ethnocentric.
For Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 132-133, 135, 136, 206 and 144, 227, 287, 377.
70Ward Churchill, Nits Make Lice, 151-157, 164 (2nd textual note), 169 and 2nd textual note thereon, 170-171 and
textual note on 171, and 175.

half of a population group in a single outbreak of small pox, native bands, peoples and nations
of the Americas as population groups, on the other hand, could over the course of fifty years
be destroyed.71
However, the very diseases that destroyed the demographic integrity of native populations
were not immutable biological facts. Both the diseases and physiological immunities of settler
colonists to common diseases such as small pox in particular but also to measles, dysentery,
mumps, whopping cough, chicken pox, etc., were the product of millennia of the enforced
impoverishment of European rural masses. Those immunities were constituted over
thousands of years as peasants lived in closed, close and shared quarters with their livestock,
primarily cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and chicken. If cows or lambs provided warmth as
peasants slept among or on them, or human mothers wet nursed infant motherless animals, it
was because of savage inequalities that produced a situation in which one family had a cow
and some chickens, while another had herds of cattle or sheep, for example, that numbered in
the tens or hundreds of thousands. Rooted in millennia of class division, disease grounded
devastation was a culturally formed phenomenon, when not thrust on indigenous peoples in
manifestly genocidal practices then always cynically a free gift of European societies to
undivided native societies. It was the immunologically congealed expression of the internal
barbarity and criminality of European societies themselves.72
Narration (continued) through mid-August 1676
Bacon had not taken part in the Assembly's deliberations. His real interests lay elsewhere as
evidenced by his preparation, his submission notwithstanding, to recoup his standing by way
of another "great victory" over friendly, neighboring Indians.
On 23 June, Bacon returned to Jamestown and in the circus that followed, he demanded a
commission as general commanding all the colony's forces. Berkeley refused. With muskets
pointed at them, Bacon's rabble cowered the Council and the assembled Burgesses: The
latter two bodies pleaded with the Governor who then conceded. The commission that was
coerced - including provisions for subordinate commanders appointed by Bacon himself,
another act of pardon for this new offense (the coercion) and a letter of justification (of
Bacon's action) to the King - was, it should be noted, specifically for making war against all
Indians.
Jamestown was still tense when, about midday on 25 June, news came of an alleged Indian
massacre of colonists at one of the outsettlements. The next morning Bacon and his armed
force left the town marching out against the Indians.
In early July, Bacon began to comb the countryside, forests and swamps for locales to which
friendly Indians might have retired. His forces confiscated arms, ammunition and horses from
citizens of Gloucester County (see Map 1). The latter, in turn, appealed to Berkeley: 'Was
Bacon's commission valid? His men have stripped us of the means to protect ourselves
against savages.' Berkeley, depressed by the events of June, suddenly found energy to ride to
Gloucester County in an effort to raise troops to protect the good citizens. The latter, the
county's small planters and tenants, refused to be drafted, thinking it a ruse to mount an
armed force against Bacon. Bacon, after all, was actually fighting Indians. When Bacon
reached news of Berkeley's efforts, he ordered his force to retrace its march. He arrived back
in Gloucester county at the end of July to confront Berkeley. The latter, without an army to
face Bacon, retreated across the Chesapeake to the safety of Accomack County on the
Eastern Shore of Virginia. Bacon now proclaimed in a "Declaration of the People" that
71See Crosby, Ibid, 24, 30-31, 196-216, esp. 203-208 and 284-287 for smallpox.

72For an example of European class division based upon huge sheep herds, see Addendum III, "Domination of

Castile and Antagonism with Catalonia" in our Bolshevism and Stalinism. Urgeschichte.)

Berkeley and his loyalist supporters were outlaws and commanded them to surrender. On 1
August, he sent Giles Bland and Capt. William Carver with three hundred men to take ships in
the James River, and from there to apprehend Berkeley. With the situation now seemingly in
hand, Bacon undertook to consolidate his support so that he could return to the project
dearest to his heart, namely, "extirpation" of Indians.73
Bacon's first act was to solidify his support. He called a "conference" at Middle Plantation
(Williamsburg), threatening planters with estate confiscation should they fail to attend. Many
attended. They were duly swore to an oath as Bacon supporters. By 3 August, Bacon had
drawn up a declaration announcing that Berkeley was creating a civil war through his
opposition to the rebels' Indian war. Now Bacon sought, wherever his supporters went, to
have every propertied farmer and every freemen sworn to the same oath. With the work of
consolidation behind him, in mid-August he turned to pursuit of the Susquehannah, found this
too difficult, and instead sought easier prey, the Pamunkey. These were "docile" Indians, viz.,
they had a leader, a "Queen, who it appears had fully adapted herself to the accumulative
habits and the demands for serviles so characteristic of the English colonists. Bacon's forces
found the Pamunkey encampment. The Queen fled leaving her amassed goods. Bacon's men
assaulted a band which did not resist, killing some, taking others prisoners and, of course,
reveling in the acquired plunder.74
Such was Bacon's only other, his last great victory.
Narration (continued) - 'til late September 1676
Bland and Carver had captured three ships in the James River. As they reached Berkeley's
camp on the Eastern Shore, the latter was presented with what appeared to be a fait
accompli. It was over, he would have to surrender. However, among those on the three ships
was Capt. Robert Larrimore, a loyalist who had cunningly taken Bacon's oath. He sent word to
Berkeley that the ship he manned had only forty men aboard. The rest were either on the
other ships or ashore (some one-hundred and sixty men) with Carver awaiting Berkeley's
capitulation. The Governor hesitated but he had no choice. He send Philip Ludwell and a
group of men to take Larrimore's ship. Larrimore's intrigue was successful, and Ludwell soon
had the other ships in tow. Carver's force, fearing some treachery returned to its ship, but too
late. In rowboats in open water, Carver's men were vastly outgunned and forced to surrender.
Berkeley loyalists had now turned the tables, and the Governor immediately went over to the
offensive.
Berkeley recrossed the Chesapeake to Northampton county on 7 August, where, recruiting
troops, he admitted men whose hearts were set on plunder, impressed others, and
provisionally authorized freedom to all rebel planters' servants who would join him. The
Governor then declared rebel planter estates would be confiscated in order to maintain and
pay his troops. With 300 men, he arrived in front of Jamestown on 7 September. Having heard
of Berkeley's recruitment and fearing the worst, the town's much larger (500 man) garrison
fled. Jamestown was now back in loyalist hands (see Map 1).
With the Governor's return and his proclamation conditionally freeing rebel planters' servants,
Bacon forces experienced a decline. Forced to recruit anew, Bacon declared that loyalist
planters servants and slaves willing to fight with him would be freed. Marshalling his six
hundred man, old and new force, and using Berkeley's Spring Green plantation some three
miles from Jamestown as his base for operations, Bacon now laid siege to the town. But
73Running north and south Accomack and Northampton counties form a thin peninsula, the Eastern Shore, bordered

on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and the west by Chesapeake Bay.
74Berry and Moryson's account ("A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion..., 136) reproduces the essential contents of
the oath of support to Bacon.

Berkeley's militia had not been idle: The town defenses had been greatly strengthened. A row
of sharpened stakes fencing in the town, a palisade, had been constructed around the inner
defenses. Bacon, recognizing a frontal assault would be suicidal, ordered his men to dig a
trench and line it with tree branches and trunks alongside and in front of the palisade. To
provide cover for the entrenchment he placed hostages, the wives of loyalist greater planters
(of Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., James Bray, Thomas Ballard, John Page and others) and Indian
captives, in front of the works. Further he carefully exhibited his Indian captives to
demonstrate to Berkeley's supporters inside that he, Bacon, was the true settlers' protector,
the great Indian fighter-killer. To further undermine the confidence of Berkeley's supporters, he
had his men shouted insults from the rebel lines, while asking who really fought the Indians.
Compounding the attempt at demoralization, he had small raiding parties make forays into the
besieged town. His psychological pressure was effective. Doubts in Jamestown emerged:
'Why fight, it was asked, a man dedicated to our defense?' Berkeley's most loyal supporters,
his officers, even began to doubt his conviction and courage: They insisted on an assault on
the rebels to uphold morale. The Governor gave in. On 15 September, the assault was
undertaken, failing as the first line collapsed back upon others as it was met with withering
musket fire. Now real demoralization began to set in, perhaps intensified by shelling with
cannon that Bacon had previously acquired. While the rebels were well supplied from Spring
Green, the loyalists too had well-provisioned themselves and appeared able to hold out. A
stalemate was developing. But Berkeley's officers, fearing mass desertion and even mutiny,
insisted on abandonment of the garrisoned town. The Governor had little choice but to pull
out. He did. On 19 September, Bacon entered Jamestown and that night burned it to the
ground. With his three ships, Berkeley's forces, on the other hand, retired to the Eastern
Shore.
From Indian War to Civil War
It will be recalled that back in August Bacon had assigned a subsidiary force to capture
Berkeley while the latter was camped in Accomack County. Clearly though, his main interest,
as the aborted search for the Susquehannah and assault on the Pamunkey demonstrated,
had remained Indian murder, enslavement and pillage. But as both sides offered freedom to
the dangerous class of servants, or servants and slaves as the case may have been, the
character of the rebellion underwent rapid transformation. First, it is at this point in midSeptember that masses of men and women entered the struggle and, second, a war of
extirpation began to change into a civil war. It would remain this way until the end, that is,
until the loyalists finally triumphed in January of the next year.
The origins of a civil war, a class struggle against the great planters by indentured servants
and slaves, can be marked from that moment at which Bacon began losing control over his
forces. As the siege of Jamestown ended, the rebel leadership had quartered their forces on
the plantations and estates of loyalist gentlemen, particularly those of the greatest planters.
The rebel militias, Bacon soon discovered, were indiscriminately looting and plundering
planter estates. These men, servants, slaves and the poor tenantcy, took, not only what they
needed (barley, oats, other grains, horses, cider) but also wine and edible delicacies; they
destroyed the records of the planters, and burnt their tobacco in the fields or drying in barns;
and they made prisoners of their families (not loyal servants, but wives and children) marching
them off and making them live on the same corn and water they in their servitude were forced
to live on. Bacon attempted to halt these deprecations by enforcing a stricter discipline on his
men. He met with little success. His criticism was that his own troops failed to make due
distinctions (not between need and excess, but, no doubt, between loyalist and rebel great
planters since he had already earlier authorized plundering of loyalist estates). It is easy to

agree with Bacon's assessment and characterize the plundering as deprecations and the
hostage taking as terrorist acts of an army gone amok, but that criticism is articulated from a
great planter perspective by a great planter. It is just as easy, assuming one is able to adopt
the perspective of the dangerous class, to characterize these acts as conscious efforts to
destroy, by wrecking the material foundations (the estates) of, forced, unfree labor.75
Narration (concluded) - to the end of the Rebellion (Jan. 1677)
During the period of his discovery of unauthorized estate plundering, Bacon developed a
"bloody flux" (dysentery) and an uncontrollable lice infestation. He died 26 October from the
dehydration. Thomas Ingram assumed command of what would become disjointed rebel
forces.
Hearing of Bacon's death, Berkeley decided to return to the offensive. Employing combined
forces, that is, coordinated naval and ground forces, he first attempted to drive the rebels from
counties in the southeastern part of the colony. The civil war now began to achieve a definite
shape: Fighting was grim, and occurred regularly. According to the day-by-day account of the
unpublished journal of Robert Morris, captain of the Young Prince - a refitted merchant ship
that had joined Berkeley's naval forces at Newport News following his most recent retirement
to the Eastern Shore, there were "numerous battles, sea-fights, and skirmishes that went on.
The fighting was severe." Significant losses and prisoner captures occurred. "Positions shifted
rapidly as raids and counter-raids were made."76
By mid-November, as his offensive haltingly but successfully unfolded, Berkeley's forces were
able to push the rebels back up the James river, away from the concentration of settlements
and large planter estates and out of York, James City and Charles counties (see Map 1). At
the same time, the Governor's loyalists began to move somewhat further north, again by way
of combined forces, up the York River. The pattern was similar: Wreck rebel militias, regain
territory and push the rebels that regrouped upriver.
By late November, loyalist prospects had considerably improved as among the naval
reinforcements received from England was a 30-gun ship, the Concord, captained by Thomas
Grantham. This reinforcement in particular (the modern equivalent of a US task force of two
aircraft carriers and seven destroyers in the coastal waters of, say, Bangladesh) made
possible a tactically important shift in the loyalist conduct of the war: It was at this time and
into December that the Berkeley's forces began to mount not just combined but joint actions
by using the waterways to disembark men for "a series of small-scale amphibious and
overland assaults on the scattered garrisons of the rebel army." Those garrisons were sited on
great planter lands bordering the major rivers. Thus, rebel forces quartered themselves on
loyalist plantations where the work of class struggle estate-wrecking continued. But rebels,
whose command no longer appears to have been centralized, were not infrequently taken by
surprise as on 10 December at William Howard's plantation.77
Toward the end of December, Grantham left the protection of his ship and moved onshore. He
spent a week attempting to discourage rebels. On 2 January 1677, he and a group of his
officers received the surrender of his old military friend, Thomas Ingram, along with West
Point, a garrisoned settlement upriver at the origins of the York (viz., at the confluences of the
Pamunkey and Mattapow Rivers). Here three hundred rebels submitted and took an oath of
loyalty to Berkeley and the Crown. From here, Grantham and his officers proceeded along the
south bank a few miles to Col. John West's estate which housed the main rebel arsenal and
functioned as its central garrison (see Map 1). On the estate were four hundred armed men,
75Bacon's "due distinctions" cited by Washburn, Ibid, 85.
76Citations Ibid, 86, where Morris' journal account is paraphrased.
77Ibid (citation).

English servants and African slaves, who remained willing and ready to fight. Grantham
offered them, in contradistinction to his instructions, freedom. All but one hundred, the vast
majority of them slaves, agree and were disarmed. Those who refused kept their arms. In
response, Grantham cunningly offered to escort the rump force downstream to any site it
chose. Naively the offer was accepted. When aboard the Concord, these rebels were
overpowered and disarmed.
The surrender of the arsenal and the loss of the main (as well as another) garrison, taken
together with Ingram's defection, broke the back of the rebellion. Upon hearing this news,
smaller, scattered rebel camps began to break up as servants and slaves, demoralized,
returned to their plantations, hoping, as it were, that by deserting rebel forces and returning
they might evade responsibility for their participation in the rebellion. With no principled reason
for supporting either side, an allegiance only to, and rightfully so, their own freedom, the
unfree had, similarly, no reason to bear the consequences of what had begun as a factional
fight among the colony's great planters. Still less did they have any reason to be held culpable
for the destruction of planter property: They had in the past carried the burden of its
production and they would in the near future carry the burden of its reconstruction. Still the
rebellion, though dealt a death blow, was not finished. Rebels of some remaining (three large)
garrisons and encampments, led by men such as Drummond, Lawrence and Arnold, remained
armed and still capable of fighting. But their days were numbered. By the middle, no later than
the end, of January most of these men including the leadership were captured.78
Shifting Loyalties
A specific character of the struggle between the rebel and Royalist forces bears recounting.
From early August onward farmers forming the social base of each side regularly switched
sides in the fighting: On the eastern shore, Bland's recruits on Lattimore's ship surrendered to
the Royalists under Ludwell (largely because, not having eaten for eight hours, they were
hungry) and took a loyalist oath; Bacon's garrison at Jamestown slipped out of town under
cover of darkness, deserted the rebel "cause" and many joined Berkeley as the latter's forces
returned on 7 September; Giles Brent and a large force of roughly one thousand men (not
discussed above), went over to Berkeley, moved against Bacon's army after he took
Jamestown, heard that Bacon had ordered the town burned to the ground, and went back
over to Bacon; the force at West Point, along with Ingram, surrendered to Grantham without a
fight in early January; etc. This behavior was characteristic of the propertied and unpropertied
freemen who formed the social basis of the pre-October rebel and loyalist forces. (It was not
characteristic of servant and slaves fighting with the rebels after middle September.)
Among the motives that can account for the behavior of these farmers we find three that
predominated. The first two were angry opposition to imposts and taxes (as boons to the
wealthy redistributed through the State structure) and resentment against the prerogatives
and monopoly of the great planters.
In the context of tobacco prices that had steadily fallen since 1660, the duties on tobacco and
other taxes (especially those to support the legislative Assembly) were driving the freemen to
the ground. Taxes imposed by the county (to support the church, ministers and a plethora of
rotating, great planter officeholders) fell most heavily in the form of the tithe, a poll tax levied
on every person over a certain age who worked in tobacco production (and hence was income
producing. Planters with slaves or servants were responsible for the tax on each tithable
servile so engaged.). Special levies were decreed to pay for ineffectual fort construction
against Dutch assaults after the last Anglo-Dutch war (1672-1674). The Crown had been at
78Berry and Moryson's ("A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion, 140) place the practical end of the rebellion at about

16 or 17 January.

war with the Dutch over its trade restrictions; yet it was the Dutch who, recall, had offered
colonists the best tobacco prices they had received in a quarter century, within, in other words,
living memory. Such considerations had not been lost on the mass of settlers.
In addition to taxes came the duties on tobacco: The King took his two pennies per pound on
every pound of tobacco carried to England. The colony itself took two pennies for every
hogshead that left Virginia. The Governor received ten shillings per hogshead for tobacco
exported to other colonies (latter transformed into a salary component) and the colony a
penny for the every pound similarly exported. Each of these imposts was levied against
tobacco weight regardless of sales price, and all appeared after 1660. Monopolistic duties,
and not competitively driven overproduction, were largely responsible for the fall in prices paid
the "producer, in particular the small planter. They ate up the small planter's profit. (In 1666,
for example, tobacco prices paid to planters fell to a half penny a pound.) The great planter,
on the other hand, had the accrued credit among the great merchants, had an alternative
source of income as a merchant himself (to the small planters), or had a salaried position with
the colony and access to whatever scam might incidentally enrich him - to insulate him from
the impact of declining prices. To boot, the great planter was further not as likely to be
adversely effected by the price decline, because he had a good deal more tobacco to load at
a wharf and was closer to a natural outlet - a deep river or bay - where English ships could
quickly load and be on their way. The small planter might have to sell his tobacco to a great
planter just to get it loaded; while a great planter, his crop already on the water, had his
tobacco sold before annual prices began to drop, i.e., before it was clear that a given year's
crop would constitute more than the available market could absorb. If, on the other hand, he
was felt certain prices would be below production costs he could, given his resources, simply
withhold this year's production from the market.
From 1660 until the time of the Rebellion and beyond, small planters were systematically
driven into the ranks of the unpropertied freemen as tenants or agricultural waged laborers. By
1676, the term freed men generally meant men "without home or land": By the moment of the
Rebellion a vast, largely undifferentiated mass of small planters and unpropertied freemen
didn't care which side of the Rebellion they stood on, i.e., which group of planters they
supported: They stood with whatever group, loyalists or rebels, that could most convincingly
promise them the chance of improvement in the conditions of their daily life.79
The third motive for the oscillating loyalties of the undifferentiated mass of freemen was fear of
Indian "atrocities" (an unexamined component which included fear of retaliation for settler theft
and atrocities). Pressed hard by taxes and squeezed by customs duties, confronting the great
planters who had engrossed all the better lands for miles around the great rivers, bays and on
the Chesapeake itself, feeling cheated because these lands were unoccupied, uncultivated
and not for sale (or far too expensive to purchase), servants who had recently become free
and whose status (regarding property) was still undecided, ambitious tenants, agricultural
laborers, and small planters all lived on the edge. Those who had had their fill of working for
another man moved onto the frontier beyond the outsettlements. There they confronted the
prospect of Indian encounters. Accordingly, they feared Indians. Here the Indian was not
another victim, expropriated and plundered, but a threatening, potentially murderous
opponent, i.e., an opponent who was quite capable of aggressive self-defense. This fear had
not, of course, been worked through; rather, it, along with all their other anxieties, hostilities
and resentments, was drawn off, canalized and expelled: Outside the human community, and
among the subject Indians largely incapable of sustained self-defense, Indians were the
objects of settler-freemen wrath.
79For the situation of small planters, Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 218-234 (221 for the cited

phrase).

Thus, freemen's aims were neither political nor entailed ideational commitment. They evinced
little regard for the political infighting among the colony's great planter factions, and they
appeared not to covet State positions, emoluments or prerogatives. Though envious, long
experience had taught them that appropriation of the booty accruing to those occupying the
commanding heights of the State was an impossible dream: It was, rather, merely the means
and facade the wealthy used to hold and expand their wealth and power. The mass of settler
colonists were indifferent to the internal affairs of the colonial State played out largely in
struggles between the Crown representative planters and local planter oligarchies. Formed in
the context of extremely exacerbated social division, itself a product of nascent and rapid
English capitalist development, they carried all the emotional burden of that formation. Hated
and despised, they hated and despised; brutalized, they were insensitive, cruel, petty and
mean; robbed of their lands or the opportunity to own land, they were rapacious: Hate-filled,
brutal and rapacious, settler-freemen sought their satisfactions in plunder, enslavement,
murder of Indians, and set their sights on expropriation of Indian lands.

Part IV
Historical and Theoretical Analysis of the Rebellion
Our account of Bacon's Rebellion suggests that entrance of indentured servants and slaves
into the arena of struggle transformed a war against Indians into a civil war against great
planter property, including men as property. Civil war pushed the war against Indians aside. It
lay simmering ready to explode underneath, so to speak, the middling groups triumphant
struggle for democracy. Once it burst onto the historical stage, the reforms of June Assembly
became irrelevant. The civil war, a raging class struggle for freedom by the lowliest and the
unfree, did not occur apart from colonial settler society (as did the Indian war), but was
immanent to it and threatened to transform it in the most thoroughgoing manner.
Servile Revolt
[A Class of Serviles in Revolt]
There are several features of the history of the colony leading up to Bacon's Rebellion and to
the servile revolt within that rebellion that allow us to form a rationally defensible view that
servants and slaves jointly worked out whatever plan of action they attempted to pursue,
acted in concert and rebelled together. First, they had much in common, beginning with similar
horrifying experiences in transAtlantic transport. Crammed together below deck in
extraordinarily tight quarters; breathing dank air with little in the way of nourishment; among
the servants were those who were, similar to slaves, kidnapped, or coerced and hoodwinked,
uprooted with little idea of what the future held. Second, both groups were treated as chattel,
like cattle or horses. Third, the conditions of work and daily life were shared: Both groups
labored the same hard and long hours (dawn to dusk). They shared the same food and
shelter. Both were beaten and mutilated, sometimes indiscriminately, sometimes out mere
whim of a master (mistress), most often to compel more effort in work or to discipline the
disobedient (which more often than not amounted to the same thing). Fourth, planters viewed
both groups similarly. Fearful of both, planters distinguished neither one group from the other,
treating both in the same cruel and barbaric manner. From 1662 onward, the masters had
developed a healthy distrust of both: A history of smaller, county-based revolts in the 1660s
led planters to see their laborers as untrustworthy, dangerous and in need of constant
surveillance. The statutes enacted by planters with a least one very important exception bore
down hard on both groups in an effort to control the minutiae of their daily lives. Those
statutes exhibit in some respects a remarkable "color blindness, since it was not until the
1705 revised code that "Negroes" were barred from owning "white" servants. Presumably the
statute was enacted because at least some Africans had served out their indentures, become
landholders and purchased servants, including "white" ones. In their retrospects on the revolt,
planters did not differentiate the servants from slaves: Berkeley spoke of the revolt of the
"rabble" against "the better sorte [of] people"; in the minutes of the House of Burgesses there
was reference to the "giddy multitude"; and, no loyalist planter, while accusing Bacon of
atheism, duplicity, greed and pride, race baited him by charging he lead "black" men in revolt.
Fifth, English servants could not have failed to clearly have understood their life chances were
dismal: Their lives might be cut short by merciless, brutal treatment, by inadequate food and
shelter, and by disease. Although none of the "rabble" had been purchased as slaves, large
numbers were subject to punitively extended terms of servitude (some terms, those extended
for life, were no different from those of slaves), and living with the knowledge of sharply
contracted life prospects, it would be difficult to practically distinguish their situation from the
permanence of slavery. Finally, it should be recalled that there were Africans amongst the
indentured. In the 1676 Rebellion, the distinction between two groups, one servants and the

other slaves, was, accordingly, largely artificial, an ex post facto construction on events by
historians (ourselves included) of later eras.80
[The "Black" Nation Construct]
By autumn 1676, Sixty percent or more of the slaves in the Virginia settler colony had been
imported from the English Caribbean, and these slaves, having likely developed a common
language (English), also likely provided the internal leadership among Africans, for example,
committing them to the revolt. That common language, as well as shared conditions of work
and daily living, would find them sharing a perspective on their problems and struggles
qualitatively similar to that of English servants. Yet it is highly questionable that in relation to
planters African slaves in the Virginia colony circa 1676 formed as such a community, much
less a stable community of people and hardly a "nation. Yet it is de rigueur among black
nationalists to hold otherwise. To be taken seriously, one must come to grips with Lenin's
concept of nationhood. For this concept, the reality of a nation is to be found in "a historically
constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory,
economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." 81 We
unequivocally add a nation in the bourgeois era is at once statified and has no reality without
popular national awareness: It must be socially constituted as an ideal unity, masses of
"nationals" must imagine it, its unity and reality.82 (This imagined concept arises from a daily
social practice that is historically and necessarily mediated by the printed word - newspapers,
novels, poetry, by political clubs - most famously the Jacobins, or contemporarily by the visual
media - film and television.)
From the double standpoint of national awareness and the concept of nation formulated
above, the notion that a "black nation" underpinned the Virginia settler colony is untenable. An
end run around the concept and the reality it refers us back to can, of course, always be
concocted: If a nation were to consist, for example, in possession of "among its people a
complete range of applied sciences, practical crafts and productive labor, a "black nation"
circa 1676 might have been "self-sufficient and economically whole" (Sakai). But, in historical
fact, it is not possible to speak of a slave economy in 1676. It may be possible to read "applied
sciences" and "practical crafts" as material elements of culture, but belief that African slaves
constituted themselves at once autarkically and as "economically whole" flies in the face of all
the historical evidence to the contrary, viz., their material integration with indentured servants
into plantation agriculture organized by large planters, the colonial production of tobacco for
the English market, etc.
The basic problem is the nationalists' failure to take seriously the reality of social class.
Instead, they define "nation" in racial and, accordingly, non-national terms, and on this basis of
this logic group them into a "nation.83 But if we consider, from the standpoint of class, the
status of slaves, we note that in relation to the planters, they constituted together with
servants (and became conscious of themselves as such) an internally differentiated
80For the 1705 law banning African ownership of "white" servants, 3 Hening 449-50; for the planter attitude toward

serviles after 1660, Timothy Breen, "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 5-6, 7-8. The very
important statutory exception (1662), aimed at Africans, made a child born in Virginia subject to the same status, free
or servile, as the mother. (The statute is cited at n.136, below); for the citation from Berkeley, the Burgesses'
reference and the lack of race baiting, Breen, "Ibid, 3 (and 18 n.2), 10, 11.
81J.V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question. 8. The concept was articulated by Stalin - with, to be sure, Lenin
intently peering over his shoulder to make sure he understood what he wrote - as the document that provided him
with the credentials to enter the governing circles of the party.
82Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 5-6; for ideality,
see "Notes on an Epistemology and Historical Ontology Underpinning Concepts of Race and Class, below.
83Harry Chang, "Critique of the Black Nation Thesis, 11.

oppressed class of serviles, but hardly a people. Nor did African slaves attempt to establish for
themselves a separate nation. When did slaves ever seek to defend a national territory? On
the one side, the majority of slaves were imported from the West Indies. These men and
women spoke English adequate to the practical tasks of forming linguistically based relations
with servants in production. Such, in fact, was a condition of their common revolt. (On the
other side, there would have still been the difficulty of overcoming the liabilities of different, still
living, African languages, and of similarly still living cultural differences, among the balance of
the slaves who may have not as yet assimilated the English language. The best bet is these
slaves had not even been involved in the revolt). Thus, in the first place, one group of slaves,
the larger, was linguistically integrated with servants (and concomitantly they were also
materially integrated from the perspective of production-based culture of daily life). In other
words, they were not "nationally" distinctive. In the second place, if those slaves brought
directly from the west coast of Africa had not been fully assimilated, it was because they were
still distinctively African peoples: The Ashante, Ibo, Mandingo or Kongo, for example, did not
speak a common language nor did they have common cultural characteristics (anymore than,
say, the Dutch and English had common cultural characteristics): It is certain this was know to
planters who, in their social practice as commodities purchasers did not indiscriminately, i.e.,
racially, subsume slaves as "blacks" but identified and purchased them on the basis of
differences in bodily appearance and ethnically stereotypical characteristics. In the third place,
slaves, some 2,000-2,800 people (of which perhaps six of seven were economically
productive), did not have the demographic density to successfully sustain an agricultural
economy nor to hold a common territory in what clearly would have become a hostile world.
Finally, the short slave residence in any part of British American had failed to significantly
transform slaves by melding them into a distinctive national grouping, "distinctive" in the
active, practically efficacious sense of consciously different from and opposed to other
"national" groupings, a community of "nationals" who shared a common territory, economy,
language and culture. To repeat, slaves, as all evidence indicates, were materially integrated
with the much more numerous indentured servants in the laboring practices of large-scale
tobacco production.84
84For the concept of a "black" "nation" present and operative in the civil war stage of the rebellion, see J. Sakai, The

Mythology of the White Proletariat, 9. We also dispute the specifically Trotskyist notion that a nation is conditional on
the historical emergence of "a system of commodity production and circulation. This perspective identifies a single
historical form, the national State of the bourgeois era, with nationhood throughout history. Accordingly, to
characterize non-Statist cultures resting on precapitalist foundations as nations, such as a multitude of Indians
nations that thrived before and throughout the colonial and US history of the settlement of North America, would be
meaningless on this analysis. For the Trotskyist perspective, R.S. Fraser, "For the Materialist Conception of the Negro
Struggle. It might be noted that the only times black Americans as a group ever consciously posed in their practice
the question of whether they would commit to a separate nation, in the Reconstruction aftermath of the American Civil
War and in the 1950s-1960s Civil Rights movement, their resounding answer in both instances was to fully opt for
integration into the really existing American nation.
For the figure on slaves imported from the West Indies, Craven, White, Red, and Black, 97; for calculations on the
numbers of slaves present in the colony circa 1676, Kolchin (American Slavery, 11) gives a figure of 7% of the total
population for 1680; a similar figure, roughly 2,800 people, is offered by Craven, Ibid, 98; Allen (Ibid, 2 :211, 218)
suggests that there were 2,000 African slaves in Virginia in 1676, and, based upon a calculation of yearly average
importations to the end of the century, roughly 720 of them came directly from West Africa. Morgan (Ibid, 421-422)
calculates two figures on the basis of single county data, the more representative county yielding the number 2,510
tithables (taxable because working) for 1674. A generalization for the colony based on Morgan (Ibid, 306, 413) would
put the total number of slaves in 1674 at 2,700. Timothy Breen ("Ibid, 22 n.63) suggests a figure of 2,500 in autumn
1676 of which may 900-1,000 where active in the Rebellion; for planter recognition of ethnic diversity among
"Africans" in purchasing practice, Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South
Carolina, 13; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 237; Barbara Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History" in J.
Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (eds.), Region, Race, and Reconstruction, 144-145; and Robin
Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 22.

[False Categories of "Black" and "White"]

Because there were neither "blacks" nor "whites, there was no "black-white" unity in the
fighting. The struggle was carried out by English (and African) servants and African slaves,
who fought together, first, because they lived and worked together and, second, because
under the conditions of daily life in the colonies the prospects of freedom had been only a little
better than nil for one group and purely and simply nonexistent for the other. In the course of
the Rebellion, together they became conscious of themselves as such and thereby formed
themselves into a class, an oppressed class of serviles fighting for their freedom against
planters.
Servants, however, were not "white" (they were Christian or English) and the slaves were not
"black" (they were heathens or Africans). This was crucial since the racial categories of "white"
and "black" both as reflective and particularly as barbaric common sense categories, i.e., as
the common currency of daily thought and speech, had not yet come into existence: Of
course, "Negro, probably adapted from the Portuguese (or Spanish) negro, meant "black,
but the contrast was between heathens and Christians, perhaps (although altogether less
likely) between African and English, but not between "black" and "white. In other words,
though perhaps often disparaging, the difference was cultural and ethnic or religious, and did
not suggest a (racial) doctrine of innate, natural superiority of one group over another.
Contemporaries recognized the novelty of the concept of "whiteness. Allen, among others,
cites Morgan Godwyn, an Anglican minister who first served in Virginia (Marston parish) in the
late 1660s. Godwyn, in publishing some of his observations on the English Americas (The
Negro and Indians Advocate...) in London in 1680, explicitly noted for his readers that in
Barbados, "the general name for Europeans" was "white. In Virginia, the term "white" had yet
to come into currency. Among Barbados planters, it had. (Barbados planters were the earliest
English colonists to employ African labor in lifetime, hereditary servitude, and to attempt to
construct a system of racial oppression in which "white" came to designate a free English
settler buffer stratum opposed to African slaves.)
Racial perceptions, moreover, did not organize the awareness and actions among the earliest
English adventurers in the "New World": In or near present day Panama, late in the sixteenth
century Francis Drake encountered and then allied with a large community, some three
thousand, of native Indians and black maroons against the Spanish. The entire affair was
noteworthy for the apparent utter lack of English racism in relation to African ex-slaves.
Subsequently Drake and his crews engaged in plunder seeking to attack coastal Spanish
fortifications and actually liberated Spanish slaves.
Now, whether "mute, so to speak, racial distinctions operated precognitively in Virginia settler
awareness is altogether dubious, and it is not demonstrable. For the colonizing and enslaving
merchants and planters, Africans were first and foremost heathens, nonbelievers, "Moors.
This status was originally elicited as a justification for enslavement. To be sure, settlers,
especially those belonging to the middling groups such as the invading army of Puritans who
occupied the lands north of Virginia, i.e., "New" England, designated Africans as "black" in a
pejorative and moralistic (and not a racial) manner: There "black, as applied to Africans,
suggested "filth, "dirt, and "lustful, "lascivious" and even "bestial"; similarly, the same social
groups took Africans, "Negroes, to be "uncivilized" or "savage, and finally, they and Indians
as well were deemed "heathen" as opposed to Christian. Among middling Puritan groups (as
well as among religiously homogeneous Catholic populations), these emotive concepts and
Right down to the 1808 end of the slave trade to the United States, merchants advertised in newspapers the sale of
Africans, not as such or as blacks or Negroes, but by ethnic reference and geographical region. Thompson,
Plantation Societies, Race relations, and the South, 101.

the attitude they entailed went hand in glove with a conscious effort to purge awareness of
sexuality by linking emotionally revulsive outward appearance to sexual activity. A "byproduct"
but necessary outcome of sexual suppression might well have been, among Puritans or
religiously animated Catholic populations, the cultivation of racial sentiment.85
["Race" and English Racism]
Among Europeans themselves (as opposed to settler colonists), the concept of "race" itself
may have been a product of reflections on accounts that narrated initial encounters with the
natives of the Americas. Gentry gentlemen, merchants, ship captains and military adventurers
were all conscious of themselves as peoples ruled by divinely sanctioned lawgivers, by kings.
The State would have, of course, neatly fused all three (King, Law and God). So the
Portuguese, Spanish and English were all dumbfounded to "discover" peoples existing without
"King, Law or God, peoples and societies without a State. From this perspective, native
peoples would have appeared as "savages" lacking culture and morality who lived in a "wild,
uncivilized "state of nature. Such intuitions would have excited suppressed fears as well as
unfulfilled longings; and, such intuitions, of course, neatly dovetailed with the very meaning of
"race" as a historically formed, changing ensemble of social meanings that constitute an
imaginary social relationship with a degraded Other.86
With the Spanish conquerors, for example, Clastres, following Lvi-Strauss, relates, "les
Indiens des Isles se demandaient si les Espagnols nouveau venue taient des dieux ou des
hommes, tandis que les Blancs s'interrogeaient sur la nature humaine ou animale des
indignes." Or again, among the English, William Petty, reflecting on his countrymen's native
encounters in North America, wrote the first dissertation, The Scale of Creatures (1676),
putting forth a theory of a global hierarchy of races in which "savages" (viz., Indians) formed a
"stage" between men and animals.87
It is simply mistaken to assume racial attitudes were characteristic of "Englishmen, i.e., to
presuppose a national culture hegemonized by a unified ruling class and diffused among all
classes of society. This is the position taken by Winthrop Jordan in his renowned White over
Black. The mistake is common, so consider it in some detail. Jordan rests his argument on the
collapse of different, and even antagonistic classes into a retrospectively projected nation. The
occlusion of the differences in consciousness and culture of the various groups that formed
85For English rationalizations of slavery under the rubric of Christianity, Thompson, Ibid, 94, 209, 288-289, 236. Of

course, if baptized Christian this legitimization collapsed. The settler colonist planters would legislatively circumvent
the difficulty. See "Legal Sanction of Racial Slavery, below; for Godwyn, Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2:
191, 351 n39; for Drake, Blackburn, Ibid, 139-140, and Morgan, Ibid, 13, 17, 33-34.
For sexual repression, Blackburn (Ibid, 289) quotes a French Dominican priest, Father du Terre as follows: "One
cannot have better verification of the saying that love is blind than the unregulated passion of some of our French who
love the Negresses despite the blackness of their faces, which renders them hideous, and the unbearable odour
which they exhale, which ought in my opinion to extinguish the fire of their criminal lust.
86See "The Meaning of 'Race' and its Relation to Class, below.
87"The island Indians wondered whether the Spanish newcomers were gods or men, while the whites questioned
whether the natives were animal or human. Pierre Clastres, "De l'ethnocide, 103; for the encounter with native of the
Americas, "Ibid, and Blackburn, Ibid, 15. In his The Racial Contract (New York, 1997), 64-68, Charles W. Mills
demonstrates that the great bourgeois philosophers of the early modern era, specifically Hobbes and Locke, thought
the "state of nature" not only as a theoretical construct whose meaning entailed a pre-political sphere of life in which
the laws and conventions of daily life do not prevail, but thought this sphere on a model of the imagined real life of the
natives of the Americas as constructed on the basis of travelers' reports.
For men like Petty, the articulation of a racial perspective presupposed the destruction of the once hegemonic
Christian vision of men all identically descended from the same progenitor. The destruction was largely the work of
late sixteenth and seventeenth century modern physical science (here one thinks particularly of Alexandre Koyr's
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe).
In the Americas, however, the concepts of "white" and "black" "races" were distinctively a product of ruling class
strategy to control rebellious, servile labor in the context of plantation agriculture.

English society follows. But to make his perspective on the proto-racist attitudes of
Englishmen stick, he must, for example, in the case of the Virginia settler colony
demonstrate that those attitudes characteristic primarily in the seventeenth century of Puritan
middling groups were socially diffused and culturally generalized, reaching to the masses of
indentures whose emigration was either voluntary or was elicited forcibly by kidnapping or
trickery. He does not; rather, he merely takes this generalization in the form of a national
culture for granted, and when he doesn't he simply asserts it. Thus, he states, there "was
every reason for Englishmen to fuse the various attributes they found in Africans. During the
first century of English contract with Africa, Protestant Christianity was an important element in
English patriotism; especially during the struggle against Spain the Elizabethan's special
Christianity was interwoven into his conception of his own nationality... Nonsense. With the
exception of Shakespeare (who arguably produced his plays in part with an eye to the "riff
raff" who filled the pits in front of his stages), all of Jordan's literary sources are men who
would never have dreamed to write for any but the courtly, to flatter the Queen, etc. For them,
the lower orders were a people apart - these literary figures didn't have a conception of
"nation" to begin with, while their views never reached those at the bottom who later who
made up the majority of emigrating servants. (Servants, at any rate, did not spend their
"leisure" hours, assuming they were literate, reading Topsell.) The major source Jordan relies
on is travelers' accounts, that is, the accounts of men who were merchants, traders and ships'
captains with an occasional gentlemanly courtier thrown in. As Puritans, republicans and
bourgeois, the sons and grandsons of the bulk of the men Jordan cites may have been
bearers of an English national culture, but they themselves were adventurers (Hakluyts
excepted, who never "voyaged" in the first place) whose "nationalism" went little further than
fawning over and seeking to penetrate the aristocratic circles surrounding Elizabeth.88
Historically, the generalization of a national culture to masses of men and women is based on
compulsory institutions of the military and education. That is, by and large nations, which
mobilize the energies of the laboring masses, are historical constructs of the bourgeois era. A
compact territory lorded over by ruling class at whose summit stood a monarch does not a
nation make, nor do hegemonic ruling classes impress their armies or navies, as the case
may be: Patriotic enlistment by masses of men is a moment of the effective meaning and
reality of nationalism. Ruling class unity, the first precondition of that national culture as it
actually came into being, would not be formed in England until after 1689. Its diffusion among
masses of laboring men would not take shape until its incorporation into developing industrial
working class movement, in other words, not before the end of the eighteenth century.
If nothing else the highly emotive attitudes revealed in the aforementioned imputed
characteristics of African slaves were particularly characteristic of Puritans and Presbyters in
the Stuart and Republican eras. It is likely these attitudes were decidedly crucial for the later
development of racial beliefs and white supremacist attitudes. But the Puritanism of history
constituted an achieved awareness that coalesced the middling groups of English society, the
gentry, yeoman freeholders, master craftsmen and merchants, as a revolutionary force
against Stuart kingship. Moreover, it is also well-known that the lowest orders of English
society, and particularly those who came to Virginia as indentured servants and remained
trapped in that status, were not particularly "godly. (They also were not, to be sure, Puritans.)
Nor were the largely Royalist great planters particularly godly. To boot, religious practices in
Virginia were not Puritan: Besides their hierarchical character, they were largely Anglican,

88Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1-43; for the imputed characteristics

enumerated here, Ibid and also Kolchin, Ibid, 14-15; for the citation, Jordan, Ibid, 24.

ceremonial, liturgical and ritualistic. Thus, racial concepts could not have been not smuggled
into Virginia by way of the religious services of the godly.89
So we come back to where we started: The attitudes of great and small planters or, for that
matter, the freemen as a whole, were (and are for this argument) simply irrelevant. For
underneath the whole rotten nascently Statist and proto-capitalist edifice of the settler colony,
servants and slaves had this much in common, namely, shared work and similar conditions of
daily life, and virtually nonexistent prospects for freedom. At this level of social practice, "race"
too was irrelevant. If the "unity" of servants and slaves was "tactical" (perhaps another set of
"mute" categories?), it was enough to fight together in a struggle against these conditions of
life and unfolding life-trajectories, i.e., in a struggle for freedom against the great planters.
Alternative History
In a purely counterhistorical, counterfactual sense, what outcome could have been expected
had servile groups emerged victorious?
In the first place, rebel planter leadership would have been swept aside. A victory of over
Berkeley and other Crown loyalists not only would have left all great planter estates, including
those of the rebel leadership, open to servile destruction - perhaps in the form of burning and
pillaging, but might also led to a call for division of the estates among the party of serviles.
In the second place, there would have been further fighting. The Crown's three commissioners
(Sir John Berry, Maj. Francis Moryson and Governor-appointee Herbert Jeffreys) who arrived
in the colony in early February 1677 came with an armed force of some thirteen hundred and
fifty English soldiers of which maybe one thousand were unseasoned, "raw" troops. This body
was sent, unnecessarily as it turned out, to suppress the Rebellion. Renewed fighting would
have split the servants. Among some, it is likely Bacon's most radical perspective would have
been recalled: Bacon, in response an interrogator's claim of the futility of revolt in the face of
Crown forces, responded that five hundred men alone could effectively defeat a force four
times as large in a prolonged guerilla-styled fight. He hoped to generalize the Rebellion by
extending the revolt to the tiny colonies of Maryland and North Carolina. And he believed
Dutch or French merchants in place of their English counterparts would willingly provide
supplies in trade with rebels. Taking this position would have thrust those advocating it back
into the arms of the old planter-rebel leadership. Amongst these servants, the perspective of a
division of the great estates would have disappeared. If another, more revolutionary
perspective was to emerge, these servants would have been compelled either to return to
their former comrades or to take up arms along with their planter leaders against them. If they
fought against their old comrades, they would have found themselves in tacit alliance with the
recently disembarked English counterrevolution. Former rebel planter leaders, in the face of a
call for a division of the estates, would have recognized they had gone too far and rejoined
Crown forces. If this counterrevolutionary alliance destroyed the renewed Rebellion, these
servants would have been forced back into a perhaps more horrible servitude (that or shot).90
Another revolutionary perspective, based on recognition of the necessity of Indian allies, could
have also emerged. Such a perspective was not inconceivable: In the Americas, the lived
89For middling groups in the era of the English Civil War, see our Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War.; for

the opposition of the lowly and the middling (the "godly householder"), Ibid.
In 1642, Governor Berkeley had drawn up a law that "required 'all non-conformists ... to depart the colony with all
conveniency.'" "Nonconformist" was historically (i.e., before the outbreak of the Civil War) the name Royalists
(inaccurately) gave Puritans. Later, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects that had formed during the English Civil War
would also be discouraged from immigrating. One result was the virtual elimination of Puritan congregations from
Virginia; another, in 1658, was the Virginia legislature's move to ban Quakers. Fischer, Ibid, 234; for the formalist
character of Virginia religious practices, Ibid, 233.
90For the perspective Bacon achieved at the end of his life, Allen, Ibid, 2: 215.

experience of enormous oppression had already provided an embryonic precedent for this
type of alliance. As we have already alluded to, during the last decades of the sixteen century
a society of some 3,000 fugitive ex-slaves and assimilated local natives, called Cimarrons,
had successfully thrown off the yolk of Spanish oppression and exploitation in Panama. Had
Indian allies been found, and they obviously would have to be among groups further afield and
larger than those "friendly" Indians tied to the loyalist planter elite, it is more than merely
possible a guerilla war of attrition could have defeated the English troops. Over time, not more
than a year, a largely untrained force harassed by its enemy and fighting in heavily forested,
unfamiliar terrain would have become demoralized and began to dissolve even without a
single set battle. Charles would have faced the prospective of throwing more troops into the
fray, and, to do so without the capacity to finance an expeditionary force would have entailed
calling a new Parliament into session. Either this, or he would have to have abandoned the
colony altogether. Meanwhile the French, and perhaps the Dutch, would have make overtures
to the revolutionaries. They might have also attempted to establish their own trading outposts
in what might well by now be retrospectively known as the former English colony of Virginia. A
European war would have hung in the balance. Such a war would have distracted the English
Crown from its concern with the Virginia colony. Either way (Charles withdraws from the
colony, or he goes to Parliament, makes certain concessions, and gets another expeditionary
force), the newly free, former serviles, as well as native peoples, would have in an objective
historical sense had a lengthy breathing space to regroup.
So had serviles in their practice committed to alliance with native peoples, there would have
been two likely final outcomes. Either this freepeople would have settled down to selfsufficient family farming, likely intermingled with scattered Indian groups and perhaps
communal in character (depending in part on the length of the African Caribbean exile and the
pre-American traditions of the Africans involved), or, over a long period of time, they would
have been completely absorbed into the native populations with which they had allied. In the
first case, they would have formed a buffer for native groups against further English attempts
at colonization. In the second case, they would have immensely strengthened Indian
opposition to any such effort. In either case, not only would the face of North America have
been changed forever (for example, the "New" England settler colony's expansion might have
been severely curtailed, and conceivably a viable native population might still exist and
occupy a portion of the continent today), and a new "race" of people may have emerged from
their co-settlement and mutual penetration as well.
Race as a Social Category
In the Virginia settler colony, for the lowliest servants race was not "factual" or "objectively
given. For them, skin color was largely irrelevant, racial meaning did not organize their
experience. Race is a historically constructed, social category. There is nothing "natural" about
it. Plantation agriculture has historically been a "contact" situation: Therein, one ethnically
distinct people, encountering another such people for the first time, seeks to exploit the labor
of this other people for production of marketable staple crops. In the crucible of labor
regimentation new "races" have come into being.91
In the "Introduction" to his The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Alexander Saxton states
that there is something "factual" about skin color: In a polemical aside he asserts the
necessity of "distinguish[ing] between race as an objectively visible fact and racism as an
ideological construct.92 Saxton has, perhaps, failed to think through the meaning and
significance of basic concepts utilized in his work. How so? Let us approach this obliquely by
91Thompson, Ibid., 62-63, 86-87, 115-117, 151, 219.
92Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 20 n31. Emphasis in original.

way of an analogy. Imagine Professor Saxton sitting in a chair in his office in a humanities
building at the University of California - Los Angeles as he composed those lines. He is with
some difficulty probing himself for the precise formulation of those words. He looks up and
gazes out his window. It is a sunny autumn day, and his thought begins to wander. Over to the
left of his perceptual field he sees two lone trees, which have somehow been preserved on
this campus. He identifies one as a pacific Douglas fir, the other as a magnificent yellow
(sugar) pine. Their luscious brown needles form a lovely carpet about each tree. Professor
Saxton would, no doubt, say that the trees are "objectively visible fact[s]" whereas the
attitudinal assessment shaping his gaze is a[n] ...[aesthetic] construct. Reflectively,
Professor Saxton is able to disengage the perceptual act of seeing, this "attitude, from the
object seen, the trees. It should be noted, however, in the original act (of seeing) itself there
was no such distinction. What Professor Saxton does not recognize is twofold: First, this
distinction is not transparent to the act of perceptual seeing, and hence it is not an
"observation" valid at all times and places. Rather the distinction (between objectively visible
facts and an aesthetic attitude) is a reflective achievement, one, moreover, that is the product
of a long historical process of abstraction, a process in which this attitude has become
detached from social practice. Because the social practice has disappeared, the internal
connection between an attitude and the form in which objects appear is occluded. Second, he
has seen two distinct objects, two kinds of trees, but he has only been able to identify them in
their distinctiveness to the extent that in the first place each is seen as a tree. What is it that
makes both trees? "Treeness"? If so, when did Professor Saxton see, or has he ever seen,
"treeness"? This is a philosophical problem.
The problem can initially be understood by way of contrast. The petty timber capitalists who
one hundred and twenty years ago cleared a tract for harvesting (perhaps in the same spot
the UCLA campus now stands) viewed a two hundred year old strand of trees and
immediately saw logs and wood, viz., raw material for, e.g., building cabins, making furniture,
etc. Two hundred years earlier, native agriculturalists viewed the same (young) grove of trees
and chills ran down their spines. The spirits cried out. (We would say the wind howled through
the trees.) They feared slashing and burning a few saplings would disturb and anger the forest
spirits. They chanted a prayer to these spirits to appease their anger. In each case, the same
grove of trees may have been "objectively visible" (well the grove has been reduced to two
trees in Saxton's case), yet the meaning and significance of the trees was qualitatively
different. Because the social practices of logging and slashing and burning were in the two
latter cases embedded in the seeing of both groups, it is clear the objectively visibility of wood
or a sacred grove were immanent to the very acts of seeing. In other words, embedded in
each perceptual act of trees are significations, aesthetic, capitalist-utilitarian and animistic,
that are incarnate in or immanent to each. These senses (significations) are socio-historical
products, meanings (idealities), whose ontological status is ideal (non-spatial yet temporal as
opposed to "real, spatial and temporal), that live in, as it were, or are embodied in those
products and both organize our understanding of and practically orient us to them. In
particular, the aesthetic and capitalist-utilitarian senses are only possible in a culture that is
thoroughly scientized.93
How is it, though, that a category, such as tree or more to the point race, which is "objectively
visible" can have a status that is socio-historical? The obvious answer is, like the nature that
surrounds us, what appears "objective, and Saxton's sense here is clearly "ontologically real
and unchanging, is historically constituted. Saxton has looked out his window and seen two
distinct objects, yet he has immediately apprehended and grasped them as instances of a
"tree. He also gazed to the far right of his perceptual field and saw a concrete structure, a
93See the second critique in our Community and Capital.

building. Actually he saw just one side of this rather large structure, but immediately identified
it as a building (on reflection, perhaps the humanities library). Natural and humanly
constructed phenomena appear either as a multiplicity (the trees), or if singular (the building)
in single perspective. In the latter case, we apperceive the other sides (i.e., anticipate their
immediate perceptual presence as they might appear from appropriate perspectives. Living
through the meaningful unity of these perceptions and apperceptions and their objects,
whether of sensuous things, other persons, events, idealities, internal states, etc., is what we
call "experience.) In either case, it is the concept, that is, a meaning (sense or signification),
that precognitively or latently operates in perception, i.e., renders experience (perception,
feeling) intelligible and sensuously immediate (non-reflective, unified and whole). Transmitted
ontogenetically in the child's acquisition of language, these meanings, as the meanings
designating novel objects or experiences, are constituted in and through mediately immediate
(i.e., "spontaneous") speech in the daily practice of groups of people. 94 Produced in this
manner, the constitution of meaning is social and historical. Such is the philosophical
problem.95
Thus, it is that we say race is a social and historical category. There is nothing "natural" about
it. For the lowliest English among the servants skin color was largely irrelevant, racial
meaning did not organize their experience of African slaves.
Labor Exploitation and Racial Oppression
After 1450, everywhere Europeans went, came into contact with, and exploited the labor of
ethnically distinct peoples with whom they were culturally incommensurate, notions of race
sprang up. By 1700, European colonists anticipatorily carried these concepts along with them.
In situations where colonization was not only intended but effectively practiced in the form of
plantation agriculture, servile labor was imported, and new "races" were actually formed.
Clearly, the concept of "whiteness" did not appear sui generis in Virginia. It had been in use in
other English settler colonies, Barbados in particular, prior to its appearance further north. In
the West Indies as a whole, the early history of contact was one marked by confrontation
between peoples of differing ethnic and cultural backgrounds in which races, brought
together violently through the actions of merchants and settler colonists seeking to create and
then coerce unfree labor, were actually born. In the West Indies, it was the planter intention to
have whites form a buffer stratum against slave rebellion. But because of the fragility of this
stratum, viz., its thinness, it appears that whites (i.e., English settlers) did not form, or alone
they were incapable of forming, a buffer stratum that made possible a stable system of social
relations based on racial oppression. Such social relations appear and achieve
systematization if one group dominates another, a domination assured by laws from above
and custom (usage, habit) from below, to the extent that the lowliest of the superordinate
group is always privileged (institutionally and in the practice of daily life) in relation to the even
the mightiest of the subordinate group.96
94Of course, an object or a series of perceptually present objects (as well as, say, a inner surge of objects) may be

unidentifiable, i.e., without meaning. In such cases, we say we are unable "to make sense" out of what we see (or
feel), we are bewildered, frightened, etc.
95Barbara Fields ("Ideology and Race in American History") makes an unsurpassed case for the historical character
of the concept of race on socio-historical grounds. She argues that ideas about race or the 'physiological fact' of color
are contextually and, as she states, "ideologically" derived, i.e., are generated in concrete social contexts and are
conceptually mediated. (For telling examples, see "Ibid, 144-145, 146.)
Here we have attempted to exhibit the historicity of concepts (race included) as such on philosophical grounds.
Epistemologically, this claim, of course, appears contradictory. We have developed the foundations for this claim in an
epistemologically consistent and coherent manner in an unpublished essay entitled "On Truth" (1980).
96For "contact" situations, Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South, 115-117.

In the Americas, the English Crowns Lords of Trade and Plantations definitely played a role in
generalizing the concept of "whiteness" with its implicit, but strongly racial connotations. The
Lords of Trade were anxious to secure the protection for Crown revenues generated by
imposts: They seemed to have thought this was a social problem that could be resolved
through insertion of a buffer zone in the form of a "white" militia between planters and slaves,
who, because (as the Lords recognized) they were so heavily exploited, were also potentially
rebellious. There is another reason for thinking the concept of "whiteness" was in use in the
West Indies prior to generalized usage in the Virginia settler colony, and for thinking that it did
not indicate a system of social relations based on racial oppression in which "whites" alone
were central. It appears that English reform preachers who "toured, if you will, the West
Indies after either living in or passing through British North America found the concept strange,
strange enough at least to explicate its sense for their readerships back home.97
The reason for the failure of a "white" buffer stratum to emerge in the West Indies lay largely
in settler flight. By 1650 in Barbados, in particular, genuinely big "great" planters, men who
"owned" two hundred or more chattels, operated on a scale far larger than Chesapeake Bay
planters. They were able to expropriate natives and appropriate and monopolize nearly all the
land in a territory so tiny that the Eastern Shore alone has three and half times its land mass.
As a consequence, those English servants who survived similar, perhaps worse, grueling
treatment at the hands of "their" masters long enough to become free men left the island for
places, such as Virginia, where land, it was thought, was more readily available. Freed
English bond servants did remain in Barbados, but their numbers were small. Unlike the
Virginia colony where freemen in 1676 were about numerically equal to servants, and English
freemen and servants combined outnumbered African slaves by a factor of approximately five
to one (a ratio that would equalize as slavery became pervasive), in Barbados in 1676 slaves
outnumbered all Englishmen by a ratio of three to two. This ratio would also change, that is,
the weight of slavery would increase so dramatically that by 1712 African slaves outnumbered
"white" freemen (planters included) by a ratio of nearly three and a half to one. In other words,
the "white" population in Barbados was never numerically large enough to form a buffer
stratum. It was for this reason that the Lords of Trade and Plantations were so concerned that
the island colony maintain an adequate militia; and it was for this reason, and not just the fear
of piracy, that planters continually militated for a strong English naval presence in the
Caribbean.98
In Barbados and Jamaica, the concept of "whiteness" largely described the planters. It did not
have the broad, inclusive mainland meaning for which "whites" were set against "blacks" in a
highly racialized society (and in which class has disappeared as a central moment of
consciousness among the non-slave masses.) The same bigotry and antipathy that ruling
classes everywhere feel toward the ethnically different groups they compel to labor for them
guided these planters in relation to "their" slaves. Yet this bigotry and antipathy could not
create a "white" middle stratum ex nihilo. A color line did indeed exist, but it was blurred. It was
This concept of racial oppression has been elaborated by Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, V. 1.
Racial Oppression and Social Control.
97For the reform ministers, Allen, Ibid, 2: 191, 351 n.39, and the discussion of Morgan Godwyn in the subsection
"False Categories of 'Black' and 'White'," above.
98For the great planters of Barbados and their land monopoly, Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 47-48, 59; for
exploitation of English servants, Ibid, 65, 72; for the desertion of the island by these servants, Ibid, 72, 88, 96; for the
numerical relation of freemen to servants in Virginia, see n. 53, above; for the corresponding ratios in Barbados,
Dunn, Ibid, 87 (Table 4); for the militia concern, Ibid, 86-87, 135. The problem of "white" migration was a problem for
planters of the entire English Caribbean. Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery, 24) states that, "between 1672 and
1727 the white men in Nevis decreased by more than three-fifths; the black population more than doubled. Between
1672 and 1727 the white males of Montserrat declined by more than two-thirds, in the same period the black
population increased more than eleven times."

"free coloreds" who largely formed an unstable intermediate buffer stratum. Somewhat
deracialized, the consequence was an intensively divided society that was organized primarily
along class lines in which slaves were directly pitted against "their" planter masters. This can
be seen in the series of revolts in both Barbados (four major ones between 1675 and 1701)
and Jamaica (five between 1713 and 1824) that rocked both islands on numerous occasions
from 1655 onward. In the West Indies, planters never were unable to construct a stable
racially oppressive system of social relations based on "whites" because the agency for
practical formation of such social relations did not exist in sufficient numbers to make it viable.
Before 1840, full civil rights had been achieved in both island countries: "Free coloreds" and
serviles were able over the course of more than a century of struggle to compel the
slaveowners to give up legally sanctioned racial oppression.99
Puritanism and Race
If specific pejorative and moralistic views toward African "blackness" bore heavily on the
development of notions of "race, then the gentlemen planters of the Virginia colony were not
their bearers. These views rested on and were entangled with a complex of attitudes that, in
England at roughly mid-century, belonged specifically to the middling groups (capitalist
farmers, urban artisans and merchants) and the smaller gentry of country gentleman (and
nonconformist clergy) who were its social bearers. That complex, dialectically elaborated on
the foundations of the daily practice of the "godly" and governing their practice by
comprehending and explaining the world in which they lived and acted, turned on notions such
as an unshakable belief in a covenanted elect - a covenant grasped on the model of economic
categories of the emerging commercial society; affirmation of the primacy of each individual's
Scriptural understanding over institutionally sanctioned doctrinal interpretation; antiCatholicism and anti-papalism; support for reformation on the continent (which usually meant
support for anti-Spanish policies); affirmation of Parliamentary liberties, nonconformity within
the Church of England and the practice of "lived religion" through the agency of the household
and a newly forming modern, nuclear family. Let us call this complex of attitudes
Puritanism.100
That complex of attitudes was characteristic of the founders, elders within, and the mass of
settlers peopling the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north. It was too often, and falsely,
assimilated to the great planters who made up the nascent ruling class of the colony of
Virginia. The latter had nearly to a man fought on the other side in the English Civil War. They
fiercely defended the Crown, submitted in their specifically religious beliefs to the King and
Anglican clergy, championed the established national Church with its Laudian emphasis
(under the Stuarts) on ceremonial trappings, upheld the primacy of King over Parliament, and
maintained a traditional, aristocratic household (in contradistinction to the "godly" whose
99For "normal" development of planter attitudes of superiority, Thompson, Ibid, 116, 132-135, 210; for slave plots and

conspiracies, Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2: 224-225; for the specific socio-historical reasons why a
"white" buffer stratum never emerged in the English West Indies, Ibid, 2: 226-238. With reference to Jamaica, Eric
Williams (Ibid, 25) states "there could be only two classes in such a society, wealthy planters and oppressed slaves."
100Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War, 12.
We shall hereafter distinguish what in England circa 1640 were two separate tendencies, Puritanism and the "godly":
Though we have developed the distinction more fully elsewhere, this much should be noted: "'Nonconformity' is a
generic term, while 'puritan' refers to nonconforming, nonseparatist members of the Church of England [who sought to
capture control of this institution from within] and "separatists" to the nonconformists outside the Church [who refused
to recognize its authority]. Significantly these terms for the most part also contain a social class 'correlate': 'Puritan'
refers exclusively to the gentry (and the educated clergy), "godly" to the nonconforming, separatist and nonseparatist
'middling sorts of people' (merchants, yeomen and craftsmen and the 'mere' preachers), and 'sectarian' to the
nonconforming, separatist 'lower' classes (who consciously chose to function without licensed clerics), particularly ...
to the apprentices of London." Ibid, 11.

bourgeois, nuclear families in England had formed the institutional foundations of the practical
forms, conventicles, gaddings and congregations, from which opposition to the old unitary
order of State and Church sprang).101
Unlike the early modern, bourgeois family in which there was a clear distinction between the
nuclear unit (since it was organized, among other things, to preserve capital accumulation)
and the household which included servants and apprentices (who clearly were not heirs to the
"householder's" accumulation, e.g., farms, shops and tools, or merchant's inventory), the great
planters of colonial Virginia conformed much more closely to the aristocratic family of English
history. This family was organized to uphold lineage and keep its holdings (including land,
servants, retainers, etc.) intact: It, accordingly, could not be distinguished from the aristocratic
household. From the other side, the familial self-understanding of the "godly, "middling sort"
also differed from their aristocratic counterpart: The "godly" saw the family in terms of a
romantic ideal, a "relationship of love and marriage, a "union for spiritual support and
consolation" and they understood marriage in terms of a social contract on the model of their
business activities, while the aristocrat saw its family in terms of political alliances, and
practiced it (family life) patriarchally. The Puritan stress on individual conscience and its
romantic ideal had consequences which were much more, historically speaking, egalitarian:
Parents didn't by and large intervene in choice of a marriage partner, and wives were much
more such a "partner" than a subordinate. Among the great Virginia planters, though, parents
were likely to arrange marriages which were as a rule not based on love.102
That the familial institution incarnated ideal moments of the great planter understanding of
society, world and nature, decisive moments such as hierarchical order and patriarchal
authority, tells us something about the other central institution of the settler colony: The
organization of productive process of social reproduction, of agricultural labor, exhibited the
same structurally embodied ideal moments. The labor processes of the plantation economy
were organized hierarchically, servants and slaves at the bottom, overseers supervising them,
and the great planter deferred to as master and patron and uninvolved in the actual
organization of labor, standing at their apex. The great planter attitude toward labor,
elaborated on the foundations of his daily practice and, dialectically, directing that practice by
providing the categories of planter common sense that explained to him his world, did not
distinguish servants and slaves according to racial criteria: Laborers differed as to temporary
or permanent, but, more significantly, they were homogenized with respect to their "lowliness,
"dependency, and their inclinations to insubordination and lack of deference. That point
cannot be stressed enough. One cannot help but be struck when reviewing the Royalist
literature of the English Civil War, and it must always be remembered that from mid-century
through the time of the Rebellion the great planters were largely loyalist gentlemen (many of
whom fought for Charles I), just how deeply Royalist aristocrats held laborers of all sorts in
contempt. No doubt, their pronouncements exhibited images of subhumanity, and included
use of the word "race" itself. There may have been a "racism" of sorts they were given to, but
only to the extent that it is clearly understood theirs was a class hatred of the undifferentiated
lowly as a "race of people apart. In the planters' vision of the world, the presence of laborers
was unfortunate yet necessary, but laborers certainly had no place in their world.
101Ibid, 7-9.
102For business model of marital understanding, Ibid, 3-4. On the centrality of marital love, Christopher Hill, Society

and Religion in Prerevolutionary England, 459, and Lawrence Stone, "The Rise of Nuclear Family in Early Modern
England," 26-27; for marriage among the aristocracy as a political alliance, Ibid; and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of
the Aristocracy, 611, 615.
"The Virginia pattern developed within a culture where marriage was regarded as something to be arranged between
families, something that did not require love as a precondition ... and something that joined husband and wife in an
organic and patriarchal hierarchy." Fischer, Albion's Seed, 286.

New Merchants
New merchants developed the triangular trade between the West Indies (Barbados, the
Leeward Islands), North America (Bermuda, Virginia and Massachusetts) and England. With
regard to Virginia, these men carried provisions and servants from England to the settler
colony, cattle and horses from Virginia south to the Caribbean, molasses (and later slaves)
north to Virginia, and tobacco from Virginia to England. They were almost always involved in
paying the costs of indentures' voyages to Virginia (and elsewhere), in investment in land in
the settler-colony, and in financing Virginia planter tobacco sales. By the mid-1630s, in the
Virginia settler-colony these practices generated (among the very top stratum of merchants
and planters respectively) a small layer in which a single man combined both roles. The
largely London-based new merchants were, in social and economic terms, men of the
middling sort; religiously and politically, they were largely Puritans.103
In his Merchants and Revolution, Robert Brenner identified the new merchant with, among
others, the Virginia planter. Though he fails to explicitly indicate such, by "planter" he
obviously means the very largest planters, those who were economically "great. He also
notes this merchant-planter was politically powerful by virtue of a seat on the colony's royal
Council. Of course, this convergence of identities would indeed involve a very small number of
planters, or, in our terms, a tiny layer among the very top stratum of merchants and planters. If
this identity held, and new merchants were by inclination and practice Puritans, it would
appear that those men who did the most to shape the planter culture of the Virginia settlercolony were not Royalists at all, but to the contrary were men, Puritans, whose notions of
"blackness" and efforts to suppress sexuality led to the cultivation of racial sentiment.
Accordingly, it would then appear that had these men culturally hegemonized the colony,
racial sentiment would have played a major role in conditioning the introduction of slavery in
Virginia, and that a strategy to maintain social control, labor discipline, and ruling class
animosity towards the lowly were all secondary.104
Now "large" or "great" as a description of the productive wealth and power of planters is a
relative term. Planters in the Virginia settler-colony who were "large" in 1624 would not have
been so in 1635; by the standards of the 1660s-1670s, the "large" planters of 1635 had a
status that might best be characterized as small to middling; while, in 1685 the "great" planters
of Barbados had, for example, slaveholdings which were twice that of the greatest Virginia
planter. Needless to say, "large" or "great" is an internally comparative designation relative
both to time and place.
Brenner, at any rate, too quickly assimilates the large planters residing in the Virginia colony
circa 1635 to his new merchants (and to members of the Council). In fact, only twice does he
actually specify personages. In discussing the 1630s tobacco trade, he refers to a "wellentrenched group of merchant-planter-councilors, led by Maurice Thomson, William Tucker,
Thomas Stone and their [rarely identified] Virginia-based friends, which dominated the preCivil War government of colonial Virginia." Thomas Stone operated out of London. He was
deeply involved in the provisioning, tobacco trade, and plantation investment in colonial
America (St. Kitts, Bermuda, Virginia), and he re-exported to Amsterdam. He was heavily
committed to political opposition to the Crown (e.g., ship-money opposition in 1628-1629,
leading light of the extra-parliamentary City opposition in 1641-1643). William Tucker, a former
103For the identity of merchant and planters, see the section entitled "The Great Planters," above; for the equation of

new merchants with Puritans, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 114-115, 281, 416; for individual new merchants
who were avowedly Puritans, Ibid, 135, 137, 139, 143, 153, 155-156, 412, 415-427.
104For the identity of the new merchant and Virginia planter, Brenner, Ibid, 116, 120-121, 143; 130-131; for Puritanism
and racial sentiment, see "Puritanism and Race," immediately above.

ship's captain, resided in the Virginia settler-colony from 1616 to 1635 (and perhaps beyond).
He was seriously immersed in Puritan projects, a man who like Thompson (of whom more
momentarily) committed himself to a gathered congregation during the English Civil War.
Among identified merchant-planters, he alone was a resident. Residency is transcendently
important: Most simply stated, a society, colonial or otherwise, is not built out of interlopers or
absentee property-owners. A stable social order requires for its constitution individuals whose
role in production makes them a fundamental class in society, and who on the basis of their
formation and that productive activity articulate a culturally hegemonic vision of man,
community and nature. In an essentially frontier society of men on the make, one or two
persons could not alone create honorable businessmen out of men who relished living
"beyond the line, much less elaborate a Puritan vision (at any rate, in no ways compatible
with the ethos of a moving frontier) to theoretically mediate, absurdly so, social practices
aimed at constructing a social order based on bonded plantation labor.105
A review of the range of activities of the new merchants will suggest why these men were on
the whole little involved in the daily plantation life of the Virginia settler-colony. From their
identifiable beginnings, roughly 1616-1625, new merchants were absorbed in triangular trade
in the colonial Americas - especially tobacco importing from Virginia and Bermuda and resale
to the Continent, privateering particularly in the Caribbean against the Spanish, domestic
retailing, and illegally interloping in the Companies' trade especially in the Far East (i.e., east
coast of Africa, Indian Ocean, etc.). Some of these activities occurred simultaneously, others
sequentially. Politically, most of the London-based new merchants were involved with the
City's Crown opposition from 1640 onward, and after 1649 they engaged in missions or
governmental service for the Commonwealth. It should be noted, each merchant activity
pursued seriously was in itself a major commitment. Moreover, these activities were
undertaken in addition to any business that might have engaged new merchants, like George
Meneife, in Virginia. Meneife, precisely because he "moved back and forth between London
and Virginia" was more typical that any who actually became resident. But far more typical
was Maurice Thompson: Committed Puritan activist deeply implicated in Crown opposition
and, for his extraordinary range of trading activities, paradigmatically a new merchant,
Thompson based himself in London. Finally, there was one new merchant form of activity
which never occurred in Virginia. That activity was the construction of a community of the
"godly" on the order of that undertaken in the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Bermuda and
Providence Island. In the latter three colonies, this activity was financed by the tiny stratum of
great Puritan lords (Warwick, Saye and Brook) and undertaken largely by men (and women)
whose religious zeal and political opposition to the Crown exceeded their trader's lust.106
105For the three men as so identified, Brenner, Ibid, 585; 367 (Stone); 414, 449 (Tucker, Thompson). Brenner (Ibid,

136) also identifies George Meneife as a (second) "resident," a Council member (1635), engaged in coordinating
Samuel Vassal's plantation operations while, "like others among the merchant-planter-councilor clique, mov[ing] back
and forth between London and Virginia [emphasis added]" (Ibid) before finally settling in the settler colony in 1640,
that is, at the outset of Berkeley's successful efforts to recruits Royalists gentlemen to the colony, i.e., at the time
when the colony was rapidly becoming a haven for defeated royalists and, accordingly, when the religious and
political views of a new merchant could no longer carried much weight.
106For Maurice Thompson, Ibid, 123-129, 134-135, 137-175, 178-178, 156-167, 397, 398n, 430n, 431, 435, 621-630
(merely a sampling of his variegated activities); for Puritan utopias and the new merchant connection, Ibid, 110-111,
148-149, 156-159, 300-302 (Providence Island); 148-149, 153-156, 279-281, 302-304 (Bermuda); 113, 149-153, 272,
278 (Massachusetts Bay). The single apparent attempt to construct a community of the "godly" in Virginia occurred in
1639 when a number of London-based new merchants petitioned Charles' Privy Council for a grant of land to a
massive tract between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. The application was never acted upon. Ibid, 158.
Several scattered Puritan communities did exist in Virginia, at least until 1642, but they were inconsequential. Fischer,
Albion's Seed, 234.

Three answers to the question, "Why was construction of a Geitesgemeinschaft as the

practical basis of a culturally hegemonizing Puritan vision never undertaken in the Virginia
settler-colony?" stand out. Let us assume there were new merchants who held nonconformist
convictions in the colony, and they were regularly involved in its productive activities. First,
these men, especially those who got their start in Virginia (only to later, literally, move on),
recognized that the complex of attitudes called Puritanism107 they carried within themselves
was out of place, strange and altogether not at home (unheimlich) in a plantation colony
founded on servile labor. This is borne out by referring back to Massachusetts where
Puritanism constituted a vision governing clerical yet democratic political practices, and social
and life practices of free and independent middling men, small farmers and craftsmen.
Brenner characterizes new merchants in the Virginia settler-colony in 1639 thusly: The new
men were, of course, deeply preoccupied at this time with Virginian plantations and land
speculation. (This view can be generalized to summarize the entire period of new merchant
activity in the Virginia colony.) One interpretation of Brenner's remark might be that the
colony's resident new merchants were by and large, strictly speaking, "Puritan" nonconformist yet nonseparatist - but not "godly dissenters, that is, not nonconforming and
separatist. Another might be that their trader's lust exceeded their religious zeal. 108 While the
former characterization would be in the event unlikely (recall the 1640's London-based,
activities of leading new merchants discussed above), the two interpretations, we note, are
complementary and not at all at odds with one another.
Let us now accept Brenner's view that by the mid-1630s, the Council "core" of the Virginia
settler-colony government consisted in "merchant-planters. Second, prior to the English Civil
War, the "merchant-planter-councilor clique" was not capable of culturally hegemonizing the
colony because their policies and practices flew in the face of the mass of planters who were
hostile to them. A key issue in this regard was free trade. The mass of planters favored it, the
great planter-merchants opposed it. When Charles banned all foreign merchants, in particular
the Dutch, from the Virginia colony in 1633, this action, taken together with revenuegenerating Crown instruction that all tobacco was to be shipped directly to England (and thus,
subject to import duties, only re-exportable later), greatly exacerbated the distress of the
smaller planters who, at any rate, after a decade of tobacco price deflation were being driven
right to the wall. That part of the royal diktak banning foreign merchants, which the wealthy
planter-merchants had pushed hard for, benefited them greatly in their merchant role.109
The history of the Virginia settler-colony itself practically demonstrates that it was never
culturally hegemonized by new merchants articulating a Puritan vision. First, in 1642 Governor
Berkeley issued a law prohibiting the presence of nonconformists in the colony. "All
nonconformists [were without exception] ... to [at once] depart the colony..." The scattered
Puritan settlements were dispersed, and some three hundred dissenters left the colony for
Maryland and "New" England.110 Second, in 1651 the naval department inside the
Commonwealth government put together a fleet of armed ships, a task force headed by four
new merchant commissioners, to sail to Virginia for the explicit purpose of subordinating the
107For Puritanism, see "Puritanism and Race," immediately above.
108For the distinction between "Puritan" and "godly," n. 99, above. The citation is from Brenner, Ibid, 158. The origins

of a split within the new merchant community can be dated from the latter 1620s or early 1630s. It can be seen in the
nascent debate over militant Puritanism's relation to the Protestant Dutch: Do the Dutch constitute an ally in the
struggle against Catholic reaction, or is friendship a masquerade, a screen behind which Dutch traders destroy the
commercial basis of English prosperity? Material on this tacit split, though not presented in this form, can be found in
Brenner, Ibid, 271-272.
109For the ban on foreign merchants, Ibid, 133, 585; for falling prices after 1624, see the discussion "Monopolistic
Control, Overproduction and Crises," above.
1101 Hening 184 (statute cited); Fischer, Ibid.

colony. Since 1643, the colony's merchants had traded freely, with the Dutch in particular, and,
after 1649, in defiance of Commonwealth law. Berkeley, as Governor, had, with Legislative
Assembly backing, opposed the Commonwealth and its colonial policies on grounds of proRoyalism, free trade, and colonial autonomy. In the event, the colony's leadership, of course,
submitted.111 Third, and finally, there was in Virginia no parallel to events that had transpired in
London in 1641-1643. There, an alliance of City oppositional forces had destroyed the
intertwined oligarchical powers of the Company merchant aldermen and the bishopry by a
revolutionary overthrow and reorganization of the common council and vestry system. 112 In
the Virginia settler-colony, small local oligarchies established their power on the old AnglicanCrown model, as they manned the vestries and the colonial State at the country level (sheriffs,
judges, militia officers).113 In other words, one, a central, foundation of the hegemonic political
power of English social forces bearing a Puritan vision had been "the destruction of
episcopacy and the creation of religious institutions ... under the control of citizens
themselves." In the Virginia colony, the vestry system flourished and remained an equally
central basis of great planter power and religious practices that were hierarchical in character,
largely Anglican, ceremonial, liturgical and ritualistic.114
Let us summarize. Great planters of a Puritan persuasion failed (except in one or two isolated
cases) at any time in the colonys history to establish the residency requisite to a leadership
role that would entail a cultural hegemonizing as its corollary (small planters were, at any rate,
hostile to great planters with a view to productive interests, and it is, accordingly, hard to
imagine them adopting the latter as cultural-spiritual models); communities of the godly
never gained a genuine foothold in the Virginia settler colony (and, to boot, those with a
Puritan persuasion where eventually expelled from the colony); and, the colonys institutional
foundation in Church and State were Anglican, not Puritan. The gentlemen planters that
dominated Virginia were not Puritan bearers of racial sentiment. This brings us back to our
original perspective: A strategy to maintain social control and labor discipline, born of ruling
class animosity towards the lowly and not of racial sentiment, was decisive in conditioning the
introduction of slavery in the settler-colony.
On the Epistemology and Historical Ontology Underpinning Concepts of Race and Class
The burden of the foregoing narrative analysis has been to suggest how "race, articulated
within the framework of the primacy of "class, could come to be central within that framework.
Here we wish to rethink the concepts of race and class. A manifest theorization of these
concepts requires that we situate them, and the realities they refer us back to, within the
context of a historical ontology of human existence.
Consider the proposition that all understanding, "consciousness, is "ideological. This
assertion is often explicated in anyone of the following ways: "Consciousness" "reflects"
111Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 586, 593-595, 597.
112The central institutional structure of the Anglican Church in England has been the parish into which worshippers

were incorporated. Governing the temporal affairs of parish churches were appointees designated by the bishops,
men who were in most cases identical with precinct heads within the City's Common Council system. The alliance of
radical democratic artisans and colonial or new merchants with shopkeepers in tow that constituted the oppositional
forces to the Crown in London democratized the Common Council breaking the power of the oligarchical Company
merchant aldermen. Since the Council was interlocked with the vestry system in the parishes, its revolutionary
reorganization cut deeply into the power of the vestries. This revolutionary reorganization was completed in spring
1643 when dissenters in mass began to establish gathered congregations within the parishes, that is, they destroyed
the oligarchical rule of the closed vestry and replaced it with an elected form of self-governance. Ibid, 362-374 (esp.
368, 372-374), 399, 448-450.
113See "Great Planters," above.
114Brenner, Ibid, 461 (citation); for the Anglican character of Virginia religious practices, see "Puritanism and Race"
and the sources cited therein, immediately above.

"social relations, "consciousness ... reflect[s] ... reality, and "reality [finds] ... distorted
reflection in ... consciousness.115 If we commit ourselves to this assertion, however, we
cannot at the same time consistently hold that groups of women and men make their own
history on the basis of previously given "circumstances, i.e., institutionally congealed past
social practice. (Similarly, the proposition requires we forego the conviction that bringing about
qualitative social change requires organizationally embedded theorizations of the dynamics of
societal development.) As a theory of how knowledge and understanding are formed, this
crude, ultimately incoherent theory of reflection necessarily presupposes an equally crude,
simplistic, and self-contradictory theory of what "reality" is and how it is formed. However, not
only are epistemology and ontology internally connected,116 their coherent unity is the
foundation on which social theory, historical reconstruction and societal analysis arise.
The awareness of social subjects is embodied either tacitly, "unconsciously, in common
sense, its prejudices, moral sentiments, and its unreflected views and theories, or explicitly
and self-consciously in systematic knowledge, "ideologies" and world visions. The concepts,
conceptual constructs and theories that make up the former are generated without explicitly
attending to their production (which is why their production is mistakenly assumed to be
"passive"); those of the latter are actively produced. The unity of both forms of synthesis can
in a narrow way be designated as "consciousness. Neither is essentially passive in relation to
the world. Neither "reflects" ("refracts" or "distorts")117 that world and neither results in
conceptual understanding that more or less "approximates" its structure. "Consciousness"
does not "reflect" the world, first, because the structure of each is essentially dissimilar, and
second, because both consciousness and theory are active moments in the construction of
reality (world) itself.
The pre-reflective categories of common sense understanding arise on the foundations of
everyday activity. Such understanding does not spring up in the interiority of an abstract,
contemplative subject (whose falsely opposed pole is the massive presence of "reality"). To
actually construct our primordial situation as that of a passive subject is only possible as
theoretical mediation. Mediation is itself is a secondary, reflexive operation. It is generated on
the basis of a pre-given end (needs, precognitive interests or objectives); and, it is form of
human activity. In and through mediation we disengage ourselves from immersement in our
immediate surroundings, our daily cares and transactions. But theoretical mediation can also
reveal our initial situation and primordial attitude toward reality: We are first and foremost
social subjects, that is, practical and sensibly embodied beings who actively pursue socially
grounded, need-generated ends within an entanglement of social relations. These relations
form the central determinants of the unquestioned, familiar world of daily activity. This
unquestioned, familiar world is what most often passes itself off as "reality. Recognizably,
within this reality the built environment is embedded and visible nature also appears. But its
structure (i.e., its intelligibility) is hidden, even occluded: It appears pre-given, perhaps
unchanging and without author. Yet its structure is formed and it is social (if not always
historical).
The built environment constitutes a sensible aspect of the unquestioned, familiar world of daily
activity ("reality"). In the genetic sense, this sensible aspect is actively constructed out of the
materials of nature (with or without regard or respect to it). Simultaneously, non-sensible yet
115Fields, "Race and Ideology in American History, 152, 153, 161.
116The passivity of awareness vis-a-vis "reality, ("eternally moving and developing matter") and the givenness of

truth (an "objective measure or model existing independently of mankind to which our relative knowledge
approximates") is neatly summarized in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. See V.I. Lenin, Collected Works,
13, 144-151 (matter), 75-85 (truth).
117Fields, "Ibid.

real products of our daily activity, social relations and institutions, are constituted and congeal.
None of us, however, ever consciously experience our origins: Before we become conscious
of its structure, we are always, already actively engaged in this world. Accordingly, it appears
to us as a pre-given world. As pre-given, it appears as a world of others, of meanings, and an
ensemble of interrelated and mutually implicative, instrumentalities (e.g., tools), sensible
structures (e.g., buildings of all sorts) and cultural objects in which we are relationally,
institutionally and naturally embedded. Yet, again in the genetic sense, it is in our daily
activities that sens (contextual meaning, signification, direction) is imparted to or incarnated in
nature. And it is in and through the same daily activities (work, labor) that the pre-given world
of instrumentalities, structures, objects, social relations and institutions is formed and acquires
sens. All our achievements are, as it were, produced "over our heads and behind our backs.
In the genetic sense, we produce and reproduce ourselves, this world and our relation to
nature in and through our daily activities of all sorts. At the same time, in the prosaic sense we
precognitively assimilate and internalize (the meanings and orientations embedded in) this
world (or, on rare occasion we, more radically and consciously, transform its structure and
meaning.) It is, further, in our daily activities that our immediate intuitions of reality arise,
forming as we pursue determinate needs, goals and objectives. It is here, in concrete social
contexts, that we generate these intuitions, the vaulted categories of common sense, both as
a means to realize those goals and as explanations of daily reality, but as one-sided
categories that capture and fix only its phenomenal aspects. Moreover, it is ultimately with
reference to this reality that other theoretical constructs, such as science, are produced. This
world practically stripped of the veil of reifications (obfuscatory categories, ideas and
constructs) enshrouding it, an act identical with its revolutionary transformation, is the real
world.118
Theory, then, is an activity: It is in theoretical forms of activity we produce the concepts in and
through which we ideally reproduce reality in order to act on it, viz., transform it by rendering it
practically rational (in a tradition bound sense). The production of concepts is the creation of a
subjective sense which establishes, for us, the meaning of this or that aspect of reality. These
conceptual productions, idealities, crowd our daily, social life: They live in, inhabit, as it were,
our sensuous experience and our emotional and moral existences. Moreover, to the extent
that such conceptual production guides a practice that transforms an aspect of reality (or
reality itself), meaning (categories of common sense, religion, science, theory, etc.) is
materialized (spatialized, temporalized and embodied) in that aspect of reality. (E.g., in
fabricating a hammer, my labor incarnates the practical meaning "to pound" in this object, a
sense which is intuitively grasped from either sensible contact with the object itself, or through
its insertion into ensemble of interrelated and mutually implicative, meaning laden
instrumentalities, e.g., the carpenter's tools laying about the house under construction.) Such
meaning, constituted intersubjectively in and through mediately immediate (i.e.,
"spontaneous") speech in the daily practice of groups of people, transmitted ontogenetically in
the child's acquisition of language and generated and brought forth ("pro-duced") in thinking,
is non-spatial, temporal and social, ideal, the ideal aspect of reality itself. As ideal, meaning,
which, to be sure, is not "in our heads, achieves objectivity and accessibility, i.e., is
universally available to any being capable of the socio-historically specific speech in which
118Reality, then, is not, even fundamentally, for example, "matter. Understood at once as the substratum of nature,

the basic element of which nature including man as natural is formed, and as the principle of intelligibility of nature,
"matter" is a theoretical construct whose production (by early, scientific bourgeois intellectuals) was originally
necessitated by the very class teleology motivating the construction of modern physical science itself, namely, naturedomination. "Matter" is a socio-historically specific theoretical construction of the meaning and significance of nature
for human existence. See the second critique in our Community and Capital.

such meaning or sense is originally constituted. These senses, meanings, we generate are
socio-historical products.
Methodologically, the critique of the counterfeit concreteness (partiality, one-sidedness and
abstractness) of common sense must nonetheless recognize that it is the crude form in which
masses of men and women theorize. Four points are in order. First, theory is not logically, but
it is contentually and teleologically dependent upon our daily practice. As barbaric theorizing,
common sense, like all theorizing, goes beyond social practice by vulgarly elaborating and
explicating it, giving intentional direction to our activities (practice). As such, theorizing has its
own criteria for truthfulness, namely, consistency and systematic coherency. Thus, it must be
grasped in these terms. As such, it cannot be adequately understood in terms of motivational
contexts (e.g., class interests). But that does not eliminate the need to understand such
contexts: Because all theorizing has extra-theoretical origins, it must second, be referred back
to those origins to grasp the motive(s) for the generation of its categories in the first place.
Nonetheless, not only inelegant common sense but all forms of theoretical activity, though
(content and goal) dependent upon, are irreducible to needs, interests and objectives, and to
social contexts (institutions, productive relations, etc.) which shape their formation. They
never are simply reflexes of those interests or contexts. To adequately understand
theorizations, third, requires recognition of the place and role of theoretical forms within the
daily life of human beings. Theory performs two inseparable yet distinct functions in relation to
other types of human activity: Common sensical, scientific, historical, etc., categories
constitute ideal mediations between two moments of social practice - a future to be made in
light of a past already taken up and assimilated. At the same time, theory constitutes an effort
to comprehend and explain this practice, i.e., infuse it with community-based and traditiongrounded, precognitive norms. From the standpoint of masses of women and men as
theoreticians, said infusion renders theory "reasonable. At this level theory of all sorts
requires further criticism: Fourth, all critique that goes beyond immanent analysis, and is,
accordingly, complete, is at the same time moral, that is, confronts and challenges communitybased and tradition-grounded, untheorized norms of a social rationality that is partial, abstract
or even criminal.
To oppose the ideal elements of understanding as "ideological" phenomena (e.g., the complex
of ideas involving "race") to the "real, historical and "material" determinants of social life (e.g.,
"class") is to construct a false antithesis. Racial concepts are idealities - concepts like other
products of conscious activity (and not passive reflections of a pre-given reality), and at the
same time materialized moments of daily practice. Their (ideal) generation depends upon the
needs and interests of social groups (classes) engaged in abiding activities of daily life
(production). But, dialectically, they are irreducible; for just as primordially, they are
institutionally embedded (and reproduced), and entangled with notions of community. In the
latter case, they form emotionally charged elements of daily awareness that function to
provide direction to specific activities within the contours of, as well as to grasp and explain
the intelligible structure of, daily life. To the extent such concepts are institutionally embedded,
reproduced in, and intentionally orient the daily practice of life, they can form abiding
moments of historically constructed social worlds. In this respect, "race" is, as we say,
infrastructural.
The Meaning of "Race" and its Relation to Class
[Race and Class]
In the late seventeenth century Virginia settler-colony, racial categories largely originated in
reflection on the problems of colonists' practice. Settler-planters incessantly demanded and
made ultimately successful efforts to acquire Indian land and cheap, controllable Indian,

indentured and then slave labor.119 For these settlers, Indians were murderous savages, their
lives lived without piety (religion) and laws (State). They were morally inferior, licentious, and
indolent, like the indentures and African slaves (heathens also) who followed them. The latter
groups, moreover, were feared and considered dangerous because they were capable of
revolt. Racialized awareness, and with it the category of race, arose, as we have and shall
argue (below), as a planter strategy to prevent such revolt and control servile labor. Given this
objective, the category of race was a likely outcome of the attitude toward serviles on which
it was to be predicated.
Racialized awareness appears to have originally developed in similar ways in all the early
plantation agriculture colonies, regardless of whether they were Portuguese, Spanish, English,
Dutch or French. To be sure, settler-planter attitudes were in part a response to the resistance
of natives, indentures and Africans to colonists' efforts at capture, enslavement, and coerced
labor as the case may have been. But these attitudes, or the racialized awareness that later
came to animate them, cannot seriously said to have developed from an unprejudiced
evaluation of early colonial encounters. This can only mean that racialized awareness, as an
ontologization of imputed, ahuman (pre-human or "subhuman") behavioral, moral and cultural
characteristics and qualities, initially took shape as a projection: The experience, sensibilities
and the very reality of others as racially identified and condemned beings counted for nothing;
rather, as central moments in personal formation,120 racialized awareness, and on this basis,
racial projection and categorization (then and now) constituted an attempt to decide who and
what these others were for purposes of domination in the labor processes.\ A struggle
invariably ensued. Class-based, racialized identities and class power were all more fully
formed as oppressed groups fought against humiliation and degradation. In this crucible,
"race" took shape. "Race" came into being as a historically formed, varying and changing
ensemble (i.e., alogical, ordered complex) of culturally specific meanings that constitute an
imaginary social relationship. The contents of these meanings (this imaginary social relation)
form a socially constructed psychic topography of arcane fears, anxieties, fantasies, and
sham facts and insights projected onto the libidinous body and otherwise unfathomable soul
of a degraded Other. These meanings are, thus the imaginary social relationship is, called into
being by and serve Power. They at once structure Objective Spirit (e.g., law) and are
embodied as the tacit purpose of any number of institutions. Hence, they are materialized and
to this extent "real. Accordingly, this imaginary social relation, a projection sedimented in the
structure of personal identity, bestows petty privilege upon those whose daily social practice
reproduces these institutions as congealed social relations of domination (and reproduces
them in opposition to those who struggle against subordination and marginalization).121
Because racial concepts are socially as well as historically inseparably tied to social control
(either for purposes of rule or the extraction of petty privileges), and because as such racial
concepts are originally consciously generated (whatever their extent of materialization) while
class originates in social practice as a relation between exploiter and exploited, the subjective
drama of individuals, groups or classes can not only come to be dominated by racial
119Planters were soon to discover that, because of their pre-Statist, free, and in modern terms leisured existence,

and because of their familiarity with the immediate environs (making escape easier and more likely), enslaved natives
ultimately made unsuitable serviles.
120 See "Settler psychology," above.
121"Objective Spirit" is comprehended here in terms of a materialist version of Hegel: Economy, Law and State (the
primary shapes, according to Hegel, Objective Spirit assumes) form the materialized substance of the struggles of
those classes and social groups that constitute society (as opposed to the embodiment of the temporal process of
self-unfolding, self-revelation and becoming-conscious of Spirit). The Hegelian concept of "Absolute Spirit," often
narrowly understood as "culture," is here similarly comprehended as the objectified products of human, creative and
self-interpretative activity, specifically art, religion, and philosophy.

concerns, but in such case subjectivity will necessarily be mystified, i.e., the class relation will
not appear "in" cognitive awareness except obscurely and tangentially. Historically, then, race
has come to be central within a societal totality for which class is primary, because it, race,
exists as objectively necessary illusion, at once as real determination and as mystification.
[The Concept of Class]
Race and class are two aspects of a historically constituted, socially divided reality: The
former primarily exists as social meaning, the latter as a relation of exploitation in social
practice (i.e., class exists in the practice of social groups, as a relation of exploiter to
exploited). The former is objectively necessarily illusion obfuscating the primordial sense and
reality of the latter. In this context, a class relation "shapes" a personal outlook and weighs
heavily on life-chances, because it is lived through and experienced ... but only in the most
peripheral, obtuse and mystified way. A class relation, however, does not and cannot exist
apart from awareness, "independently, which is precisely is what being said when it is
asserted that it is "reflected" in consciousness. Class in that sense is scientized, thereby
constituting a metaphysical abstraction, and is of the same order as the claim that "matter" is
the "'essence" of "reality, or the predestinationist assertion that the masses of heathens are
forever condemned to hell because they do not know God. When we speak of large groups of
people in society (e.g., slaves, peasants, proletarians that form a working class, elites that
coalesce to make up a ruling class) we mean such groups (classes) in relation to other such
groups. Social relations of this order, i.e., class relations, are not formed without a conscious
moment: The constitution of class is informed by intentionality, direction and understanding
oriented toward action - no matter how false or even ideological the achieved awareness:
People entangled in similar class relations form in and through their daily activities similar
understandings of their place in society and the world and act according to those
understandings in similar ways.
The concept of class cannot bear the weight of constituting "independently" of awareness a
"real" or "objective" determinant of social existence such as position in the process of
production. First, the separation of class relations from consciousness and the social practice
in which both consciousness and class relations are formed is, as already noted, a
metaphysical abstraction that looks to a scientized transcendence to comprehend the world.
"Reality" can only comprehended, i.e., critically explained and transformed, from within it, not
apart from it, from outside it, nor from beyond it: The world ("reality") does not exist
independently of consciousness; rather the world of daily living, though pre-given and "always,
already there, is the product of the activity (especially labor) of previous generations of men
and women. Second, the reality that "class" refers us back to is itself historical: Class relations
are characteristic of divided societies, societies sundered by production grounded materially
inequality; their hierarchical arrangement organized and secured through Power (the State)
distinct from and superordinate to the social groups whose activities form society. Third, class
relations are not always and everywhere constituted in the same manner. For example, social
classes of the Florentine Republic which emerged sometime shortly after 1290 in an era that
can be characterized as late feudal society of the West were not for the most part constituted
socio-economically (that is, in terms of position in the production process). Rather, they were,
right down to the period of the greatest practical extension of (guild) republican principles (the
Ciompi revolution, 1378), determined politico-juridically, i.e., legal categories had effective
resonance and were determinate in the practice of daily life. Classes in the contemporary
sense may not even originate from within the production process. Take, for example, State
spending resulting from former U.S. President Reagan's militarily Keynesian economic
program. Social classes and adjunct social strata (such as owners of defense related,

subcontracting firms, the middle stratum layer of engineers, designers and programmers in
aerospace and electronics, or retail merchants in communities dependent upon military
related expenditures) that appeared in the production processes of high-tech industries as
well as support industries were formed either by military expenditures or upon the basis of
military spending-induced rapid economic growth. Both groups were products of State
mediated, politically formed production processes. They were, in others words, not the
outcome of some magical dialectic of productive forces and relations, but the byproducts of
State policy.122
Historically, the concept of objectively determined classes is related to the development of
industrial capitalism in the West. On this view, productively determined classes appeared the
moment when capitalist societies were for the first time fully constituted: A distinctive
"economy" came into being. As a system of production, this economy seemed to function as
an autonomous regulator of social life. Social life itself appeared naturalized: Scientifically
ascertainable "'laws' of motion" governed its development, or, more rigorously, the objective
logic of capital accumulation governed the system of social relations as a whole, an automatic
"subject" reigned over living subjects, dead over living labor. Ideology arose.123
The illusion that classes, and with them corresponding forms of consciousness, are objectively
determinable (i.e., constituted solely by position in the process of production) also arose.
Once classes were so constituted, the structure of "consciousness" could be inferred from
objective position in production, that is, the latter formed the basis on which ideal-typical and
imputed because reified forms of awareness could be constructed. This illusion may have
been necessary from inside the communist movement, wherein construction of a theory to
accord with certain millennial expectations concerning the onset of proletarian-based "real
history" was pursued (Lukacs). But this illusory concept of consciousness is reductionist and
passive; it is an anti-dialectical residue of a metaphysics of essential (human) natures; and, it
is an ahistorical reification, freezing a specific, long past (if not merely retrospectively
projected) moment of proletarian existence.
The "material" premise of the formation of consciousness is not merely activity undertaken in
the process of production. It also includes those decisive sentiments that are institutionally
formed and that shape the daily life of social classes. (Institutions, such as the family, are
precisely those congealed social relations resting on specialized and ritualized practices that
have become separated out as seemingly self-contained spheres of daily life that in turn
provides a partial identity to the bearers of these relations.) In particular, a collective sense of
propriety, moral imperatives, loyalties, sanctions and taboos, and expectations, that delimit the
range of available options for action in the world (i.e., form typical emotional character and
psychological patterns) and that characteristically constitute the core identity of those living a
particular class relation, are all formed in and through the activities of daily life. These
elements that make up core identity are moments of consciousness. It should go without
122For Florence, see our The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, 4-5; for State mediated, political

formed production processes, see our Whither America?, 20.

123Ideology arose ... but not in terms of the relativistic and meaningless conceptual mystifications, not, in other
words, as a systematized concatenation of beliefs and taken for granted convictions. Ideology arose first as a selfevident, intuitively apprehended and then theoretically elaborated inversion of the intelligible structure of reality as
capitalist. Thus, "ideologues" and "ideological constructs" (e.g., literary documents, pamphlet literature, speeches,
etc.) exhibit a specific structure, exhibit, if you will, "ideology at work. The writer, speaker or document masks a
specific intent, as well as the author(s) of that intent, by asserting the action oriented to realizing that intent will
achieve just the opposite of the intended outcome. For example, attempts to dismantle affirmation action in the state
of California have gone under the heading of a "'civil rights' initiative": In the name of broadening rights in the
institutions of daily life, middle strata ideologues have sought to conceal efforts to effectively reintroduce systematic
discrimination against groups whose access to such institution had been historically barred on most commonly racist
grounds. A racist attempt to restrict access to public institutions in the name of "civil rights" is ideological.

saying that this identity may itself be decisively centered around considerations of "race" such
as "whiteness.
On the other hand, the concept that class refers us back to a reality formed objectively, strictly
in terms of position in the production process, has no value for reflections on the formation of
classes and "races" in American history.

Part V
Social Control and the Constitution of Planters as a Ruling Class
From Temporary Servitude to Racial Slavery
[Primacy of Indentures]
Throughout the seventeenth century, planters of the Virginia colony preferred to use the labor
of indentured servants to that of African slaves. This preference was overwhelming up to and
beyond the moment of Bacon's Rebellion as can seen by examining immigrant composition
revealed in the headrights lists for the colony. For the 28 year period of 1649 through 1676,
that ratio was nearly 37:1, some 48,626 servants to 1,316 slaves; for the next decade, 1677
through 1686, the ratio dropped nearly in half, to 20.5:1 (9,641 servants to 470 slaves). Slave
use among planters was becoming more popular, yet hardly in significant numbers. (Or,
alternatively, servant purchase was becoming less popular.) But in the last thirteen years of
the century, the situation changed. From 1687 through 1699 the ratio dropped by to just
about 5:1 (10,234 servants to 2,080 slaves). In fact, in one year (1697) headright totals
indicate planter purchase of slaves actually outnumbered that of servants, 202 to 191. While
these numbers do not account for all the bondsmen imported into the colony in the period in
question and should, as Craven suggests, be used with care, the trend is unmistakable. The
preference of planters for the use of servant labor on their large tobacco plantations had given
way to a preference for slave labor. Why had this happened at all, and, then, why not
earlier?124
Among several socio-historical issues involved, two separate ones concern us. In neither case
was "race" significant. The first issue was the defense of the colony against enemies. Those
enemies included, to be sure, hostile Indians, but what both the colonial leadership and the
Crown had in mind was first the Dutch and later the French. It was of overriding importance to
have the manpower to defend the colony, that is, Crown revenue, planter property, and land
as the foundation of commodities production and labor exploitation involved in the cycle of
merchant Englishmen's trade, from the possibilities of a Dutch or French takeover. To do
required adequate settlers to form militias for self-defense, and that desideratum required
Englishmen, loyal subjects, who could be trusted to fight for mother England.
The second issue concerned rational behavior (in the specifically capitalist sense). By and
large planters attempted to acquire new labor out of profits. Such an investment would be
small entailing a purchase of two, three, five or ten serviles. Now merchants and ships'
captains moving African slaves required purchase of one or two hundred slaves or more at a
time. The facts that the Dutch dominated the slave trade from Africa in this period, and that the
Navigation Acts (1660) forbade use of Dutch ships to carry cargo to the colonies, was not
relevant: English merchants had organized a substantial triangular trade between the Virginia
and Massachusetts colonies, the English West Indies and England. Caribbean slaves were in
plentiful supply for the Virginia planters' needs. Still, relative to indentured servants, they were
hardly purchased. Why? Given the mass of profits generated in the production of early
colonial tobacco, a hundred to two hundred slaves was an investment that for the most part
was beyond the existing means of most Virginia planters or even, for the matter, for most of
these planters taken together. Nonetheless only in such mass purchases would the
economies of scale have rendered slaves cheaper than indentured servants. When slaves
124Compilations of these lists are conveniently reproduced in annualized form in Craven (White, Red, and Black).

Comparison should be made between annualized lists of total immigrants (Ibid, 15, 16) and similar, specific lists of
Africans (Ibid, 85, 86). Subtracting the annual total in the second list from the corresponding annual total in the first
list, and then dividing the former into the latter provides a ratio of the purchase of indentured servants to African
slaves. Figures for slave tithables in a single colony county (Surry) where the records are available similarly suggest
the mid to late 1690s were the turning point at which time planters began to purchase more slaves than servants.
Morgan, Ibid, 306-307.

were bought, they were often bought in smaller numbers from merchants operating out of the
English Caribbean (Barbados, Leeward Islands, Jamaica). Under these conditions servants
were, notwithstanding all the alleged advantages of slave labor, less expensive than, roughly
half the cost of, slaves.125
In neither case was "race" a relevant consideration.
[First Precondition of a Shift to Slave Labor. Planter Unity]
The shift from servant to slave labor not only required a more numerically populous colony (to
insure adequate self-defense) and a large, sustained increase in the mass of planter profits (to
allow for larger "investments"). A shift to bondsmen without even the possibility of freedom
was a daunting prospect for individual planters to face. The Rebellion and the rumblings of
revolt down through 1682 that following created within individual planters a deep-seated fear
of bonded men held without chance of freedom. In an objective historical sense, confronting
rebellious labor required planter unity: The factional character of the great planters as a social
group had to be overcome so that this group could cohere into a ruling class. Up to this time
control over the State apparatus, securing merely an objective condition of rule, had
prevented great planters from losing all coherence as a dominant social group. It was only
Power that at once reproduced yet canalized their conflicts, and thus that allowed planters as
a group to maintain their rule.
In the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion, the problem of disunity was only exacerbated:
Neither Bacon's death, the execution of rebel leaders Drummond, Lawrence, Arnold and
others, Charles' recall, i.e., removal, of Berkeley, nor the hearing Crown commissioners gave
the grievances of the settler masses (as well as the cosmetic changes in colony policy they
recommended) laid the foundations for greater planter unity. Factional differences among the
great planter elite had run deep: After all, Berkeley, informed of his recall on 1 February 1677
(immediately upon arrival of the commissioners), refused to leave the colony until May, i.e.,
until he, against explicit Crown orders, was satisfied his policy of reprisals against the rebel
leadership had been carried out. In that interim, the Governor called an assembly which,
entirely obeisant, reversed the democratic legislation of the June 1676 Assembly. On the
ground, he also instituted a practice of plundering the rebel estates with a vengeance. After
Berkeley's departure, this practice continued. It was led by the loyalists Robert Beverley
(orchestrating the House of Burgesses) and Philip Ludwell (as acting secretary directing the
Council) in opposition to the new Governor, Herbert Jeffreys, and without regard to Crown
wishes. In so continuing, for the entire period defined by the rebellion on one side and revolt of
small planters in 1682 on the other side, and, in destroying the active rebel leadership, this
practice was regularized and legitimized by the Legislative Assembly. The fear of another
servile revolt and the pursuit of legal plundering in opposition to the Crown (in the persons of
the King's appointed governors) allowed the bulk of planters (minus rebels) to achieve a
nascent class unity but only at the highest of political levels. Amongst themselves, they
competed fiercely, not so much for market shares (as planters, they could also agree in a
general sense on the necessary market conditions to ensure their continued survival), but for
the settler colony's offices (and wealthy widows). For it was access to those offices on which
125For requirements of large slave purchases, Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 30, and Craven, White, Red, and Black,

93; for triangular trade, Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, 273, 274, 276, 283-285, 307.
The much ballyhooed advantages of slaves included permanent as opposed to temporary servitude, a selfperpetuating labor force, familiarity with tropical agriculture and an alleged ability to better withstand tropic climate.
Lifetime slaves (circa 1665) cost the planter as much as twice what an indentured servant did (Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom, 297, and Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2:137). On average for a slave the
planter paid one half again the price of a servant (Ibid, 172). However, after 1690 slaves would become more cost
effective from the standpoint of planter profitability.

so much of wealth accumulation in the last quarter of the seventeenth century depended. At
any rate, securing the basis for planter unity had not been Charles' primary aim. Obviously, it
was not an objective outcome of his actions. He had witnessed a massive decade long, "wild"
and largely successful revolt of the middling groups in his youth (the English Revolution) and
he, unlike Berkeley, did not fail to understand the potential for wrecking that source of revenue
on which he so heavily depended. Yet as much as they threatened his interests, Charles was
stuck with the great planters who organized a recalcitrant colony three thousand miles away:
He would neither give into the democratic demands of the mass of freemen nor give up a
major financial component of his royal independence (viz., he would not reduce or eliminate
the Crown tobacco impost in order to ease the oppression of his colonial subjects). As matters
stood, the changes in Crown policy in the aftermath of the Rebellion were nothing more than
cosmetic. The rumble of revolt continued. There were small rebellions in 1677, and again in
1681, and another great one in 1682.126
[Second Precondition of a Shift to Slave Labor. Change in the Structure of Reality Itself]
Thus, the great planters were still far too divided to see their way forward. For them to do so,
the socio-historical structure of reality itself would have to change, i.e., the conditions of daily
life among the mass of settlers had to improve adequately enough that the great planters
would on this foundation be able to grasp and then elaborate a real strategy of social control
to secure and sustain their rule, especially in light of the feared recurrence of rebellion.
Such a change did occur, and it began to occur in 1683 as tobacco prices underwent a steady
increase that lasted until shortly after the end of the century. There is limited, circumstantial
(even negative) but nonetheless substantive evidence to support this assertion.
First, following upon the depression in tobacco prices that had begun in 1660 and had yet to
run its course, in late May 1682, at the instigation (perhaps) of Robert Beverley, small planters
in Gloucester County began to cut down young tobacco plants growing in the fields. The
action was aimed at withholding from the world market enough tobacco to force up prices. The
action gathered momentum: More small planters and a large body of tenants joined plant
cutting parties. Having had no relief from the oppressive burdens, taxes and low tobacco
prices, that had largely inspired the Rebellion now nearly six years in the past, they had
nothing to lose. Plant cutting activity spread to New Kent and Middlesex counties, and from
there to the great planter dominated plantations of Rappahannock and York counties. The
Governor had to bring in militia from distant counties (where the movement hadn't taken hold)
in order to suppress the action. By the end of May it is nonetheless estimated that seventy-five
percent of the tobacco plants in Gloucester, a full half in New Kent, and lesser quantities in
Middlesex, Rappahannock and York counties had been destroyed. In August, the entire
movement began to unfold again.127
The destruction of these crops limited the supply available for European markets. And, this is
the second piece of evidence, those markets had expanded. In 1675, about one-third of the
tobacco carried to England had been re-exported. By the last years of the century, re-exported
tobacco had doubled. Now, as we noted above, if tobacco was re-exported, the Crown
returned roughly three-quarters of its duty on tobacco shipped to England from its colonies.
(Merchants, it can be safely said, took their share and then passed the bulk of the rebate back
along to planters.) This increase in exportation, and hence the expansion of market demand
for tobacco beyond England, had to be substantial even by 1685 because in that year
Parliament allowed the King to increase his duty from two to five pence per pound. (The
increase should be seen as an effort by the Crown to enlarge its tobacco duty income in view
126For a narrative account of the aftermath of Rebellion, Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 271-292.
127For plant cuttings, Ibid, 286-287.

of an expanding world market.) Yet a 150% increase in the impost merited no outbreak of
renewed anger in the Virginia colony. (Further evidence for the expansion of the market in
tobacco can be inferred from the late 17th century rise in English wages, with the rise in
demand among laborers that it entailed.)128
In fact, and this is the third piece of evidence, the public levy, one of three components of the
poll tax assessed every freeman in the colony, was reduced from an average of 45 pounds of
tobacco per person from 1660 to 1686 to 11 pounds per person in 1687 (from 1687 to 1700
where after it was reduced again). The public levy was reduced in part in response to the
additional revenues from the duty on tobacco leaving the colony. These additional revenues
flowed from the increased production of tobacco which, under the depressed conditions that
had dominated the colony since 1660, could only have been in response to a large expansion
in the world market itself.129
Finally, and this is the last piece of evidence, Robert Beverley, a great planter and as we have
seen a major figure in the events of this period, stated in 1705 that tobacco prices "of late
years" had by and large sold at nearly 20 shillings a hundred weight of tobacco, i.e., nearly
twice the price in the period of 1660 through 1682. Such an increase in prices could only point
to a large expansion in world market demand for the tobacco of the Virginia settler colony.130
This rise in tobacco prices after 1682 is not to be taken in the sense of some dumb,
objectively unfolding historical phenomenon independent of conscious activity. Between 1660
and 1684 a low price for tobacco was largely determined monopolistically by Crown policy and
merchant practice. But after 1682, the great merchants within the Royal African Company
began to hold down the price of African slaves in order to insure adequate labor within the
colony. By holding down planter costs of production in the face of expansion of tobacco
demand, they thereby contributed to the formation of the enlarged planter profits within the
settler colony.
After 1689, the Company's monopoly began to collapse as its primary sponsors (James II,
other members of the royal family, and Prince Rupert) fled into exile following final defeat of
the Stuarts by William of Orange backed by the Parliamentary faction. In 1697, the Treaty of
Ryswick was concluded. It formally incorporated the western Atlantic, the Caribbean and the
Americas into international treaty arrangements. The newly achieved status of the "New
World" was further solidified in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht (which ended the cycles of AngloFrench wars). The era of piracy and marauding thereafter rapidly came to an end. As a result,
Atlantic-based trade achieved a hitherto unknown orderliness and stability. Merchants were no
longer, for example, compelled to include losses due to thinly disguised commercial warfare in
their freight rates. Insurance rates for transAtlantic cargo fell also. Peaceful competition
(among planters) begin to fully assert itself as the primary element in the formation of prices of
plantation agricultural staples.131
128For James' increase in the customs impost, Ibid, 197, 291.

Brenner (Merchants and Revolution, 710) claims that after 1650 real wages in England rose having been stabilized at
roughly the same rate since 1610, and Blackburn (The Making of New World Slavery, 326) states European wages
rose in the 1680s. Jan De Vries (The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, Figure 6, 186) presents a graph of "Day
wage of building craftsmen in southern England expressed in pence" which suggests that from 1654 to 1687 wages
among this crucial category of workers remained stable, and thereafter until about 1711 they steadily rose.
129For the decline in the public levy, Morgan, Ibid, 345.
130Beverley's remark, made in his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), is cited in Ibid, 204 n. 29. Morgan, by
the way, plays down the significance of the expansion of market demand after 1682, but then, again, even he
recognizes that "the small man's economic position improved. Ibid, 345.
131For the relaxation of Africa Companies monopolies and treaty consequences, Blackburn, The Making of New
World Slavery, 255, 303, 326, 350, and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 32.

As the mid-1680s demand for the colony's tobacco expanded, natural disasters and poor
yields were frequent enough to prevent another crisis of overproduction: English merchants'
tobacco markets did not undergo saturation. Further, food shortages did not reemerge, in fact,
food was abundant as were clothes. By 1687, after several years of increased tobacco sales
at better prices and with the lifting of some of the oppressive tax burden, small planters and
tenants had adequate surpluses, while even agricultural laborers earned enough, to afford
these necessities. Servants were better feed and clothed. Unpropertied freemen and English
servants as well, then, began to climb out of the poverty of the previous decades. Taken
together with their increasing life expectancy, servants' chances of achieving free status
began to actually appear real. Freemen now found credit more available from wealthy
planters. This allowed the mass of nonpropertied freemen among them to purchase land.
Westward expansion (within the limits of present-day Virginia) began anew, and without the
fear of Indians. (Indian communities of the country today called eastern Virginia had been
decimated by disease, enslaved and murdered in countless settler encounters. The
demographically devastated populations migrated further west both to avoid more settlers,
and because they were pushed west by other native nations from the north, particularly the
Seneca.) In the last fifteen years of the century, moreover, English servants became much
less readily available: The attractiveness of settler colonial life was considerably diminished as
news first of the Rebellion and then the plant cutting riots reached England. Wars with the
French in every year except four (1698-1702) between 1689 and 1712 placed heavy demands
on the English military (ship crews and fighting men were required). Thus, the force of
legitimate authority as an element in the drafting of indentured servants for export virtually
disappeared. There was also a clampdown on "spirits, i.e., on a key link in the division of
labor through which the criminalized, unemployed and marginally employed had been
kidnapped or duped into assuming emigrant servile status. Those who did emigrate as
servants were more skilled in accordance with planter demands. Accordingly, in the last
decade of the century economic pressures on the sheer numbers of competing newly freed
servants abated.132
The rise in tobacco prices after 1682, taken together with both a lessened tax burden and a
slackening in the flow of servant emigrants to the colony, effectively sundered reality, i.e., daily
life, and produced an objective cleavage where there had not been one before: The status of
English bondsmen in the colony, and in particular, their life-changes, now no longer largely
coincided with those of African slaves.
Of course, this cleavage was not all at once firmly implanted in daily life (i.e., tasks in
production, housing, and meals were yet to be segregated according to servile status, servant
or slave.) Once it was, common sense racial intuitions would arise on this basis, i.e., this
cleavage would become fully assimilated and internalized by servants who, in turn, would
orient their practice according to a new racial common sense. This barbaric common sense
was sanctioned, encouraged and reinforced by newly drawn up and legislated servile codes,
especially those of 1705 and 1722. But even before the codes were formulated and enacted
as law, this cleavage was exacerbated by a political development, the ongoing struggle (that
really began to unfold in the 1690s) between the Governor as Crown representative in the
colony and the great planters in the Legislative Assembly. The joint action taken by planters in
this struggle, which would last far into the next century (and which, occurring in similar forms
in other colonies, was a crucial component in the development of national awareness in British
North America), found them politically cohering in this medium (Legislative Assembly). The
struggle resulted in both factions appealing to the freemen (propertied and unpropertied) as a
132On upward mobility after 1684, Breen, "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 12-13; for the

clampdown on "spirits" and demand for more skilled servants, Allen, Ibid, 2:118; and, Breen, "Ibid, 14, 15.

whole. Such an appeal, emphasizing the political weight of these middling groups, made it
more difficult to justify the importation of English indentures. It also dovetailed neatly with a
strategy for social control which stressed the "whiteness" of freemen and servants in
opposition to African "blackness" which was rapidly becoming synonymous with slavery.133
Thus, on the foundations of this novel division in the structure of reality itself, with a colony
populous enough to insure adequate self-defense and a mass of planter profits great enough
to allow for larger investments in human chattel, great planters began roughly after 1692 to
inaugurate a shift from servant to slave labor. This shift in the purchasing practices of the
great planters was the first expression of a new awareness that would begin to cohere them
as a provincial ruling class. The statutes of 1705 hammered out by a nine man committee of
the Legislative Assembly and concerning servile labor constituted objectified expression of a
consciousness and maturity that cohered the great planters as unified ruling class.
Racial Slavery as a Planter Strategy to Secure Rule
The Rebellion compelled great planters, Crown representatives and the Crown itself to
become fearfully conscious of the "giddy multitude. The evidence, though perhaps
circumstantial, is indisputable. First, the number of slaves imported for the entire decade todate beginning in 1670 averaged, according to Craven's headrights count, fifty-seven per
year. In 1677, that number fell, undoubtedly for fear of rebellious Africans, to just two. 134
Second, without hesitation and with the slightest provocation, Charles removed Berkeley, a
Royalist who had fought alongside his father and loyalist who had faithfully carried out Crown
policy for twenty-nine years (including policy such as the renewed Navigation Acts of the early
1660s that were vastly unpopular in the colony). If the colonists blamed Berkeley, his
peculation and authoritarian rule, then no matter how consistent with Crown policy his practice
he had to go.
Contemporarily, Bacon's Rebellion was a watershed event: It compelled the great planters to
formulate and develop a set of categories that would allow them to form a perspective in order
to deal effectively with any future outbreak of revolt. But, as we attempted to explain above, a
new reality itself had to first emerge, the contours of daily life had to change, before sufficient
insight could be possible to elaborate a strategy to secure their rule. It was only after these
new categories had become Objective Spirit, that is, after that strategy had been developed
and embodied in the fundamental law of the colony, that, retrospectively, the Rebellion could
appear as a historical watershed, i.e., that the victory of the loyalists in the Rebellion could
appear as a historical defeat for natives as well as for the oppressed and exploited. First,
native peoples, Indians, could, had they desired to, count on those dynamics of settler colonial
development which appear as an objective process in which soil exhaustion drove
monocultural crop expansion, hence, new settlement which in turn led to settler-native
confrontations in which Indians were more often than not the losers. Of course, the concept of
"objective process" masks the fact that, on the basis of social control of the colony insured by
the defeat of the Rebellion, planter pursuit of profitability without regard to soil conservation
drove the "process. Second, the same planter victory laid the foundations upon which lifetime
hereditary African servitude was constructed and the "black" and "white" "races" were
invented. Make no mistake about it: The introduction of the concept of "white" and with it the
category of "black" was a product of, in first Virginia and then across British North America,
ruling class policy to create and promote it. On this basis, the great planters employed the
133For the political struggle and appeal to freemen, Morgan, Ibid, 346-352, and Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure

in Virginia, 112-113.
134Craven, White, Red, and Black, 84, 85.

mass of "poor whites" as a agency to control "black" slaves; and, in so doing they as a class
had taken the major steps in practically realizing a strategy to secure their rule.135
The formulation of this strategy was part of a longer historical practice in which it developed,
was embedded and was the outcome. Let us call the strategy drawing a color line along a
fault line among the exploited. In the seventeenth century, the Virginia colony's great planters,
often at odds with one another - especially before 1680, groped first to find a means to protect
themselves against the general fall of tobacco prices that objectively threatened their positions
in society, i.e., threatened their incomes, estates and power. The crisis of overproduction that
confronted them and impinged on their revenues during the period 1660-1682 was not strictly
a market phenomenon. ("Free" or unencumbered competitive markets are an abstraction of a
later historical era.) Planter margins were a residue after monopolist controls and price fixing,
that is, profits were the return after planter costs, after a Crown impost independent of tobacco
price - it was based upon weight, after merchants freight pricing for English only transAtlantic
transportation, and after sale in a captive home market. To support those profits that
threatened to collapse, planters consistently pursued one avenue only, namely, they turned to
the one dimension of production-conceived-in-terms-of-costs they could control, and that was
labor. From the moment they transformed waged labor into temporary servitude, lifetime,
hereditary servitude was thereafter their objective. Yet even at this point, the strategy had
altogether failed to emerge explicitly.
Africans were the victims of choice because they formed the easiest social groups to enslave.
Indians could run away, and disappear into a forest world they knew far better than the sheriffs
who, raising the hue and cry, pursued them. They also could find allies, i.e., other native
bands, peoples or nations to support them. The effort to enslave the vast number of Indians
needed to sustain the settler colony's monoculture might result in war, which, even if winnable,
could disrupt production by disastrously damaging crops, fields, and estates and by
endangering planter lives themselves. The number of natives enslaved was limited and most
of them were taken south and sold in the West Indies. Englishmen too were difficult to
enslave. English bondsmen, like Indians before and Africans after, not only fought tooth and
nail against the brutal and vicious conditions of plantation servitude. They also had a historical
memory of "free" (viz., waged) labor, and it would have been difficult to permanently enslave
them. The difficulty arose from their struggle against "their" masters, and, in conjunction with
that struggle, from settled opinion in the homeland. It is likely that, through their control of
Parliament, gentry and the "better sorte" among middling groups in England would have
compelled the Crown to forgo any colonial adventure in which Englishmen enslaved
Englishmen, i.e., men and women amongst whom there may have been the potentially godly.
Finally, planters also learned that a regular flow of English servants could not be guaranteed,
as the military needs of the English State after 1689 demonstrated. That left Africans.
The various ethnic and national groupings imported from the west coast of Africa after 1673
lived in a world torn by fragmentation and constant warfare (which slave traders would come
to play a major, even generative, role in); they were, one and all, strangers in an alien land,
and without supporters or allies in the colony or abroad. Their coloration made it difficult for
them to blend in should they escape, and they did not constitute a compact, homogeneous
135Because the "fundamental law" of a social order, the society and culture of a "white" settler colony as it was

coming into being, was actually if initially embodied in legal codes (as colonial statutes), it is the defeat of one class,
the victory of another and the unified, dirigist consciousness of the victor which was incarnated as fundamental law in
the 1705 and subsequent legal codes of the Virginia colony.
The term, "invention" and the concept of a strategic ruling class orientation toward creating a buffer stratum against
servile revolt are developed by Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, V. 1, Racial Oppression and
Social Control. For poor whites as a buffer stratum, see also Edgar Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations,
and the South, 34, 296.

group since amongst them there were linguistic and cultural differences that would take time
to overcome. Calculated over a lifetime (and with steady growth in planter profit after 1682, it
was possible to make this calculation), their costs were considerably cheaper than temporary
servants. Once an albeit short-term peace (Treaty of Breda) had concluded the second AngloDutch war, and the issue of control of the coastal waters of Africa (and elsewhere) with the
Dutch was settled, the supply of Africans appeared plentiful. Finally, the Crown too strongly
favored the enslavement of Africans. Operating through a monopoly established in 1663 as
the Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa (and refounded in 1672 as the Royal African
Company), the Crown had, alongside private English merchants, direct interests in the slave
trade.136
Legal Sanction of Racial Slavery
Because legal codification expresses and give objective substance to the consciousness of
hegemonic classes, the strategy of drawing a color line along a fault line among the exploited
can be traced out in the colony's statutes. (Said codification was transcendently significant
because, once racial slavery was fully formalized, Virginias statutes provided the model for
similar laws throughout the colonies of British North America.)
Scattered laws of the early 1660s, primarily punitive, attempted to permanentize African
servitude. One statute in particular is of paramount importance. It was alien both to English
common law and to body of hitherto enacted statutory colonial law. (Its alien and
unprecedented character - which merely reveals the legislators intent - can be gauged from
the fact that customary fatherless children in the colony became "orphans" regardless of
whether the mother was still alive.) Enacted in 1662, the law declared all persons born in
Virginia follow the condition (free or bonded) of the mother.137
Laws enacted in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion (in 1680) furthered these early efforts, and
formed the first attempts to oppose Africans as slaves to Englishmen as servants. These
statutes rested on what we shall call repressive distinctions: Racial laws appear but they were
not distinctive, viz., were not yet clearly separated from oppressive class laws. For example,
"Negro" children were made tithable, thus workable, at age twelve, while "white, i.e., English,
children were made tithable at age fourteen.138 These were both reductions in a previously
uniform tithable age, set at age sixteen, that had been in effect. If repressive distinctions were
designed to drive a wedge between Africans and Englishmen, it was not along a color line.
The enactments were simply not systematic enough to suggest this was the intent.
(Nonetheless, it is in these enactments that the first usages of the term "white, taken over
from the planters in the West Indies, begin to appear with some regularity.) In our view, to hit
on this notion that great planters as a group had first to witness a distinction of this sort
136For planter reasons for enslaving Africans as opposed to natives and Englishmen, Lenore Bennett, Jr., The

Shaping of Black America, 63-65; Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom, 303-305, 310), among others
(Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 225, and Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 352), stress the cost
effective and profitability of slaves relative to servants; for sixteenth century aristocratic effort to enslave laborers,
efforts beaten back by those same laborers, Blackburn, Ibid, 57; and for social fragmentation and warfare in West
Africa, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Modern World, 98-128.
For the direct Crown interest in the slave trade (James II, it has been reckoned, made 12% annually until forced to
flee in 1689), Blackburn, Ibid, 255. The King (Charles II), the Duke of York (his brother, later James II), Prince Rupert,
and members of the royal family were members and subscribers of the original Company, as well as the refounded
Company (active after Charles' death). Ibid, 254-255.
137"Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be
slave or free, be it therefore enacted ... that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according
to the condition of the mother. 2 Hening 170. For the status on orphans, Morgan, American Slavery, American
Freedom, 168.
1382 Hening 462.

emerge in the conditions of daily life. More importantly, the laws were still designed primarily
to close the circle on African enslavement. Significant and symptomatic in this respective was
the statute which stated imported servants would be slaves unless born to Christians in a
Christian country and first purchased by a Christian.139
In the 1705 statutes, these repressive distinctions were subordinated to racial ones, and these
were systematized in a form which opposed "Negroes" as slaves to "white servants. The
1680 statutes, some racial in character, were primarily codifications of class oppression; those
of 1705 were oriented toward creating oppressive racial distinctions within the overall
framework of class exploitation. For example, according to the 1705 code any "white servant"
who raised a hand to master (mistress or overseer) could be subject to a year of extended
servitude, whereas any "Negro" slave who resisted "correction" could be legally murdered.140
Or, "white servants" could not be whipped without prior order of a justice of the peace, and
had the right to legally appeal against severity of treatment and inadequate provisions,141
while, again, this newly created servile group of "blacks" as "blacks" ("Negroes") had no
recourse whatsoever.
The differences in the repressive distinctions in the revised statutes were at once significant
and arranged on the lines of a plan. Provisions were made to systematically separate two
groups of the oppressed. A color line that privileged "white servants" was now openly
declared. It was also proclaimed as the colony's ruling class, exhibiting in and through these
statutes an achieved level of awareness that demonstrated it had cohered as such, made
remarkable efforts, efforts laden with penalties for failure to comply, to impress upon
nonpropertied "whites, especially servants, that they were different from and better than
"Negro slaves. Parish clerks were by force of statute to read the laws in full once in the spring
and again in the autumn before their assembled congregations. Sheriffs were under the same
compulsion to do similarly at the courthouse door during the June or July term of court.142 This
legally codified action was quite simply extraordinary. It must be understood and explained by
reference to a full consciousness of the intended consequences: Legislatively mandated,
revision of the colony's statutory codes was begun 6 years earlier (April 1699) by a joint
committee of the colony's Council of State (three members) and the House of Burgess (six
members).143 In that six year period, planters as a class organized for rule hammered out the
foundations of racial oppression as a system of social relations.
Still the great planters had yet to perfect their strategy. By creating a distinction between all
blacks as slaves and all whites, the codes of the 1720s accomplished this and, in so doing,
revealed the planters as a class had found the means to secure their rule: Specific social
groups, that is nonpropertied whites taken as a group, could be enticed to forgo revolt against
their class subordination by their practical commitment to enforcing the terms of racial
oppression. The code of 1723, along the way disenfranchising free blacks (excluding them
from the right to vote, hold office or testify in a court of law), 144 allowed officials, ex-officials,
and great planters and their overseers exemption from militia service as long as they could
find "one able white man, servants inclusive, to substitute for themselves.145
The 1727 code completed this systematization of racial laws with the singular provision for a
slave patrol, a special form of militia largely manned by bonded as well as free "poor whites,
1392 Hening 260.
1403 Hening 451, 459.
1413 Hening 442.
142Allen, Ibid, 2:251.
1433 Hening 181.
1444 Hening 133-34.
1454 Hening 125.

to secure the planter regime from the danger of black servile revolt. 146 These "whites" were
privileged since they were exempted from muster meetings, from tax payments, and from
parish levies.147 The extra tax burden planter groups may have incurred as a result of the
exemption was a pittance relative to the security (of rule and in the anticipated unhindered
pursuit of profitable production) they enjoyed.
After 1680, planters began to make every effort to drive servants and slaves apart: English
servants were humiliated, abused, beaten and branded, their terms of servitude were
extended, all to separate them from Africans. (Africans were, of course, also similarly
oppressed but in order to reinforce their servile status.) Nonetheless, such brutality, without a
change in the structure of daily life (reality) that effectively separated English servants from
African slaves, merely drove to servants and slaves together (by rendering their life conditions
indistinguishable.) Planters then legally sanctioned these practice. For decades planters had
legislated at best partially successful efforts to break the class unity of servants and slaves. To
little or no avail. Then a dramatic change in the objective structure of reality, in the conditions
of daily life, created the foundations upon which planters achieved strategic insight. The
consciousness elaborated on the basis of the insight was codified. A hundred years after the
legally codified and perfected strategy (revised 1727 code) aimed at producing a system of
social relations predicated on racial oppression, the extent of the success would be revealed
by the pervasive believe among nonpropertied whites North and South that slavery provided
the foundations of white liberty.
The Planter Ruling Class and Constitution of Class in History
We say that factionalism, rooted in significant differences in the daily practice of great
planters, made them a ruling elite and not a ruling class. As they found their way to a strategy
to secure their rule, they began to cohere as a class. They could have never found that
strategy if left to operate within the contours of productive practice: Their unity was forged
politically as Power and at the level of the State. It was forged politically with a view to another
class, to servile Africans. (The caste-like class identity of these serviles was in turn formed
productively: As slaves, they became conscious of their position and all its limitations in their
struggles to overthrow the terms of their bondage,148 i.e., in opposition to planters as
masters.) The unity of planters as a ruling class, was forged by rendering white servants,
tenants, and agricultural labors declassed, reducing them to a buffer stratum without
consciousness. For it is consciousness with coheres social groups and allows them to appear
as classes and act in history. Primarily oriented in their practice by a complex of racial beliefs,
nonpropertied whites formed appendages to the class rule of the great planters.
By mid-eighteenth century, the great planters began to form a mature ruling class. Hitherto
"immaturity" was due both to internal division and to planter status as a provincial aristocracy
of a settler colony. Certain developments, however, led out of this impasse. As males in the
great planter families achieved greater longevity, and children within great planter families
1465 Hening 19.

In retrospect, the slave patrol was crucial for the long-term success of the planter strategy securing social control of
labor by perpetuating a color line drawn along a fault line among the exploited. With privileges accorded poor whites
over against negro slaves, the former might feel they had a tangible stake in the system of social relations. The
perverse emotional satisfactions derived from this role offset their lowly status, near or actual propertylessness and
effective disenfranchisement. These were intrinsic features of the poor white position in the production process of the
society of plantation slavery that guaranteed these strata would be locked out of wealth, its possession, display and
consumption.
147Ibid.
148Revolts occurred not just in 1676, but also in 1687, 1694, 1709, 1710, 1722, 1731 and 1741. See Bennett, The
Shaping of Black America, 79.

intermarried, the competition for widows altogether disappeared. A certain stability and civility
in social life now began to appear. As the strategy for control by detaching "whites" from
slaves achieved effectiveness, and to this extent rendered productive life less volatile thereby
allowing planters to ratchet up the rate of exploitation on the body of slaves, great fortunes
were created. With wealth derived directly from the exploitation of slave labor, planters threw
off their dependency upon officeholding (as medium of appropriating wealth). The vicious
competition for political office largely disappeared. Growing out of planter productive practice
common emotional and moral sensibilities formed, and common loyalties, taboos and
sanctions took shape. This practice and those sensibilities and imperatives lay at the basis of
a self-conception that was cultivated and projected as a social model. Thus, the ideal of the
civically active gentleman-farmer appeared. Politically, opposition to the Crown began to loom
still larger, and it functioned as a central unifying activity. Common themes, such as republican
antagonism to arbitrary (kingly) government, the moral centrality of landowning to a liberty
loving people, opposition to standing armies and support for uncoerced free assemblies,
began to be articulated and to form nodal points around which a nascent national awareness
developed.149
Here, then were the beginnings of a class maturity in an altogether profound sense: Maturity
in this sense refers to that development of consciousness which enables a class to
hegemonize society and beyond that to act effectively in history. Consciousness in this sense
is determined from maximum potential consciousness, from the projection of action (and its
plan) based upon world vision, that is, the most cohesive and coherent (logically consistent,
integrated, and intelligible) perspective on community, world, and nature that the more abiding
elements of awareness of daily life of a group tend toward.150 Such awareness, visible in its
objectified products and creations (in Objective Spirit as, e.g., law, or Absolute Spirit as, e.g.,
in a literary or philosophical work), is operative in the practice of a class. Describing at any
given historical moment what a coherent class is at the limit capable of elaborating (and,
accordingly, suggesting the kind of change at that moment it is at the limit capable of
effecting), it is given by the totality of its formation and by, especially, social projects borne by
and in turn reshaping that formation, a formation which is at best partially grounded in
production. At this limit, it is precisely maximum potential consciousness which is historically
efficacious, which, in other words, lives in and illuminates the historically significant actions of
large social groups as coherent classes.
From the onset of the revolutionary crisis, through the early national period, to the war against
the British ending in 1815, the class of Virginia planters not only dominated a coalition of
social groups and classes that shaped the early history of the Republic, but also generated its
own organic intelligentsia.

149Some of these themes are stated in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 55-93.

150The concepts of world vision and maximum potential consciousness have been developed by Lucian Goldmann.

See his The Hidden God, 89-102, 313-318.

These concepts structure our analysis of the "free labor" community that underpinned northern opposition to slavery.
See chapter 7, especially "Real Community of Free Labor - Free Men, below.
Like Goldmann, our use of the concepts implies, for lack of a better term, a certain sociologization, of the Marxian
concept of class consciousness. The Marxian concept, especially in its only adequate rendering by Lukacs (History
and Class Consciousness), constitutes a metaphysical extrapolation of Hegels concept of Geist. On this, see Part II,
What if the Workers Dont Achieve Consciousness, section III in our Whither America?

Introduction
Opening Remarks
"Irrepressible" Conflict? Slavery, and a Conflict of Contradictory Societies
Dimensions of a Basic Conflict
The conflict between the North, and West, on the one side, and the South, on the other, was
one which pitted regionally-based societies with different classes and class structures, similar
yet different cultures, and different basic forms of productive activity with different logics and
trajectories of historical development, against one another. If the societies of North and South,
grounded on fundamentally different sets of productive relations and regimes of labor,
achieved contradictory, fractured unification in and through the national political system, it is
because in the bourgeois era - and specifically that of liberal capitalism, the national-State when more than merely cobbled together - comprehends not only fundamentally different
forms of productive activity but also the societies that rise on these forms.
The South was not, however, some foreign admixture in the historical development of
capitalism. In fact, it was only because the slave society of the South was defeated and
destroyed by civil war that retrospectively it can appear archaic. It was not liberal capitalism
that gave this anachronistic appearance plausibility; rather, it was the rise of radical
democratic and working class movements within societies of the West that did. After two
hundred years of industrial capitalism, we should full well know that it is compatible with many
different forms of barbarity, including slavery. Thus, in order to highlight the internal historical
relation of modern slavery to capitalist development, consider briefly a number of central
differences between modern and ancient slavery.
Ancient Slavery in Contradistinction to Plantation Slavery within the System of
Capitalist Social Relations
In the context of a massively agrarian world, private ownership of the land and labor
shortages, slavery in the ancient world rested on the victorious class struggle of the demos
and plebs against large aristocratic landowners. That is, it rested on the resulting
democratization of the polity and the popular expansion of citizen rights, and the consequent
inability of landed elites to compel free men to labor for them. The development of the
American South, on the other hand, was intimately bound up with that of the North, and, for
that matter, with the industrial (England and France) capitalist economies of Europe as well as
mercantile capitalist sectors of other European societies (Portugal, Spain, Netherlands). "New
world" slave societies made their appearance with the first stirrings of liberal capitalist
development, and could not have come into being apart from the enormous consumer
demand for sugar, tobacco and cotton this development generated.151
In the ancient world, expansion was not "economic" but geographical; or, stated differently,
military conquest, entailing plunder, captives taken for slaves and tribute, was identical with
expansion. In the American South, crop monoculture, the impracticality of widespread use of
fertilizers, "low labor productivity" and terrible livestock quality, against the background of
intra-regional slave breeding, sale, and purchase (that provided the labor for territorially
shifting production), led to soil exhaustion. This complex interplay resulting in soil exhaustion,
when taken together with an acquisitive planter subjectivity rooted in ancient practices of
151For the internal relation of the development of free citizenship to slavery, Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and

Modern Ideology, 86-90; on the relation of rising European capitalist demand and modern slavery, James Oakes,
Slavery and Freedom, 45-52, 140, and "New Merchants and the Distinctively, Modern Capitalist Nature of Production"
in our Preface, above.

expropriating, plundering, and murdering natives in pursuit of land, created an expansionary

dynamic at the heart of southern society.152
In the ancient world, slaves were used primarily in peasant households and agriculture but
also in "industry" and commerce. In Rome they engaged, on behalf of their masters, in petty
commodity production (the peculium). In Athens, other ancient Greek cities and in Rome, they
appeared as domestics, engaged in productive and unproductive labor, in public
administration (e.g., as clerks), in positions of authority (as overseers in the fields) and
responsibility (as, though rarely, bank "managers"). Accordingly, positioned in qualitatively
different places in production as well as in the "state," ancient slaves formed a juridical, but
not a social, class. Slaves in modern, southern society were used in productive labor
exclusively, whether engaged in agriculture, as craftsmen or as domestics mediately
reproducing (sewing, cooking, etc.) other slave labor. They formed a racially-based social
class, and never held positions of authority or responsibility.153
The social differences between ancient and modern slaves exhibit the underlying difference in
precognitive valuations of labor. The mid-nineteenth century southern planter, like his
seventeenth century counterpart, pursued profitability (within the context of efforts, unlike that
counterpart, to realize a seigniorial form of life), and, on this basis, carefully attended to and
maintained his slave labor in health and life: Accordingly, while southern planters may have
striven to become leisured gentlemen, they never doubted, nor did they downgrade, the
importance of labor socially or personally; the ancient ruling classes, on the other hand, held
(concrete) labor in contempt. It was the reason for their absence from their estates and the
use of slave overseers, slave clerks in the executive offices of the "state," a slave police force,
etc. Life for free citizens was community life that consisted in governing their own affairs. This
presupposed an entirely different subjective-class evaluation - one with an objective-social
impact - of the meaning and telos of life. For the ancients, especially the Greeks, this
evaluation was political (the one area from which slaves were without exception excluded) and
centered on citizen self-government, while for the Southern planter it was economic and
social, revolving around production for the sake of the accumulation of wealth and its
display.154
Thus, while sharing certain social features in common with ancient slave societies, the
differences described above are crucial. Characterized, economically, by its need for large
capital outlays, its strong tendency toward single crop specialization and its commercialism
that in its early history anticipatorily entailed forms of the capitalist organization of work
processes,155 the slave South (as well as Caribbean and Brazilian slave societies) appeared
with the rise of industrial capitalism, and, while remaining productively distinct, was fully
152For the inseparable relation of conquest and expansion in the ancient world, Perry Anderson, Passages from

Antiquity to Feudalism, 28; for southern expansionism, Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 245246. Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 125, notes this expansive dynamic characteristic of
the southern economy without, undertaking an account of its well-springs; for the crucial, subjective moment that as
customary behavior was not merely ancient (native peoples were still being pushed westward out of lands -which as
states, e.g., Arkansas, Texas, were part of the historical core of the Confederacy - at the height of planter "civilization,"
viz., during the 1830s), see "Overproduction, Class Geography of Planters, and Planter-Settler Engrossment of Indian
Lands" in the Preface, above.
153On the role of slaves in the ancient "economy," Finley, Ibid, 80, 82, and Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient
Greece, 99, 100, 101, on the peculium and the juridical reality of slavery, Finley, Ancient Slavery., 77, 82, 102.
154In ancient Athens, the police force consisted in a corps of state-owned slaves. Such a development would have
been inconceivable and practically unrealizable in the slave South. Finley, Ibid, 99. For the ancient contempt of labor
(at least among the ruling classes), Anderson, Ibid, 26-27, and, especially Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2837. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 22-28, 137-145, for restriction (in our view correct) of this
contempt to the ruling classes; for a different evaluation of planters attitude toward labor, one which see it as a mere
ruse hiding real contempt, see Genovese, Ibid, 47-48.

integrated into the transAtlantic system of capitalist social relations. The slave South cannot
be thought as merely as a reproduction of the ancient slave societies within a modern context:
If it is the case that in large parts of the ancient Mediterranean world slavery was the dominant
form of social wealth-generating productive activity, in the modern world it was subordinate to
the entire economic development of liberal capitalism.156
Specificity of Slave-Master Relation in Contradistinction to Wage Labor-Capital Relation
Having situated southern slave society within the context of capitalist development, it must not
be forgotten that the South was "peculiar," that its specificity as a society at the outset of the
Civil War rested on the foundations of slave production and, thus, radically distinguished its
from the capitalist North. The regime of labor in the South was unfree, in the North (and old
West) it was free. The basic social relation of production in the South was slavery, in the North
it was tendentially wage-labor (in the West tendentially tenancy). The fundamental social
classes in the South were planters and slaves, in the North wage-earners and capitalists
(including in the West property owning capitalist farmers and, in particular, proletarians
disguised by tenancy)157. The dynamic of societal development in the South rested on a
complex, socio-economically (and not naturally) conditioned fact of soil exhaustion that
demanded geographical expansion if the social order was to endure, in the North (including
the West) that dynamic centered on capital accumulation. The culture of the South was
paternalistic, that of the North and West was bourgeois.
Not matter how much the profits extracted from slave labor contributed to laying the
foundations for industrial capitalist development in the North, and to what extent historically
forms of capitalist organization of work processes appeared in the South (e.g., in colonial
tobacco-producing Virginia), the South was not capitalist. Though both societies produced
commodities for market exchange, cotton in the South was produced (exclusively for external
markets) by slave labor. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system of social relations (and not
merely productive ones) produced and reproduced through waged labor. This assertion
articulates objective characteristics of capitalism in two senses.
First, for capitalist production to exist at all, labor must be alienable. A woman's labor must be
a commodity. Subjectively, this means, her exertion, strength and skill, though hers, are no
longer judged as integral aspects of her personality, but are objectively possessed, "owed,"
the utilization and transfer of which she can at will turn over to another for a price. Now, as in
the slave South, there may well also have been a market in slaves; but it is not a market
between slaves and masters because the exchange relation only existed between masters. A
market in slaves hardly, then, renders slave production capitalist.
Second, it is not in the formal act of exchange of wages for labor that the system of capitalism
is constituted; rather, it is in the actual labor of men and women as workers that it takes
shape. What at any given moment in the actual labor of men and women is lived and
experienced as a task to be performed, a certain attentiveness, a temporal rhythm and a
certain sociality with other workers, a unitary complex of odors, sounds and sights, an unitary
155Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 227-228, 232-235, and the section of our Preface cited in

note 1, above.
156These modern economic characteristics are suggested by Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern
United States to 1860, I (1958), 302, cited in Genovese, Ibid, 15.
The relation of slavery to capitalism constituted a complex dialectic, so that, for example, though the latter was
subordinate to the entire development of the latter, in the United States slavery was the infrastructural foundations
upon which American capitalism was built (e.g., roads, canals, New York ports were all built out profits from cotton
production in the form of loans). Profits from cane production of Jamaican slaves played a similar role in France.
This integration is examined in chapter 1, "Cotton Exchange and the Rise of New York," below.
157For concealed proletarianization in the old West, see chapter 2, "Capitalist Development in the Old West," below.

complex of internal feelings (stress, body aches, anticipations), etc., all has the objective
social meaning of a cost of production, that is, a purely quantitative calculable element of
production to be bought and utilized as a raw material in the production of commodities. It is
labor that creates these commodities (which can only be realized as such through sale in a
market), but it is not this labor, not "the actual labor of men and women," but only this concrete
labor after it has been reduced (from lived temporality to objective time), quantified and
generalized in and through waged labor-processes and then objectified and materialized in its
product, i.e., after it has been abstracted through this entire socio-productive process.
Reduced, quantified and generalized, and objectified and materialized, i.e., abstracted, labor
creates commodities, and what is essential to them as commodities, namely, value. This labor
processes-based tendential reduction of workers' humanity - sensibility, affection, corporeality,
experience and reflection - to an object of capitalist exploitation is abstraction. Abstractive
labor-processes generate value (capital), and the entire system of social relations that
reproduces and enlarges itself through cyclical expansion and contraction, driven by an
objective logic of capital accumulation, is capitalism.158
We repeat: The South was not itself capitalist. Only on the basis of an exceedingly narrow and
reductionist perspective centered on the merely formal similarities of wage-labor and slavery
(e.g., both as basic social relations that are determinate for the whole of society) would it be
possible to argue otherwise. In fact, the employer-employee and master-slave relations were
essentially different. The master-slave relation could not be reduced to the purely "economic"
relation (in the modern calculative sense) that characterized wage-labor. More specifically,
there was a formal freedom versus a formal, absolute submission; the form of surplus
extraction, exploitation, was abstraction as opposed to degradation; from the dominant side of
the relation, there was, on the one hand indifference and on the other paternalism. Each
relation gave rise to qualitatively different societally characteristic, customary class behaviors
and cultures. Each relation also gave rise to qualitatively different class psychologies and
personalities as social class types (e.g., at work the cold, calculative rationality of the
capitalist, in the fields the profusely emotive displays characteristic of the planter, etc.). 159
Capitalist development, grounded in the fundamental social relation of waged labor and
capital, in its liberal, competitive era (and beyond) was determined by production processbased abstraction of waged labor and its metamorphosis into value. The production,
extraction and accumulation of a value created the "economy" as a separate sphere of society
that functioned as a regulator of the totality of social life and led to cyclical development
distinguished by periodic crises in the form of rapid (expansion and) contraction. This form of
development was tendentially characteristic of the North at the outset of the Civil War. The
South, as moment of the American social formation, was mediately subject to this same
movement; but it was not of this form of society. This much said, southern society was
nonetheless integrated into the world capitalist market, and was as such constituted in a
manner that made its class structure, its dynamics and it itself as a social system in its
specificity with all its peculiarities, as explained above, historically and logically impossible
apart from this broader, capitalist context.

158"Labor, for capital, is modernity's metaphysics / it is that miraculous transubstantiation / of sweat, muscle, blood

and bone / into / abstracted and quantified,/ generalized, objectified and materialized/ emptied temporality / into
'value'." From a poem entitled "Labor," in Guillaume-Francois Destiche's Night of the World. See also the third critique
in our Community and Capital.
159On paternalism, see Genovese, Ibid, 32-33, and his Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3-7. Also see Oakes, The Ruling Race, xixii.

The Capitalist North and the Republican Party

[Northern Ruling Class Social Groups]
By 1860, the North(east), consisting in Massachusetts, New York, (eastern) Pennsylvania and
Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, and Rhode Island, was thoroughly
capitalist, dominated by the unity of merchant, financial and manufacturing capitals. Merchant
and financial capitals, differentiating themselves from out of long history of commercial
capitalist development, were based both on an older, great merchant stratum rooted in firms
engaged in import and export and modern financiers whose activities were strictly grounded in
banking and capital forming institutions. (Among both strata there was a small but important
element of factors, brokers, bankers and merchants tied to the antebellum South by the export
of cotton.) This older merchant stratum was intertwined with the great textile magnates whose
fortunes had been generated through creation of the first factory-based industry in North
America. Newly emergent financial capitalists, on the other hand, were housed almost
exclusively in the great cities of the Northeast - New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Related
by family, by high Calvinism and by vision of the world, engaged in similar life-practices, these
big eastern bankers and trans-Atlantic import-export merchants together with the great textile
manufacturers, leading Congregationalist and Episcopalian clergy and prominent
"conservative" politicians objectively and subjectively constituted an alliance of social groups
whose vast wealth and economic power made them a ruling class.160
[Industrialization and the Republican Party]
Manufacturers, on the other hand, with the very important exception of railroad capitalists,
were largely still economically organized on a small scale and still dependent upon
commercial, merchant capital. It was the Civil War, and the huge profits from the northern
government demand-generated wartime boom, that allowed manufacturers to found their
independence, by liquidating debts thereby breaking ties of dependency to the merchant
community. Not yet the giant industrialists of one decade later, manufacturers were,
nonetheless, tied particularly to financial social groups through the Republican party, and it
was their vision that by war's end constituted a central ideal component of the alliance of
classes, strata, social groups and professional politicians that made up this party. This alliance
included, of course, much larger class strata than the narrower social groups making up the
northeastern ruling class. The Republican party was, after all, the party of "free men," that is,
small farmers and craftsmen, engaged in "free labor," a party opposed to slavery and
committed to "free soil."161
The Republican party incarnated specific political-ideal interests, centrally the aims of ending
slavery and unifying by industrializing the nation. It was also, of course, organizationally
impelled to win national power both to realize its politico-economic program and for its own
sake. The question that arises here is this: If industrialists were not the socio-economic force
they were to become in the era of trustification (industrial capitalist concentration), if, in fact,
their differentiation out of a "free labor" mlange that also included craftsmen and small
businessmen could perhaps be foreseen (because it was already occurring) but not on the
scale that would so shortly be achieved, how is it that an economic program that anticipated
the interests of industrial capitalists was central to the early Republican party?
160For the ruling class unity of the great merchants and financiers, Jim Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 59, and Irwin

Unger, The Greenback Era, 125.

161For the exception of railroad capital and its central role in the creation of an industrial infrastructure in the United
States during the 1850s, see the section headed "Railroads, Regional Integration, and Specifically Capitalist
Development" in chapter 2, below. For the economic dependency of manufacturers, Eric Foner, Reconstruction,
1863-1877, 20; and, for the social basis of Republican party support, Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, passim.

The first point to note here is that the historical form of industrialization at its origins cannot
straightfowardly be assimilated to a more developed, even if more familiar, form.
Industrialization in the early era of trustification (1870-1894) was characterized by capitalists
engaged in vertical integration of their firms in order to create monopolistic domination of
markets through control over all moments of the production of commodities. For example,
Andrew Carnegie owned ore mines (raw materials) in the Mesabi Range in present-day
northern Minnesota, a railroad and the lines that transported this ore east, and, among many
others, the Cambria Iron Works, a manufacturing complex at Homestead (Pittsburgh) which
produced iron (later steel) rails. The characteristic feature of capitalist firm in this era was the
(largely successful) attempt to develop a mass production form of industrial activity. This
project involved a sustained, State-supported struggle with manufacturing workers, largely
craftsmen (themselves descendants of artisans of an earlier handicraft era) who undertook
defensive actions against assaults on wages and in response to skill dilution, and the
recreation of the American working classes as a mass production, largely immigrant proletariat
with a small stratum of skilled workers in the new industries.
In the late antebellum and Civil War eras, industrialization did not at all have this meaning (of
the creation of mass production forms). But harbor expansion, waterway improvements (e.g.,
dredging rivers and clearing them of snags), the manufacturer of railroad engines, rail cars,
and the construction of tens of thousands of miles of railroad lines, the production of
mechanical implements for use by western farmers (e.g., thrashers), etc., was industrialization
nonetheless. As the means of achieving American national expansion and realizing American
national power (as well an end in itself), the Republican party enthusiastically supported this
form of industrialization: From 1854 until Congressional control was finally achieved in late
winter 1861, Republicans in both Houses (and in state legislatures as well) pushed hard,
running up against the southern planter controlled Senate or a northern Democratic-southern
sympathizing President, for "internal improvements (e.g., a Pacific railroad), for a homestead
law, for agricultural colleges, etc.
There are three further answers to this question concerning the relation of the Republican
party to industrialization.
First, because their desire for "free soil" thrust it directly into conflict with the entire systems
logic of southern development as it actually unfolded on the ground, pushed on by fear of the
consequences of tenancy in the old West, an alliance of leading, western social strata
(politicians, lawyers, bankers and capitalist farmers), not manufacturers, was the vanguard in
the struggle against slaveholders. Against planter efforts to keep the masses of property
owning small farmers, tenants farmers and agricultural waged laborers out of the territories
(efforts embodied both in armed struggle in Kansas, and in opposition to Congressional
legislation and successful demands for Presidential vetoes), this alliance pushed by these
same masses insisted on a homestead law to cheaply distribute federally expropriated Indian
lands as well as harbors and rivers improvements and railroad construction in order to get
rural surpluses to market. As a central class component of the emerging Republican party, the
western business classes demanded industrialization.
The second answer, which we shall develop later, is the Republican party program closely
corresponded to the older Whig-National Republican-Federalist programs of earlier eras, that
is, its key components included a protective tariff to support infant manufacturers and to
furnish revenues for internal improvements, a national bank to generate and control an
uniform currency that would insure the stability of the financial transactions of those capitalists
engaged in such improvements, and a centralized State that would protect and guide the
entire process.

The third answer is that a vast, State-sponsored program of internal improvements, what a
later generation would come to call industrialization, was "in the air," that is, the cultural-ideal
atmosphere was charged with frenzied expectations of wealth gain based on internal
improvements and territorial expansion. Inextricably intertwined with justificatory notions such
as "manifest destiny," the uplifting force of "Christian civilization," etc., i.e., with the racist
metaphysics of territorial expansionism, the social groups forming the Republican party
excitedly, anticipatorily, bore in their bosoms a project of nation-building - the subjectively
efficacious moment of a nascently objective dynamic of capital accumulation - to be achieved
through the creation of a national market, a creation that was only achievable through the
simultaneous destruction of the Slavepower.162
Southern Slave Society
Now the Slavepower was the "Yankee" name given to a concept which described the southern
planter politicians, great planters, their efforts to dominate national life, and their efforts to
extend slavery into the territories, into areas militarily seized, occupied, and settled by
Americans (e.g., Texas from Mexico, later an aborted design for taking Cuba from the
Spanish), and even into the North. Stripped of its conspiratorial character, the concept
described the slaveholding aristocracy as a social class. Yankee fears of the Slavepower were
an ideal moment in the very logic of development of the North: Dialectically expressed in and
mediated by the subjectivity of its ruling class social groups, its vanguard strata and the
Republican party as the organized form of a hegemonic class alliance, this development
propelled the society of the North inevitably toward conflict with the South. Just how did
matters look from the side of the southern planters?163
Because it is obvious, it bears stating explicitly: The social power of planters was based on
rural activity, on plantation agriculture - unlike the planters' northern and urban capitalist
counterparts. Planters were not a homogeneous social class, and socio-economic (and
subjective) differences among planters were largely determined by differences in
slaveholdings. The South, in fact, was regionally circumscribed by slavery; its several
divisions (and their subregions) were shaped by characteristic slaveholding patterns.
In one region of the Upper South (Delaware, Maryland) slavery itself was very limited, with
populations of free blacks much greater than slaves. Here manumission had been long
practiced. In other regions of the Upper South (Missouri and Kentucky), where tobacco and
hemp were grown, pockets of slavery concentration existed (in a northern belt of central
Missouri along the Missouri River, around Frankfurt-Lexington, and in south central Kentucky
bordered by Bowling Green in the east and Hopkinsville in the west). Here, though, large
populations of anti-planter, anti-slave yeomen and workers (especially in St. Louis which was
a northern city) numerically dominated the region. In the middle South (Tennessee, North
Carolina) - both cotton and tobacco producing regions, slave populations, though not
localized, were found in specific regions of each state (extending down from south central
Kentucky into middle Tennessee, in the southwestern Tennessee region along the Mississippi
River, in the eastern half of North Carolina). In these regions of the Upper South, slave
populations ranged from tiny to large but remained outnumbered by mostly free white
yeoman.164
162On the anticipatorily character of the industrial project, similarly, Alexander Saxton, who, relying far too heavily on

a physicalistic metaphor, suggests that atmosphere was "magnetized, already tuned to the field of a distant force."
The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 102-103, 249-251 (citation appearing on 249); also W.E.B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America, 293-295.
163For the "Slavepower," Eric Foner, Ibid, 92-94, 129; W.E.B. Du Bois, Ibid, 100.
164For the geographical distribution of slaves and crops, William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 10-11 (maps).

Qualitatively smaller slave populations, and geographical proximity to the North, conditioned
attitudes toward slavery that are not popularly associates with slaveholders. In two antebellum
periods these attitudes were particularly manifest. The first period (1820s to roughly 1835)
was determined by the extraordinarily low price cotton fetched. The second period (the 1850s)
was, not incidentally, characterized by the greatest cotton boom in antebellum history. The
boom created a demand for slaves in the Lower South. During this period Upper South
slaveholders sold off large numbers of their slaves southward. With the proceeds they
engaged in an agriculture reform that entailed some crop diversification and rotation, reduction
in the size of recently fertilized fields, greater supervision of a decreasing populations, and,
among some of the region's states, a reorientation toward northern markets. Otherwise
suppressed, in these periods "conditional termination," i.e., gradual emancipation of slaves
based on their removal to locations outside the United States ("colonization"), emerged as the
dominate perspective on slavery in the regions of the Upper South.165
The Lower South and Southwest (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Arkansas and eastern Texas) had the heaviest concentration of slaves. (By 1860, the Lower
South as a whole held 55% of the slave population in the United States.) In the coastal
lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia, rice was grown, and in southmost, central Louisiana
sugar was produced. But the densest slave populations largely coincided with those areas of
heaviest cotton production, that is, in those areas most approaching a tropical climate, areas
often designated as the "black belt." Among the great plantations of these areas 85% of all
slaves in the Lower South were held. These areas consisted in the Mississippi River Valley
(from New Orleans to Memphis and north), the Red River Valley, a strip of counties weaving
through the center of both Alabama and Georgia, and central South Carolina.
In the older areas of the Lower South (South Carolina originally, but by 1860 all of the "black
belt" was old South), the early nineteenth century collapse of cotton prices had produced
violent opposition to Congressionally legislated tariffs designed to protect fledgling northern
manufacturers. These low prices were blamed on the tariffs. Thus, for old South planters it
was the Yankees, i.e., their tariffs (which did, in fact, exert downward price pressure), and
neither regional soil exhaustion that lowered yields nor competition from vastly more fertile
southwestern lands, that created overproduction and lowered prices in the first place, and
that, most importantly, threatened a settled seigniorial, rural life based on slavery.166
On the southwestern frontier, a moving frontier that consisted in Alabama, Louisiana and
Mississippi in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century and Arkansas and Texas in the
1820s and 1830s, primitive conditions of "uninhabited" and "uncivilized" life generated even
among planters a "whites' only" egalitarianism, while the presence of vast "uninhabited," fertile
tracts of plantation crop producing land found planters both able to produce cheaper and to
make up for lower prices by increasing production. Accordingly, these planters were more
concerned about Indians as restraints on slavery expansion.167
Slavery, as a singular precondition of their respective forms of life, committed both regions of
the Lower South to the politics of "perpetualism," viz., to slavery as the foundations of society,
culture and civilization. Nonetheless, while planters of the Upper South may not have been as
165For the collapse of cotton prices, Ibid, 256; on conditional termination, Ibid, 119-210.

Virginia was an historically shaped anomaly: Because, as part of the Upper South, it was the center of slavery in the
colonial and early national eras, it shared characteristics with both that region (tobacco culture, ambiguous attitudes
among masters toward slavery, sell-off of slaves southward, etc.) and the Lower South (large black belt in the
Tidewater east, an old family, settled seigniorial life wherein the class line might take precedence over the color line,
etc.).
166For the materially grounded differences between planters in the older Lower South and the Southwest, Ibid, 262,
268-269
167For the lower costs of cotton production among southwestern planters, see North, Ibid, 125, 129.

committed to slavery in perpetuity as those of the Lower South, all southern planters could
agree that the question of the fate of slavery in the South was a question that only
Southerners could decide, and, in particular, not one for "Yankee meddlers." Of course,
"Southerners" meant planters, and the greater that planter the more he had to say in that
decision. Regionally-based differences should not obscure planter unity on this central
question: Consciously constituted, this unity (which itself was largely the content of early
southern nationalism) was the decisive moment in the formation of a southern planter ruling
class.168
The Role of Cotton Production in American Economic Life in its Entirety
If hemp and tobacco and rice and sugar as well as cotton were southern crops, after 1790
cotton was the far most important crop not just in the South but in the entire United States. It
was, in fact, the most important American export until at least 1870. The surpluses, generated
by slave labor and realized as profits in the sale of cotton in foreign markets, were re-funneled
into northern development. Extracted by those Northerners - brokers, merchants and
especially bankers - for disposing of the cotton abroad, these surpluses, for example, financed
the development of a transportation system needed to bring cotton to port cities (New York,
Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans). The construction of infrastructure in the Northeast, and
the concentration of money wealth (used to finance other economic activities) in eastern
banking institutions as well as among the trans-Atlantic export-import merchant community
clearly produced the wealth necessary to start the North down the road to industrial capitalist
development. Stated differently, not only was slave labor, in particular the surpluses its
exploitation generated, the basis of planter wealth and power in the national political system
but those surpluses, moreover, constituted the material foundations of American civilization:
The culture and society of America rested on racial slavery. 169 At the same time, cotton
exchange incorporated the backwards plantation agriculture of the South, and with the rest of
the American economy resting on it, into the circuits of British capital, reducing it to an adjunct
to the latter's reified movements.
That much said, it is important to recognize the decisive role of cotton in American economic
development because, among other reasons, this centrality provided the great cotton planters
with their vast wealth, social authority and the enormous political power that they leveraged
into a tenuous control of the national political system.
The federal system, it might be recalled, was the political form adopted at the founding
Constitutional Convention of 1787. Driven by the shortcomings and failures of the
Confederation of states (1781-1787), delegates from the big states (Virginia, Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania) achieved a federalist compromise with a bloc of small (New Jersey, Delaware)
and slaveholding states (Carolinas and Georgia) that carried the Convention. This
compromise protected those legislatively-ensconced ruling classes (that had dominated
climatically-geographically based forms of production and unified themselves in territoriallybounded statelets of what in 1787 appeared to be a passing era), as well as the larger, more
168For "perpetualists," see Freehling's discussion of South Carolinian confrontationalism, The Road to Disunion, 253-

276; for agreement on Southerners deciding that fate of slavery, Ibid, 36, 150, 359.
169Regarding cotton exports, as late as 1870, cotton constituted 72% of the total U.S. exports by volume. See the
chart presented by William N. Parker in his "Comment," 74 (on Rothstein in Gilchrist and Lewis, Economic Change in
the Civil War Era). According to Parker, for the years given cotton formed the following percentages by volume of total
agricultural output: 87% in 1839, 80% in 1849, 49% in 1859, and 72% in 1869 and again in 1879. For the entire
period 1815-1860, cotton constituted nearly half (46.4%) of the value of total U.S. exports. (Figure calculated on basis
of table appearing in North, Ibid, 233.). On cotton at the foundations of American capitalist development, Ibid,
especially 67-70, 122, 127-128. Also see Eric Wolf's remarks (Europe and the People Without History, 279, 280) on
the primacy of cotton in U.S. antebellum production.

powerful and sectionally-based, commercial and slaveholding interests with which those
classes intersected. While the federal form allowed the large merchants and the great planters
to fashion a unity amongst themselves, that unity was contradictory. It led, because of their
weight in the nation's economy (attributable to the profits from cotton production), to the
political ascendancy and hegemony of planters in the national political system. Planter
hegemony had, however, already been embedded in fundamental law.170
On the basis of control of the national political system, great planters hegemonized the
various social groups who as a whole made up the southern, white society: The seigniorial
ethos of the old families of southern planters in the older regions of the South, the paternalism
of the great planters, and their "perpetualist" self-defense of this self-consciously "aristocratic"
form of life set the standard for southern practical behavior, articulated attitudes and entailed
political commitments that would accelerate the movement, grounded in the contradictory
dynamics of antagonistic yet interrelated societies, toward conflict and war.171
Dynamics of a Unfolding, Necessary Confrontation
In the North as a whole, the classical relation of town to country in the epoch of liberal
capitalism prevailed. In the West, capitalist farmers, both the mass of tenants and the small
stratum that based itself on private property in very cheap lands, found markets for their grain
and livestock surpluses in the growing demand of the exploding, no longer self-sufficient,
laboring populations of northeastern cities. In the East, manufacturers, financed by the profits
accruing to merchant-bankers from their role in the cotton trade, developed and grew in
lockstep with the rising demand for finished goods and implements by western farmers. This
inter-regional relation constituted the conditions for self-sustaining capitalist development. The
conscious expression of this entire movement, articulated in the phase "free soil, free labor,
free men," was embodied in the early Republican party.
In the South, "free men" were marginalized socio-economically and politically: Southern
yeomen possessed the least fertile lands (and historically planter expansion exacerbated the
situation); and, in most of the South (e.g., Virginia, North and South Carolina, etc.), yeomen
populations were effectively disenfranchised as planter-controlled legislatures insured (state)
government service provided such meager remuneration that only the wealthy could,
generally speaking, pursue politics as a "vocation." Yeoman populations, living largely outside
the market, and a few tens of thousands of planters, possessing extremely limited needs for
finished goods (including crude implements, cotton gins and slave clothing), could not
generate the vast demand for an entire range of manufactured goods that several million
western farmers and that western urban classes did. Instead "low labor productivity," crop
monocultures (that were not merely not diversified but also were not periodically fallowed),
170Enshrined in Constitution, the three-fifths rule gave the South as a section the largest single bloc, though a

minority, in the House, a numerical majority in the Senate, and a nearly unbroken domination of Presidency for
seventy-five years. Another Constitutional clause played a role here also. The fugitive slaves clause was held so
sacred by southern dominated Supreme Courts that northern personal-liberty laws were consistently struck down.
(For personal liberty laws and the Somerset rule, see Oakes' chapter entitled "Masters and Slaves" in his Slavery and
Freedom.)
171For the most part, we prefer to use the term "seigniorial" in opposition to the more feudally laden "aristocratic."
"Seigniorial" refers to "masterly" behavior, which historically in the West but only in the West had been pre-bourgeois.
In the case of southern planters, this behavior was itself at once capitalist and non-bourgeois. But it cannot properly
be characterized as pre-bourgeois, and it surely was not "aristocratic" on European feudal model; that is, planter
behavior was not based on the institutional foundations of a legally defined social class, that is, a social hierarchy
rooted in hereditary legal privilege (primogeniture), noble titles, etc. To be sure, bourgeois behavior abounded, e.g., in
family relations. But the master-slave relation just as surely generated behavior - for example, the regular exhibition of
passions as opposed to rational calculating activity, and forms of dissolute behavior such as gambling that were
engaged in by significant number of planters - that could be found in no bourgeois catalog of virtues.

and the great expense of fertilizing vast tracts of plantation lands conjoined to the practical
difficulties of controlling slave labor while doing so, mediated by the customary planter attitude
toward land, led rapidly to soil exhaustion. Because of the enormous profitability of cotton
production beginning in the latter half of the 1840s after recovery from the panic of 1837 was
underway, neither crop diversification nor livestock cultivation (which was, at any rate,
rendered nearly impossible by the notoriously terrible treatment of farming animals by slaves)
were viable alternatives. With a steady source of slaves "imported" from the Upper South,
sales that allowed that region to engage in a limited agricultural reform, the great "black belt"
planters of the Lower South demanded and pursued territorial expansion as soil exhaustion
threatened the entire regime of plantation life.172
Territorial expansion, however, meant opposition to cheap homesteads ("free soil"), it meant
opposition to "free men" (i.e., to tenant farmers who might settle the territories, and work and
farm those homesteads), and it meant slave labor in opposition to the "free labor" of skilled
workers, craftsmen, and farmers in slave as opposed to free states and territories. Farmers
and workers of the West desperately wanted cheap, rich lands, and were just as desperate to
keep black slave labor out of the West and the territories. They were haunted by a great fear
of a competition that would at once lower the value of their products making them
uncompetitive, and in the interaction with blacks degrade them leaving them less than manly.
The great southern planters, rendering the soil unproductive through cotton monoculture, also
wanted new, fertile land, that is, they wanted the territories to be incorporated as slave states.
The great planters organized their opposition to western farmers and the dynamic elements of
capitalism in the East through the Democratic party. The Democracy, in practice dominated by
planter concerns, was a class alliance constructed on the basis of support from poor farmers
North and South, artisan workers in Philadelphia and New York, and immigrant laborers. In the
two decades before the Civil War, southern planters blocked every effort, through Democratic
party control in national political system (especially in the Senate), to legislatively generate
the funds to pay for construction of the infrastructural preconditions for a unified, national
market. These efforts, primarily threefold, were aimed at aborting internal improvements such
as canal, road and harbors construction; tariff protection; and, a homestead act that made
expropriated, Indian lands available at cheap prices to farming settlers.173
As the nineteenth century unfolded, this conflict between two antagonistic and mutually
exclusive societal logics, between slaveholding-driven territorial expansion and capitalist
industrialization borne along by the western farming masses demanding "free soil," was more
172For a detailed example of growth of plantations at expense of poor white subsistence farmers in Louisiana in

1850s, Roger Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana, 96. "Low labor productivity" constituted the primarily
daily form of slave resistance to planter efforts to not merely rationalize but absolutely control slaves. See Oakes,
Slavery and Freedom, 140-141, and especially, Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 26, 43-69, 244; and,
also W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40, who summarizes the real situation underlying planter complaints: "All
observers spoke of the fact that the slaves were slow and churlish; that they wasted material and malingered at their
work. Of course, they did. This was not racial but economic. It was the answer of any group of laborers forced down
to the last ditch. They might be made to work continuously but no power on earth could make them work well."
For the limitations of livestock farming and (cotton) crop monoculture, Genovese, Ibid, 85-104 and 105-123,
respectively; for the contradictory character of agricultural reform, Ibid, 124-154; for the relation of soil exhaustion to
an expansion dynamic, Oakes, Ibid, 134, A.O. Craven, "Poor Whites and Negroes in the Ante-Bellum South," 14, and
Shugg, Ibid, 105; but for the fullest, most careful elaboration of this dynamic (that nonetheless misses its subjective
mediated moment), Genovese, Ibid, 244-251, 255-264.
173For the Democracy and its embodiment of this opposition, see chapters 3 and 5, below.
According to Oakes (Ibid, 123), there was a Whig, anti-Jackson party situated in the South that pushed for "internal
improvements," an activist government, sound banking practices, etc. However, it was not, in our view, viable
precisely because it did incorporate the interests of the great cotton planters, i.e., because, (socio)logically expressed,
it floundered on the contradiction between a nationalist party whose most important membership component was
state righters. For this, Freehling, Ibid, 356ff.

and more fought out in a struggle for control over the national political system by the
contending parties. As expansionism from both sides proceeded apace, these conflicts over
control of the national political system periodically erupted into struggles over the
Constitutionally-mandated basis of representation in that system, that is, over creation of a
territory or admission of a state as "free" or "slave." The entire history of the development of
the "irrepressible" conflict can legitimately be viewed from the perspective of these struggles,
and the erupting disputes - the Missouri Controversy (1819-1820), South Carolina Nullification
Crisis (1832-1833), Texas annexation and war with Mexico (1845-1847), the Compromise of
1850, and the prolonged Kansas-Nebraska crisis (1854-1859) - as so many nodal points for
the development of the antagonism that sharpened the North-South conflict. Long before that
outbreak of formal hostilities in early spring 1861, the struggle in Kansas beginning in 1854
demonstrated at once this antagonism took its sharpest form and found its most acute
expression on the frontier (i.e., precisely where all the political, specifically State, and other
institutional mediations of social life were missing or, at best, rudimentarily developed) and
that the practical outcome of this conflict between contradictory societies tended toward open,
armed struggle. Sometimes centered on tariffs, banking or internal improvements, not fully
conscious until after 1843 (the point onward from which the great southern planters as a class
really became conscious of themselves, their institutions and their differences with the "free"
capitalist North, and the point onward from which the free or slave status of territories began
to become the central issue), the struggle from beginning to end was over slavery as
foundations of organized social life.174
By 1860, two contradictory class parties confronted each other: On the one side, born in the
mid-1850s the northern Republican party, a party that (on the basis of the class alliance it
brought to fruition) had internalized the accumulative dynamics of capitalist development,
sought to pave the way for consolidation of a national market by destroying the Slavepower;
on the other side, arrayed against it, stood the southern planter-dominated Democracy, the
leading elements of which were a stratum of the slaveholding class most committed to the
territorially expansive dynamics of its social system and defense of its fundamental, "peculiar"
institution.

174For armed conflict between Missouri slaveholders and their supporters and free soil Kansas emigrant farmers see

James Rawley, Race and Politics. "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War, esp. chapters 4, 5.

Antebellum Origins

Preliminary Notes on Political Parties

In mid-nineteenth century America, political parties were simultaneously the vehicle for class
organization and the mechanism of constitution of interclass alliances. Given some of the
peculiarities of the American State, they were, and remain, a necessary vehicle for class (and
interest group) representation.
Recall that in what is colloquially referred to as "America, feudal social relations on the land
never existed. The socio-economic and political forms of the colonies presupposed the entire
seventeenth century English development, but not its outcome. Although the colonial
governing forms were bourgeois from nearly the start, i.e., involved legislative and executivecouncilar representation of territorially-based ruling elites, the rural, Anglican and aristocratic
lords, who, fighting alongside Charles I, lost the English Civil War, made a new start in the
southern colonies. They eventually formed a regional ruling class of planter gentlemen based
on slave labor. Peculiarly, and this was strictly a modern phenomenon, slave productive
relations were simultaneously distinguished by their formation in an Atlantic "economy" that
was basically capitalist and their seigniorial and paternalistic character.175 The other side in
the (English) Civil War, the Puritan bourgeoisie was in part self-transplanted to the American
northeast where, originally basing itself on mercantile trade, it developed a strong opposition
to the control exercised by London over its trade, emerging as classically liberal, Yankee freetraders. In this development, merchants merged with bankers into a regional ruling class,
which was in the end abysmally and existentially dependent for its wealth, standing and power
upon extraction through trade and banking of surpluses generated by southern slave
production.
Following their war of national independence, these ruling classes themselves fragmented
and produced a balkanized political terrain made of statelets. Within fifteen years, leading
nationalists (Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Jay, Wilson, King, etc.) had had enough of a
confederation of "several states" and wished only to found a "strong national government,
"raising the federal pyramid to a considerable altitude" (James Wilson), that could "act on the
whole of people of the United States" (Rufus King). 176 The centerpiece of a regime capable of
acting on the whole people was, and remains, the Executive. Thus, the first characteristic
which distinguishes the American form of bourgeois democracy from the more common,
parliamentary regimes of western Europe, then and now, is the centrality of the Executive, or,
if you prefer, the Presidential system.
Now, it was precisely because the Chief Executive, with its Constitutionally mandated vast
powers over repressive apparatuses (armed forces, polices, and albeit primitive espionage
agencies) and control of domestic productive development (control based upon cabinet
government), had achieved such extraordinarily independence in the age of "democratic
revolution" that the apex of that "federal pyramid" could be raised to such an "altitude. Among
the "founders, it was clearly the case, all the mystifyingly specious arguments about
separation of powers aside, that the Presidency was designed as the functional, if thinly
veiled, equivalent of kingly government. Over two hundred years of State policy and practice
have made little change in this equation. At any rate, the political form of bourgeois democracy
hierarchically coheres productively based groups of elites as a class, while at the same time
the great height of the summit of this form not only distinguishes the presidential and
175On this, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, and, in particular, the Introduction, above.
176With its commitment to and practice of alienation of land, means of production and even human beings, capital's

movement was implicit from the outset in this colonial-settler society. The State established after 1789 was much on
the order of a empty bed only awaiting capital's arrival, i.e., its evolution and development.
For the remarks by King and Wilson, Max Farrand (ed), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. 1: 49, 57
207.

parliamentary regimes but, because of the control over society it carries with it, intensifies
competition among organizations of ruling class social groups fighting to obtain and hold this
seat of power.
The American form of bourgeois democracy is, secondly, distinguished from the common
European form by its method of representation. The actual historical practice of
euphemistically designated "proportional representation" i.e., in its winner-take-all form,
effectively restricts representation to one type of organizational form within which in stable
periods only two competing, political parties can thrive.177 Both by design and function, the
American Presidential system precludes intraclass based organizational representation. If, for
example, candidates of five different parties, each party commanding vastly differing
resources, each representing different social classes or class fractions, were put up for every
seat in the national legislation (House of Representatives), it is possible, though highly
unlikely, that one party could win every seat without a majority of the votes cast in any district.
This outcome tends to restrict American political parties to, and polarize them into, two broadly
based, opposing camps.
This characteristic can be stated more generally. Precisely because voting citizens are not
proportionally represented at each and every level of the State (municipalities, states, federal
government), political mediation of socially and productively constituted conflicting interests of
individuals, social groups and classes must be represented through broad-based, interclass
special organizations. These special organizations, political parties that, as indicated, form
within the narrowest of parameters two polarized groups, are essential, constitutive moments
of the State. Because they are organized, the systems-based or structural requirements of
these special organizations, revealed in the actual, historical practice of American political
parties, then, rarely re-present the amorphous "opinion" of the voter-citizen on the terrain of
State life. Rather, they address the concerns of its various interest constituencies within the
overall framework of advancing the programmatic concerns of the dominate class fractions in
the parties in question: These special organizations, political parties, hierarchically
concentrate and are hegemonized by the active elements (professional politicians) of the
different factions within the socially and productively dominant class, though membership is
drawn from hegemonized groups as well: It is only ruling class social groups with the financial
resources, whose members have the training and preparation, influence and access that in
normal times can pursue organized, professionalized political activity. (It is only in times of
crisis, when the social or political order is under great pressure, e.g., during a period of
structural economic change when new classes appear or old ones disappear, that new parties
emerge and the American Presidential system opens up somewhat.) Given its interclass,
social and interest group representation, American political parties are the medium in which
some level of ideological unity is constituted, and which in manning and administering the
State in its day to day operations insures social stability with a view to the long-term interest of
central capitalist groups. Thus, the interclass character of political parties is the third and final
distinguishing feature of the American form of bourgeois democracy.

177This much can be deduced from an examination of documentary formulation of the structure of the American

presidential system. Historical efficacy merely demonstrates what was in principle Constitutionally given at the outset.

1.
The Republican Party's Prehistory. The Jacksonian Democracy
In this country alone does perfect equality of civil and social privilege exist among the white
population, and it exists solely because we have black slaves. Freedom is not possible
without slavery.
[Negroes are] created with less intellectual powers than the whites and ... [are] most
probably intended to serve them and be the instruments of their civilization.178

Part I
Pre-Jacksonian Social Struggles and Strata
State Activism and Popular Exclusion in the Pre-Jackson Era
No candidate emerged from the Presidential election of 1824 with a popular majority. Andrew
Jackson held the largest plurality followed by John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and
Henry Clay. In the end, Adams was declared the winner as Clay threw his electoral college
votes to him in the House of Representatives. Adams was a candidate of the National
Republican party, heir to the Federalists and its program of State-directed national, economic
development. In one form or another, nationalists had dominated the Presidency since
Washington, i.e., from the establishment of this form of Executive. The exception was
Jefferson, who, we add, was theoretically but not practically (once in office) opposed to
nationalist-styled large-scale economic programs aimed at rapid commercial capitalist
development undertaken by an activist State. In particular, the last sixteen years of the
Presidency, viz., under the leadership of Madison and Monroe, had seen an enormous
commitment to the buildup of the State through military fortifications and grand developmental
projects.
There was, however, a social problem with this nationalist direction. Prior to the last election
(1820) of Monroe, the emerging urban working classes of the Northeast and the exploding
populations of rural yeomanry in the newly opening areas of the West (Kentucky, Tennessee,
Ohio and Indiana) were politically unenfranchised. Yet it was independent artisans and selfsufficient farmers, engaged in activity giving rise to an use-value ethos, who were left
bewildered, unsettled and angry by market relations-engendered social change in the wake of
rapid economic development, and who, clinging the democratic promises of the Revolution
(1776-1882), and the Declaration and War of Independence, bore the burden of taxation that
financed State expenditures.
Popular Revolt and Enfranchisement
The antebellum Democratic party, otherwise known as the Jacksonian Democracy or more
simply the Democracy, developed out the Presidential election of 1824. Though he lost the
election, the unforeseen success of Andrew Jackson's candidacy was a measure of the
strength of a popular upsurge that had been in the making for a decade but crystallized in the
aftermath of the Panic of 1819.
This revolt against the National Republican program of State-directed capitalist development
should not have been unexpected. Revolt, brewing for years, had periodically boiled to the
surface. In the spring of 1816, the Fourteenth Congress passed a Salary Act that roughly
doubled Congressional pay. Yeomanry everywhere expressed anger and outrage that poured
forth in protest meetings, petitions, and newspaper articles. In the Congressional elections late
178First citation appeared editorially in the Richmond (VA) Enquirer in 1856, cited in James Oakes, Slavery and

Freedom, 80. The second citation quotes Charles Pinckney, member of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, seeking
closure in the U.S. Senate over the entry of free blacks into Missouri during debate over the Missouri Compromise of
1820, cited by James Rawley, Race and Politics, 12.

in that year two-thirds of the House and half of the Senate incumbents went down to defeat.
The Act, later rescinded, cohered resentment over a heavy burden of taxation to support a
national-State-sponsored program of infrastructural projects designed to accelerate
"economic" development.179
There were other indications of mass resentment. In the two largest states, New York and
Virginia, democratic discontent was also simmering ready to explode. For example, in New
York, after 1815 "growing cadres of ambitious activists" in the National Republican party
challenged Governor De Witt Clinton's autocratic control over the party. Opposing on
democratic grounds the entire organizational assembly based on wealthy aristocratic New
York City families and driven by personal factions, these new styled politicians, known in New
York as "Bucktails, threw up one of their own, Martin Van Buren, a moderate and a politician's
politician. Basing themselves on the City's mercantile capitalist working classes (dock
workers, street cleaners, construction laborers), prosperous upstate farmers and
shopkeepers, artisans and small farmers in the villages along the middle Hudson, Bucktails
were able to defeat and subsequently re-form Clinton's organization. Having captured the
state government at Albany (and thereafter after having earned the name, "Regency"), by
1821, the Van Buren-led new mass party and the entire movement underlying it were able to
call a constitutional convention in which the institutional framework (including system of
appointed lifetime judges on state's highest courts that exercised a veto over the elected
legislature) that underpinned the Clintonian party was partially dismantled and the franchise
was extended. In two-thirds of the other eighteen states the franchise had by 1815 gradually
been extended on the basis of reforms introduced by institutionally non-established gentries
competing for popular support among growing farming-based populations.180
This long process of franchise extension, in which white males had by 1824 largely won the
bourgeois-democratic right to vote and which occurred against the background of black
slavery and Indian expropriation, was a historical condition of the very possibility of the
emergence of Andrew Jackson. But the decisive event that was central to his emergence was
the Panic of 1819.
The Financial Panic of 1819
Following the end of the war with Britain in 1815, federal lands sales west of the Appalachians
leapt forward. The war had been a running occasion for the expropriation, i.e., murder and
plundering, of Indians and their lands: With those newly federalized lands "cleared,
immigrants (fleeing economic or political oppression), farmers (in western counties of
seaboard states seeking more fertile soils), planters (in southeastern states abandoning soil
exhausted lands), and, in particular, speculators purchased "virgin" tracts at cheap
government prices. In 1813, land sales totaled a half million acres, but by 1820 that sum
increased to almost four million.181
Apace with this growth of a trans-Appalachian farming population went the development of a
transportation system that carried agricultural surpluses east and south to urban centers.
Steamboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers reduced travel time between Louisville and
New Orleans from the three to four months by keelboat and flatboat to a single week. With
their greater carrying capacities rates fell and the prices of wheat, pork, cattle and cotton in
the cities decreased accordingly. Between 1820 and 1830, their number increased from sixtynine to several hundred. The lure of extra cash and the ability to purchase implements as well
179Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 104-105.
180Ibid, 107, 110-113.
181Ibid, 131.

as luxuries (especially clothing) integrated once isolated farmers into the market as traders
and merchants set up shop at nodal points all along the steamboat river routes. The price of
manufactured goods had been rendered artificially cheap by a flood of European, especially
British, imports embargoed and hence stockpiled during the war. Population increase,
territorial expansion, rising production and growing consumer demand fed entrepreneurial
ambitions. At the top was the activist State engaged in naval fortifications and large "internal
improvement" projects (turnpikes, canals) followed by state projects - the most noteworthy
was New York's Erie Canal - and the growth of manufacturers (textiles, meatpacking, flour
milling). Economic development required capital and most of it was soaked up by the national
government. (Federal expenditures increased from $700,000 in 1816 to $14 million in
1818.)182
The boom found entrepreneurs eager to extend credit: Banking, bank charters issued by the
states, bank notes, corporate charters for allegedly publicly beneficial activities, stocks, and
bonds all erupted into the economic life of the country. Between 1815 and 1818, the number
of state chartered banks doubled to nearly four hundred. The federally chartered Bank of the
United States did nothing to abort this proliferation but actually encouraged it. Having
suspended specie payment (gold) during the war, banks were loathe to redeem in specie the
paper notes they issued. As Sellers indicates, new banks "could open on no other capital than
stock loans and a little borrowed specie, and then force their notes into circulation by lending
freely. The expansion of credit at once inflated the values of goods in production and
expanded production. As production began to catch up with postwar demand and the
ramifications of the paper frenzy began to dawn on big financiers, frightened stockholders at
the Bank of the United States installed a new leadership that immediately implemented a
severe deflationary policy. The Bank compelled its debtors as well as state banks to resume
specie payment. At the same time, in spring 1819, a similar financial crisis in Britain led to a
collapse of commodity prices. The multiplying paper currencies underlining the American
boom could not be redeemed and the boom collapsed.183
The panic had begun. As bankers called in their notes against loans to farmers, land
speculators and small handicraft manufacturers, paper currency was useless: Missed
payments followed, and, in turn, ruthless bankers foreclosed upon yeoman and artisans. The
collapse, giving hundreds of thousands their first taste of the other side of capitalist
development: It forced a developing waged layer of men and women in the big eastern cities
into unemployment, and following from that, hunger and homelessness. It led to the ruin of
independent artisans, and it doomed self-sufficient farmers in debt only for their land.
Thousands fled the urban areas returning to the countryside to eke out a subsistence
livelihood among kin. The collapse further left the hundreds of thousands making up these
uncomprehending, because largely precapitalist, social strata terrified and angry, particularly
at the banks.184 Andrew Jackson emerged as the champion of these strata.

182Ibid, 131-132.
183Ibid, 133-136 (citation appearing on 133).
184Ibid, 137.

Part II
Jackson's Rise and its Social Class Foundations
Andrew Jackson185
Jackson came from a land hungry, Scot-Irish immigrant family that had settled as squatters in
the border regions of the Carolinas. His father died in a tree felling accident while his mother
was still pregnant with him. His mother raised him in the paternalist, family traditions of the
backcountry yeomanry, and though dirt poor managed to get him Scot-Irish Presbyterian
schooling at which he learned to read and write. By the time he was thirteen the Revolutionary
war had entered the Carolina backcountry.
With kin Jackson fought as a guerrilla against the British, historical enemy of the Irish and
Scots. One brother died in fighting early on, and the other succumbed to smallpox contracted
by both while they spent time in a foul British jail in Camden. Released in a prisoner exchange
arranged by his mother, Jackson also lost her (to cholera) when she left shortly afterward to
nurse cousins held off Charleston in British prison ships. Left terrifying alone while still an
adolescent, Jackson's personal formation was shaped by these youthful experiences.
Socialized in the southern yeomanry-based, "patriarchal society where males vied for honor,
Jackson understood and acted on this formation in terms available to him in this society.
Those experiences had left him angry because emotionally wounded, extremely irritable and
prone to violence as a solution to (both) personal (and social) problems he confronted. The
patriarchal code imposed strict adherence to honest, respectful practices among males who
were proven equals. Family honor was based on this male honor, while shame over
dishonorable behavior constituted an ultimate sanction. On these socio-cultural foundations,
Jackson "carried to an extreme the aggressive masculinity through which [white] men earned
each others respect, his exaggerated sense of male honor corresponding to an equally
exaggerated sense of patriarchal family responsibility. He was protective toward, savagely
defended, women, troops under his command (from whom he, in return, demanded
unquestioned loyalty) and the many children, particularly sons, he regularly adopted.186
Jackson learned law from backcountry attorneys and headed off to middle Tennessee as a
lawyer. As such, he initially did well in this frontier society, a land speculation-based empire
build up by William Blount. Jackson engaged in retailing, planting and speculation, but soon
lost everything to defective land titles and the bankruptcy of a friend for whom he had signed
notes. That experience left a life-long hatred for banks and the paper system (viz., paper
money, bank notes, etc.). Thereafter he married a Donelson and rose in Tennessee politics,
though he rejected the latter early on pursuing instead a career in the state militia where
eventually he was made commander. He built a reputation as an Indian fighter, and a
murderous one at that. Indians, like blacks, were, after all, altogether outside the charmed
circle of yeoman society. He was not pretentious, self-consciously identifying himself with the
backcountry yeomanry - honest, simple farmers - and industrious tradesmen, in a double
opposition to the luxury and corruption of the monied interests, banks and monopolies, and to
the inhuman degradation of slaves. He promoted himself as a "plain cultivator of the soil" in
the legendary tradition of the Roman hero, Cincinnatus. And in that tradition, Jackson
remained on his farm at his "plough" until called on to serve his patria, ready to rush to the
defense of all those whom he could fit under his patriarchal wings, self-consciously the
"champion of a virtuous populace against a corrupting and exploitative market elite.187
185For Jackson, Ibid, 174-180. In light of Jackson's behavior, belligerent, murderous and pathological, also see

Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children, chapters 2 and 3, where the "Hero" is appropriately subject to a depth
psychological (i.e., Freudian) analysis.
186Citations appear in Sellers, Ibid, 176 and 179, respectively.
187Ibid, 180 (citations).

Andrew Jackson was put forward as a Presidential candidate for the Democracy by the
leading group of Tennessee banker-politicians - John Overton, William Lewis and John Eaton
- anxious to protect themselves from a powerful, popular anti-bank current that solidified in the
aftermath of the Panic of 1819. Jackson's motives, contradictorily, for accepting a draft from a
banking elite and the intrigues surrounding his candidacy have been described elsewhere.
What needs to be brought into relief here is the nature of Jackson's representation of the
popular classes (especially the yeomanry) he championed, the class coalition that formed the
basis of his ascendancy, and the manner in which ruling class social groups recouped losses
to popular opposition through the Democratic party.188
Ideal, Civic Elements in the Consciousness of Yeomanry
Well after the Civil War, isolated communities of families remained the basic unit of production
in southern upcountry yeoman society. Wives bore large numbers of children, always in the
hope of having boys. The characteristic yeoman depended upon his sons' labor, since he was
poorly integrated into the market, possessed little if any cash and, accordingly, had only the
most primitive implements to carry on subsistence farming, i.e., he was heavily dependent
upon labor. In this light, he carefully sought to control his family's "estate, typically dominating
his sons into their mid-twenties. Thus, unlike the practice forming among the liberal
bourgeoisie, the yeoman did not assist his children (sons) in development as autonomous
individuals; to the contrary, the yeoman family, like the community in which it was embedded
and relied on (especially for shared labor), "depended heavily on the perpetuation of intergenerational dependency. This was the patriarchal side of a yeoman family life that was
contradictory unity of patriarchal and egalitarian elements. Clearly, then, Andrew Jackson's
obsessive and overbearing paternalism was materially grounded in the productive family life of
yeoman communities.189
Best articulated by Jackson during his two terms as President, the ideational expression of
this form of life was rooted in the same productive activity, community and culture: The poor
rural producer was a self-sufficient farmer with a small parcel of land who was far less rather
than more integrated into the market, was opposed to the freeing of slaves and even more
opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories, violently racist, and desperately
wanted Indians cleared out of the West (that is, those territories, soon-to-be-states, just east
of the Mississippi River). He was self-consciously civic and virtuous (whether his social
practice exhibited such characteristics is an altogether dubious), and, correspondingly, was
suspicious of and hostile to all forms of centralized power, especially, monopolies, (after 1819)
banks, and unchecked national power. All of these yeoman attitudes were rooted in his daily
culture: He himself owned the land and appropriated the fruits of his family's labor as the basis
of his independence. (Both slavery and waged labor, if geographically generalized, threatened
that status.) As neither a slave nor waged laborer, he was beholden to no other man, thus able
in principle to judiciously vote his conscience. Frugal and untouched by civilized amenities
(i.e., cash poor with little access to the market), he was in this romanticized conception
"uncorrupted, viz., a repository of civil virtue. Protecting his land meant advocacy and
defense of private property rights. Thus, in the southern yeoman, stock from which Jackson
hailed, self-interest and the defense of "liberty" (property rights) were seen as inextricably
joined in a community of equals (an egalitarianism that was, in the tradition of classical
188For those intrigues, Ibid, 173-175, and Michael Holt, "The Democratic Party, 1828-1860, 499-500.
189For yeoman families, Oakes, Ibid, 114-115, from whom we have liberally drawn. See also John Mack Faragher,

Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, 118, 133. Faragher analyses are based upon southern yeoman life
transplanted northward, viz., the Butternut belts of the old West, in particular those of southern and central Illinois.

republicanism, an equality among head of households only), the ideally autonomous,

republican citizenry.190
Jackson's Political Ascendancy (I). Underlying Class Issues, Classes and Alliances
A review of the social strata who supported Jackson electorally suggests, the perspective he
articulated found a real resonance among the yeomanry. (This perspective was, to be sure,
broadened to include all "free labor" in order to strengthen his political appeal.) We shall start
with the yeomanry.
[Poor Northern Farmers and the Southern Yeomanry]
The southern yeomanry were obviously the strongest base of support of the newly forming
"Democracy": Numerically, southern independent farmers populated the areas of upland
country in East Tennessee and eastern Kentucky, northwestern and southwestern Virginia,
northern Alabama and western North Carolina, northwestern South Carolina and northern
Georgia. In the North, the same social strata occupied roughly the lower half of states of the
old Northwest, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Numerically, these farmers made up the largest
component of the Jacksonian coalition. Jackson Democrats could, moreover, be found among
the subsistence farmers in the southwest (Mississippi and Louisiana) and poorer yeoman
farmers of the East, for example, throughout rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey where the
"Hero" ran far ahead of the other three candidates. Jackson supporters also be found in the
border states, in the western regions of Kentucky and Maryland and Missouri, where Henry
Clay had been the regional favorite.
Now for the yeoman, the Panic of 1819 had resulted in an assault on his independent land
ownership, and thereby also threatened his civic identity formed on this basis. One
consequence of the Panic was an enormous number of bank foreclosures for failure to met
repayment on loans against land purchases.191 Thus, any legislation to relieve the pressure on
yeoman, militated for by settlers and farmers, was favorably greeted by the same. In this
respect the United States Supreme Court, the Federalist court of John Marshall, Joseph Story
and Bushrod Washington, aided Jackson considerably in two decisions it handed down
concerning occupancy laws after 1819.
In 1785, the Federal Congress had enacted a Land Ordinance accompanying the formation of
the territory northwest of the Ohio river (Northwest Territory). Congress lay down a formula for
a systematic survey of all territorial lands prior to their division into states. The survey
established a rigorous mathematical division of the lands. 192 On the basis of the survey, tracts
and plots would as public land be sold to private settlers. Kentucky and Tennessee (achieving
statehood in 1792 and 1796, respectively) had not, however, undergone prior survey. In 1797,
1799, 1801, 1809, 1812 and 1819, the Kentucky Legislature enacted laws, which in modified
forms became models for other states, to ameliorate the disadvantageous position actual
occupants, settler farmers, were placed in by compact made with the state of Virginia at the
time of creation of the state of Kentucky. The agreement between Kentucky and Virginia gave
prior legal claim to any Virginian who had purchased lands (largely in anticipation of rising
land values) before actual settlement got underway. The agreement essentially protected
absentee landowners who had bought large tracts of land in order to speculatively profit.193
190Oakes, Ibid., 115-116.
191In Kentucky, by 1821 one-third of the land under private title had been foreclosed or forcibly sold with title reverting

to banks or absentee owners. Paul Wallace Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier, 19.
192Historical Atlas of the United States, 118-119; Gates, Ibid, 43-44.
193Gates, Ibid, 19-26.

Actual occupants, settler farmers or yeomen, paid taxes on the lands they occupied to which
they just as often as not held title. While absentee owners avoided regular tax payments,
settler farmers also paid taxes on improvements they made such as fencing, buildings they
constructed, and fields they plowed and planted. Lacking a survey prior to settlement, the
problem was that the same lands, or portions of them, were often sold, and resold not just
once but multiple times. Hence, disputes arose and the courts dealt with countless cases of
litigation between absentee owners and occupants.194
In 1821, the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling that the Virginia claims were valid, struck down
Kentucky's occupancy laws. The decision was reaffirmed in 1824. Though both decisions
were made under peculiar circumstances,195 they were clearly decisions made by a Federalist
Court. The decisions gave substance to, concretized and exemplified the yeomanry's
conviction that monopoly, here the State itself, conspired against republican virtue. On the
most sensitive of all issues (land), Andrew Jackson, paradigmatically anti-monopolist and
opposed to centralized power, was the political beneficiary of these decisions (though, of
course, he himself had originally opposed these laws).196
[Urban Artisans to the North]
Among other states from where Jackson drew support Pennsylvania was of particular
importance. It had the second largest representation in Congress. And significantly it was
there Jackson also demonstrated urban strength, his second base of electoral support.197
Pennsylvania politics had long been dominated by the radical democratic wing of the NationalRepublican party, which had prior to 1815 ran candidates in local and state elections as
"Democrats. Pennsylvania Democrats were anti-Federalist and "constitutionalist" in the
specific sense that they consciously rooted themselves in the since overthrown, old state
constitution of 1776 (one which had provisions for an extended franchise lacking the then
customary property limitations on male suffrage). The postwar boom in Pennsylvania as
elsewhere gave rise to a burgeoning class of entrepreneurs, speculators and merchants a
stratum of which entered the Pennsylvania Democratic party, aligned with emerging
professional politicians and split Democrats into a "New School" that welcomed and attempted
to expand the boom and a "Old School" that opposed its manifestations (e.g., easy money)
and outcomes (esp. artisan economic decline). Old School party members looked to working
class leaders such as Aurora editor William Duane and the younger Stephen Simpson, editor
of the Aurora successor Philadelphia newspaper, the Columbian Observer, and in 1830 a
candidate of the first labor party in the United States. The Old School was based on urban
mechanics and artisans, particularly the less prosperous ones in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and
Harrisburg, who began to see their social decline and loss of opportunity in sharper relief
against a background of rising entrepreneurs. Their criticism focused on the institutions of this
ascendant social stratum and the economic context in which they developed, namely, the
postwar boom. In 1814, for example, the state legislature chartered, above and beyond the
194Ibid.
195That is, with participation of only a minority of the seven judge Court. For the Court's decision, Ibid, 30-38.
196For Jackson's opposition to occupancy laws, Thomas Abernathy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee

(Chapel Hill, 1932), 262 ff, cited in Gates, Ibid, 43, n. 70. The Kentucky Governor, Legislature and Court of Appeals all
ignored the Supreme Court decisions, and set in motion the machinery to circumvent them. The decisions themselves
were reversed by the Supreme Court in 1831. Ibid, 39-41.
Gates characterizes the 1819 Kentucky legislation as a struggle that pitted the "Relief party, consisting of farmersettlers as debtors, "several eminent lawyers and a large majority of the population, against the "Anti-Relief party,
"the mercantile class, the lawyers and judges, and the larger farmers" (Ibid, 28-29). The Supreme Court obviously and
predictably came down on the side of the Anti-Relief party.
197For a regional breakdown of 1824 voter percentages, see Sellers, Ibid, 197 (chart).

existing four, forty-two new banks. From the mechanics' standpoint and that of the Old School,
banking, paper money, rampant speculation and the ambition and greed underlying them (as
well as the social division based on concentrated property and wealth that they gave rise to)
created a moral and social crisis that threatened a virtuous citizenry. Conjoined to the political
side of the same developments - the caucus system, special privileges and governmental
financing of projects of an emerging capitalist stratum, entrepreneur activity would destroy the
foundations of democracy. In the tradition of Anglo-American classical republicanism
associated most often with the name of Jefferson, this perspective in the early 1820s neatly
dovetailed with that which comes down to us as Jacksonianism.198
Using his Observer as a forum, by spring 1822 Simpson was elaborating critiques of banking
and its overly rapid expansion as roots of the 1819 panic. These efforts coalesced into an
organized campaign as the canvassing for Jackson got under way in Tennessee. Until March
1823, William Crawford remained the favored Presidential hopeful among the Old School,
while the New School supported Calhoun. Thereafter, Old Schoolers swung around to
Jackson. In the local election of delegates to a late February statewide party convention,
Jackson sweep the rural areas, which had come around after the Panic of 1819, and the three
large urban areas. This outcome more or less shocked the New School politicians, who did an
about face by abandoning Calhoun and announcing for Jackson in order to co-opt an
emerging alliance of farmers and workers.199
[Planter Stratum]
The third class component of the origin Jacksonian coalition consisted in a stratum of
southern planters. This planter support did not develop exclusively in any one region of the
South, though, as we shall suggest below, it was concentrated in the southwest. Planters were
not a homogeneous social class: Socio-economic and subjective differences among planters
were shaped by characteristic, geographically-specific slaveholding patterns.
198The Jacksonian era should not, of course, be narrowly understood as the historical period of Andrew Jackson's

two Presidencies (1829-1836). Rather, it should be grasped in terms of the dynamics defining an era - roughly the
period from 1815 to 1845, that is, in terms of rapid population rise, economic growth and geographical expansion, the
broadening of the franchise, and the simultaneous consolidation of a "white's man government" and sectionally-based
institutional slavery, or, within the Marxist tradition, as the era of primitive accumulation, i.e., the period within which
the fundamental material preconditions of capitalist development were created on the basis of the genocide and
expropriation of Indian land (see Rogin, Fathers and Children, 165-169). With these fundamental historical conditions
reduced to a mere background, the Jacksonian era has been interpreted politically and culturally, i.e., all-too-narrowly
and hence inadequately, in terms of the rise of mass politics, a mass medium of communication (national
newspapers), and mass political parties.
The aforementioned "labor" tradition of Jacksonian era mechanics was not a dimension of a working class culture as
that term, beginning from the middle nineteenth century on, is now received (Unger, The Greenback Era, 30, n. 51).
Though in New York City and Philadelphia there was in fact a wage-earning artisan element that enthusiastically
supported Jackson, the Jacksonian term "mechanic" meant small producers of all kinds, especially yeoman farmers
but also small businessmen. Reappearing here is the concept of "productive labor, one that suggested - because it
historically realized in certain limited moments of the first half of the nineteenth century American society - a coalition
of all classes and social strata that lived from their own labor, and not parasitically, as did bankers and lawyers, from
the labor of others. This tradition was, appropriately, anti-bank and anti-monopoly, understanding these institutions
and social forms as mechanisms on the basis of which the product of the labor of producers was siphoned off. In the
case of banks, paper money and interest were the precise medium in and through which bankers got a hold of labor's
product. Thus, Jacksonian mechanics had been strongly bullionist, committed to exchange in gold and silver.
(Organized labor as it initially developed in the 1840s and 1850s, too, had been bullionist: The historically effective
outcome of the destruction of the national banking system by a Jacksonian class coalition of small producers had left
the United States with as many bank laws and types of currency as there were states. Under these conditions the
value of paper money was always dubious, and best defense of labor, as an institutional element of capitalist society,
was a demand for compensation in specie payment.)
199For Pennsylvania politics and their relation to Jackson, see Kim T. Phillips, "The Pennsylvania Origins of the
Jackson Movement, especially 490-507, and Sellers, Ibid, 187-189.

In the Upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina
and Virginia) slavery itself was limited, populations of free blacks existed in large numbers,
and slaveholding patterns ranged from the practice of manumission (Delaware, Maryland) to
pockets of slavery concentration (eastern Virginia, Frankfurt-Lexington, south central
Kentucky extending down into central Tennessee). Qualitatively lower slave populations, and
geographical proximity to the North entailing a partial orientation toward northern markets,
conditioned attitudes toward slavery. These attitudes included a strong regional nationalism in
the western Upper South states (contiguous, not just geographically but attitudinally, with the
northwestern states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois) - among which Henry Clay of Kentucky and
his "American System" were very popular, and an acceptance of a policy of gradual
emancipation of slaves based on their removal to locations outside the United States.200
The Lower South had the heaviest concentration of slaves. While rice (in the coastal lowlands
of South Carolina and Georgia) and sugar (in south most central Louisiana) were important
staples, the densest slave populations largely coincided with those areas of heaviest cotton
production, that is, the "black belts" of Georgia, central South Carolina, eastern Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama. The 1820s collapse of cotton prices had produced violent opposition
to Congressionally legislated tariffs designed to protect fledging northern manufacturers. In
the oldest region of the Lower South (the South Carolina low country and eastern Georgia),
these low prices, it was argued, threatened the foundations of a settled seigniorial, rural life
based on slavery: Low cotton (and rice) prices were blamed on tariffs. Tariffs and particularly
(federal aid to) "internal improvements" were not meaningless because irrelevant to a rural
seigniorial society with an "aristocratic" ethos; rather, they, planters screamed, were inimical:
Tariffs and federally-directed internal improvements diverted slavery-generated resources
northward for development of manufacturers; they suppressed European trade by preventing
price competition with the North; they raised the price of the few manufactured goods
southern planters required; and, we suggest, federally aided and controlled internal
improvements threatened development of a class of entrepreneurs in the interior of these
states who could politically function as an alternative to the great planters. An active,
entrepreneurial class as such could undermine planter control over legislatures and minimalist
state apparatuses (while federal control of such expenditures would expand a national power
that, if hostile to, could limit the spread of, or, more radically, legislatively abolish slavery). By
the 1830s, John Calhoun had become the leading spokesman of this region of the Old South
opposing these developments. Here opposition to Jackson and his egalitarian rhetoric and
support for newly forming state rights parties were strong. Issues of rule centered as much on
maintenance of class hierarchy as on race subordination, while the latter entailed a
"perpetualist" politics, that is, a commitment to slavery as the unalterable foundations of
society, culture and civilization.201
On the southwestern frontier (Alabama, Mississippi and the territories of Arkansas and
southeastern Texas) primitive conditions of "uninhabited" life generated even among planters
a "whites' only" egalitarianism, while the presence of vast "uninhabited, fertile tracts of
200In the twenties and thirties, Clay, U.S. representative from Kentucky (1811-1814, 1815-1821, 1823-1825), House

speaker from 1815 to 1820 and from 1823 to 1825, Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams (1825-1829), and
U.S. Senator from 1831-1842 and again from 1849 until his 1852 death (Webster's Biographical Dictionary, 316), "log
rolled" legislation by linking protectionism to internal improvements: "Northwestern entrepreneurs backed high tariffs
to provide revenues for roads and canals, while northeastern manufacturers supported transportation appropriations
to sop up surplus revenues that might force tariff reduction" (Sellers, Ibid, 290). In a nutshell, such was the "American
System.
201For southern planter opposition to tariffs, Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 37, 38, Oakes, Freedom and Slavery,
167. The "Nullification Crisis" (1832-1833) in South Carolina grew out of opposition to new federal tariff schedules of
1828, see William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War.

plantation crop producing land allowed planters to make up for lower prices by increasing
production. Attention here was, thereby, deflected from tariffs and oriented toward Indians,
whose land occupancy and stewardship created restraints on slavery expansion. White's only
egalitarianism, defense of slavery and Indian removal all led the planters of this region to
identify with Jackson.
[Class Coalition]
The class coalition that brought Jackson to national prominence in 1824 consisted, then, in
less prosperous northern farmers and big city artisans, the southern yeomanry and a primarily
southwestern, planter stratum. At the height of Jackson's power (i.e., during his Presidency),
this coalition was, moreover, dominated, by still another more amorphous social class stratum,
entrepreneurs, who at this time had become difficult to distinguish mass party politicians. This
entrepreneurial stratum, to the extent is was made of "men on the make" whose activity in
production centered on "business" generally and banking specifically, was differentiated out of
the new layers of a merchant class that developed on the basis of major eastern cities' trade
with the West and the South. The possibility for coalescing such a disparate, internally
antagonistic bloc in part rested on ideological ambiguity.
On the one side, for poor farmers, yeoman and artisans, Jackson symbolized the revolt
against capitalist market penetration by men committed by their practice to an use-value
ethos. This symbolic projection was not fortuitous, since Jackson's populist oratory validated
their unambitious, democratic strivings for equality. On the other side, men on the make,
entrepreneurs and the new breed of politicians, thrived under market pressure: They were
oriented toward pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Equality, in other words, for
them meant uninhibited, unregulated entrepreneurial opportunity.202
To grasp how these elements of this class bloc came together, i.e., the manner in which
Jackson 1824 national prominence was translated into power (which is what occurred in the
Presidential election of 1828), and to understand how Democracy-embodied Jacksonianism
outlived the Hero, it is necessary to understand the following: (i) The regionally integrating
expansion of productive activity that produced merchant differentiation and out of it a layer of
entrepreneurs; and, (ii) within the context of the role of politics in American governance, how
intertwined strata of entrepreneurs and professional politicians, the latter representatives of
rising or already dominant social groups within the American ruling class, came to support
Jackson. To achieve this understanding requires a rather long detour along the lines of an
explication of the relation of cotton production to its market exchange. Obliquely, this analysis
will demonstrate both (some of) the tensions between North and South that objectively
compelled the confrontation consummated in the life and death struggle of the 1860s, and the
emerging merchant-financier based elements with the northern urban Democracy. With this
explication behind us, we shall be able to exhibit the manner in which the ideationally
constituted moments of Jacksonian became ideological, i.e., functioned to mask the later,
post-1844 planter ascendancy within class coalition making up the Democracy. Returning to
the highpoint of Jacksonianism, the Hero's Presidency, the various threads of this analysis will
be brought together in a closing note which briefly examines the major political crisis of that
Presidency, Jackson's confrontation with the institution of the Bank of the United States and
its representatives.

202Sellers (Ibid, 352) suggests the Jacksonian class alliance in some measure rested on this ideologically ambiguous

equality.

Part III
Cotton Exchange and the Rise of New York
Jackson's Political Ascendancy (II). The Political Economy of Class Alliances
[Role of Cotton Production in the Early Antebellum Economy]
Commercial cotton production in the United States began in 1786. In 1793, the year Eli
Whitney invented the cotton gin, cotton exports totaled 488,000 pounds. The explosive growth
of the English textile industry, itself a decisive moment in the victorious industrial capitalists'
transformation of English manufacturers, created a demand which propelled the geographical
expansion of southern cotton production westward into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Arkansas and East Texas. As early as 1801, cotton exports exceeded 20 million pounds, and
by 1807, the last year of the slave trade, this production rose so dramatically that exports
alone, 66.2 million pounds, had more than tripled in just a half dozen years.203
The Napoleonic Wars on the Continent and inextricably intertwined with the Coalition (i.e., the
British, Austrian, Prussian and Russian) struggle against France, the rising tensions between
England and America (culminating in the War of 1812), generated restrictions and embargoes
that all but closed down trade during the eight year period beginning in 1807. When these
barriers were lifted during 1815, cotton exports for that (partial) year alone reached 83.8
million pounded valued at $17.5 million. Though cotton prices started to fall beginning in 1820
(and continued to fall until 1832), by 1825 cotton exports were valued at $37 million,
production for export alone had risen two and a third times to 194.7 million pounds. In 1840,
the value of cotton exports totaled $64 million.204
Handling the exchanges between the cotton South and the textile capitalists of Manchester
and Birmingham at once recreated the transportation geography of these exchanges and
merchant middleman who put masters whose slaves produced cotton in touch with
industrialists whose wage laborers produced cloth.
[Transportation Geography of Exchange (I)]
Historically, the movement of cotton began in the interior river bottoms, was carried by flatboat
and keelboat to the larger towns in the interior, Nashville, Lexington, or directly to the port
cities of the Old South, New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond (in the upcountry of the Carolinas
and Georgia, it was carried by wagon to Augusta), and from there it was shipped by steamship
to the great Atlantic port cities of the North, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
The supercession of flatboats and keelboats by steamboat on the great riverways in the
South, the Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi in the West, the James and Savannah in
the East, largely cut out the interior towns; while rapidly and massively expanding production
centralized exchange, since only in New York was there the wherewithal to handle the sheer
volume of transactions. New York City had proven, stable relations with the British mercantile
houses; the Port itself boasted a sheltered harbor; and, its merchants had historically sold in a
large regional market for British finished goods. All these features made (from the import side)
New York City the port of choice for English manufacturers. Moreover, of singular importance
203Alfred Chandler, Jr., The Invisible Hand, 20.
204Ibid.

On average, from 1810 to 1819, the mean cotton prices was $.18 per pound; from 1820-1829, they fell to an average
of $.12 per pound, and in the years 1830-1832, the mean dropped to $.09 per pound. William Freehling, The Road to
Disunion, 256. In detail, cotton prices hit a low of $.11 per pound in 1823, recovering to $.19 per pound in 1825. They
collapsed again in 1826, falling to $.12 per pound, hit bottom in 1927 at $.09 per pound, and did begin to recover until
1833, when they again rose above $.10 per pound. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical
Statistics of the United States, I, 209. Cited by Sellers, Ibid, 277. At $.19 per pound in 1825, $37,000,000 represented
194,700,000 pounds of cotton.

to the planters, these merchants and their houses had the capacity to extend planters credit
from one years crop to the next.205
Credit allowed eastern, in particular New York, merchants, beginning with the factors (see
below), to come to dominate the movement of cotton. From the very late eighteenth century
outset of cotton exchange, eastern merchants were involved in creating a "triangular trade.
Following production, cotton exchange moved from the cotton ports of the South, Charleston,
Savannah, Mobile and, above all, New Orleans, to the great East coast ports, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, Boston and, above all, New York. From the East it was shipped in transAtlantic
carriers to Liverpool, England and Havre, France for textile manufacturer. As the volume of
cotton shipped exploded after the end of the war with Britain (1815), return shipments south
from these eastern ports were systematized and regularized. Organized by merchants,
particularly those of New York City, actively involved in the trade (through ship ownership and
operation), a group of ships that made routine, outgoing or return trips, in this case bearing
manufactured goods, were known as "packet lines. Protected in the land of free trade by
mercantile law, only American bottoms could bear American (coastal) trade. Carrying goods
ordered by factors, merchants operating coastal packets thereby avoided the two-sided
problem of, first, paying for the purchases of cotton (and, to a qualitatively lesser extent, skins
and furs) on incoming trips from southern ports and, second, of "deadheaded" cargo (i.e., a
nonproductive return voyage with no cargo) that was economically disastrous (since the time
at sea created wear and tear on ships, while the ships crew had to be paid wages regardless
of whether ships carried cargo).
Packet lines were established first in Charleston in 1821, then in Savannah in 1824, Mobile in
1826, and lastly in New Orleans in 1831. The development of the port of Mobile, which in the
last decade before the Civil War was only second as a cotton port to New Orleans, offers an
exemplary instance of why New York merchants dominated this trade. In 1820, Mobile was a
tiny Gulf settlement populated by 1,600 people, yet eastern merchants were already present
in the community developing their links by way of factors to the great planters of the cotton
belt river bottoms, offering (irregular) return shipments of manufactured goods for shipments
of cotton picked up on Mobile's docks. When this trade was regularized six years later, these
merchants controlled it in its entirety.206
After 1835, New York gave way to that of Boston as the major port of entry for cotton
exchange within the United States. This does not speak to a loss of New York hegemony,
instead it points to the emergence and need of American textile manufacturers for cotton. After
1850, however, the amounts of actual cotton bales shipped through the port of New York
dropped dramatically. Still this event did not evince a collapse of New York hegemony in the
cotton trade. To the contrary, it merely signified a novel form of the sale of cotton which, by
bypassing New York and permitting the cotton to move directly to Europe, actually lowered the
merchant community operating overhead. Always speculative (since the realization of
exchange was not consummated in actual sale, and, accordingly price was not constituted,
until months after production had been completed), the cotton transactions after 1850 were
handled through the presentation of samples bales (expressing the quality of the product) and
bills of lading. The City merchants continued to ship manufactured goods (e.g., coaches and
barouches), now often domestically produced, south and to return with raw materials and
agricultural produce. (New Orleans was particularly significant in this, the latter, respect. Skins
and furs from its own hinterland, tobacco from Kentucky, Gulf Coast sugar grow as cane and
205Irving Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 127.
206Robert Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 95, 96, 105-110. Mobile would reach a population of 29,000 in 1860.

refined in Louisiana, and large amounts of gold from newly opened mines in Mexico were all
backhauled to New York.)207
Profitability still accrued to eastern, and in particular New York, merchants: Even without the
profits deriving from towing and pilotage to and fro the port, wharfage and warehousing once
in the port of New York, these profits accumulated from transit charges (for cotton carried
largely in New England bottoms on which New York merchants received a commission),
freight insurance charges, interest on advances, and commissions taken at each point in
which a bill of exchange was created.208
[Class Differentiation in Exchange]
Traditionally, the merchant had been a generalist: He operated a family run business. Drawing
on his own imports, other producers or other merchants, he supplied the typical two to three
man, artisan owned and operated shop with raw materials, tools and whatever furnishings that
were required. He purchased and then resold, thereby distributing the products of these small
shops locally, regionally or abroad at either wholesale or retail levels. Thus, he, residing in the
coastal towns and cities, imported, exported and sold both wholesale and retail.209
The growing demand for cotton, however, changed all this: The same movement of cotton
exchange which transformed New York City into the greatest entrept in the Americas led,
first, to a centralization of merchant activity in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore,
and second, to specialization in the strata engaged in the cotton exchange. It also inaugurated
a renewed, qualitatively greater integration of the Atlantic economy with its poles situated in
the financial communities of the American northeast, the cotton South, and the English
industrial heartland. Cotton was at the core of this integration, and the planters' practicoeconomic dispositions and habits were crucial. This entire movement began with a factor.
The cotton factor, selling the planter's crops, purchasing his supplies and securing him credit,
was the planter's immediate representative, so to speak, on the ground. He lived in the South,
often in inland larger towns geographically contiguous with the cotton-growing hinterland (e.g.,
Augusta and the South Carolina and Georgia upcountry, Nashville and middle Tennessee). He
was likely a Yankee New Englander with already established close connections to the New
York City merchant community. Depending upon the size of the crop (or crops) involved, thus
on the size of the plantation producing the cotton, the factor shipped the crop on consignment
to a middleman in a southern inland river town or coastal port, or to one of the great eastern
ports, or (rarely) sold it directly to a manufacturer's agent. This middleman in turn shipped the
consignment to another merchant (who sold it to a manufacturer's agent) or sold it to a
manufacturer's agent. For each consignment a bill of exchange, an advance against actual
sale, was drawn up. The bill of exchange constituted a promise of payment within so many
(e.g., 60, 90) days at a specified rate of interest (e.g., 7%, 8%) for the period. It could be
207Ibid, 98-99, 116 (bills of lading), 117-118. In 1822, for example, the port of New Orleans exported 156,000 bales of

cotton. Amongst the major destinations, 28,000 went to New York, 10,000 to Philadelphia and 7,000 to Boston, while
64,000 bales were shipped directly to Britain and 33,000 to France. (In 1825, these totals for the three cities were
51,000, 3,000 and 7,000 respectively.) About a third of the value of cotton exports was diverted north. This was a
fairly constant figure. By 1837, however, Philadelphia received 6,000 bales, New York 23,000 and Boston 39,000.
After 1835, the proportions embodied by these figures was also fairly constant. The Boston figure, of course, speaks
to the growth of domestic textile production. Ibid, 101.
In 1859, the ports of destination for cotton, expressed numerically in bales, from New Orleans and Mobile taken
together, were as follows: New York, 28,000; northeastern ports (mostly Boston), 310,400; and, foreign (mostly
Europe), 1,866,000. However, if the transactions represented by New York-based bills of lading and those made
largely as direct, transAtlantic shipments are taken into account, 200,000 bales must be added to the New York total
(and, correspondingly, deducted from the foreign total). Ibid, 116.
208Ibid, 96, 114, and the list of charges appearing in Appendix XXI, Ibid, 414.
209Chandler, Ibid, 17-18.

discounted (if payment was made within an allowed period), and it could be taken to a bank
willing to purchase it for cash (and redeem the bill from the merchant who issued it). The bill of
exchange, thus, allowed the factor to cover transport costs, insurance, storage costs, etc.,
and make an advance to the planter on his costs of production and his return on his
investment (less, of course, factors fee).210
The latter, an advance to the planter, was the crucial element which allowed, in the person of
the factor, the New York merchant community to largely control the transport and sale of
southern grown cotton. It should be recalled that the role of New York City, its merchants and
its port, in cotton exchange was not in any sense given: New York was an additional two
hundred miles north of the transAtlantic shipping lanes, and several more days travel time,
from the cotton ports to Britain (Liverpool) or France (Harve). In a world of production in which
capital outlays were necessary far in advance of investment returns (from returns on the
actual sale of cotton), the planter was invariably short of cash. Bourgeois in his mad desire to
accumulate (land and slaves) in order to pursue a life of lavish, ostentatious display, to
seigniorially exhibit his masterly worth, the planter was chronically debt-ridden. Generally
speaking, planters did not have the financial turn of mind to regularly, constantly and
monotonously engage in and handle the necessary transactions involved in cotton exchange.
Enter the New York City merchant community: In the person of the factor on the ground, it was
the only source from which the funds necessary to financially carry planters as a class could
be generated. And the factor too was financially subordinate to the commissioned merchant
with whom he regularly dealt: In his semi-annual summer trek to New York City to buy
provisions, crude implements and goods for luxury consumption (for his planter clientele), he
himself was advanced both those supplies and the credit to purchase them by "his" merchant
or jobbers.211
As the sheer volume of cotton exchange increased geometrically, a division of labor within the
merchant community developed. This volume of transactions created the modern market in its
impersonal form as the family businesses largely disappeared and the traditional merchant
became obsolete. Instead, firms of merchants began to deal exclusively in cotton, and strictly
as commissioned agents. In this manner they avoided the risks involved in the price
fluctuations in the transAtlantic cotton market. Bills of exchange and the advance of credit
remained, of course, permanent features of the cotton trade and, because of the magnitude of
these transactions (as well as the fact that exchange regularly involved currency changes
from dollars to pound sterling and vice versa), a stratum of financial specialists also
developed. Finally, in the areas of the greatest concentration of cotton exchanges (London,
New York), a stratum consisting of brokers and brokerage houses, engaged strictly in putting
buyers and sellers into contact with one another, evolved.212
With the development of a western market (discussed below), a specialization in the domain
of import duplicated the export specialization that had come to characterize the cotton trade.
210Ibid, 20-21, and Albion, Ibid, 100, 112.
211Albion, Ibid.

Of course, there were planters that regularly keep more or less respectively bourgeois journals of their transactions.
At a certain level of volume, record-keeping is an essential, though secondary, operation. (It is not always necessary,
i.e., below that level of volume merchants have often been known to keep a strictly ideal or "mental" record of their
activities). The point is, however, that planters did not engage in the primary, time and life consuming activity of
actually preparing and handling the requisite transactions that made up cotton exchange.
The factor's activity, like the planter's, followed the cycle of cotton production. Planted in the spring (March-April),
harvested in the autumn-winter (October-January), the hot, dull summer was a period of "down time. The well-to-do
planters also converged on New York or in nearby resorts, to avoid the debilitating heat and humidity of the southern
river bottoms, to spend (of course, on credit), and to enjoy the cultural life the City offered. Ibid, 113, 118.
212Ibid.

Simultaneously merchants began not only to restrict themselves exclusively to exporting, or to

importing as the case may have been, but importers began to limit their imports to a single
type of raw material (or finished good), e.g., iron or copper used in the production of
implements or grates, stoves, etc.213 A entire series of merchants, generally speaking the
further into the interior the smaller, sprung up to handle this trade. New strata were born, such
as the jobber, a merchant who purchased on his own account various types of goods in large
quantities at discounted prices, warehoused them, broke them down and sold them
individually or in smaller quantities to retail merchants.214
[Transportation Geography of Exchange (II)]
The New York City hinterlands (the Hudson River valley and contiguous New Jersey, Long
Island and Connecticut) had, as exhibited by the census, provided the City merchants with a
ready-made market, roughly one-sixth of the entire population of the United states from 1810
to 1820.215 The cotton trade (discussed above), the Erie Canal and the development of rails
made New York City and its proliferating merchant and financial strata the center of rapid
economic development on the North American continent.
While commissioned agency, financial specialization and brokerage houses were
developments within cotton exchange, specialization of merchants was greatly assisted by the
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.
The Canal linked New York City, by way of Hudson River to Albany and the Mohawk River to
Rome in upstate New York by steamboat, to Buffalo. From Buffalo, New York City and the
immediate region it served was linked by lake to Erie, Cleveland and Detroit and their
immediate rural environs. (In the year of its opening, furs from Mackinaw, Michigan, more than
a thousands miles from New York City, made their way to the Port.) The Erie Canal, then,
overcame the problem, lively debated since Washington's time, of how to establish trade with
farmers beyond the Alleghenies.216
Prior to its completion in October 1825, farmers, living and working in the upstate New York,
Canal midsection (finished since 1823), already had access to the City. Flour first and
foremost, ashes (potash), flaxseed (linseed) and salted meat (hogs, cattle), whiskey and
lumber were shipped east. In return, imported manufacturers goods, originating in Britain,
were shipped west. The Canal together with the cotton trade was crucial to rise of the New
York Port, its ascendancy in terms of volume over Montreal and Quebec to the north,
Philadelphia and Baltimore to the southwest, and Boston up the coast.217
213Ibid, 22.
214Robert Albion, Ibid, Appendices XXX and XXXI, 420-422, enumerates the range of merchants operating in New

York City, circa 1860. These merchant specialties included importers (474), jobbers (900), shippers (146),
commissioned merchants (921), brokers (1,817), auctioneers (257), bankers (660) and speculators (665). It also
included a broad, undefined category of "merchants" (21,677) who, according to Albion, even comprehended country
storekeepers. The parenthetical quantity expresses the number of those merchants engaged in each of these most
general group of categories. For example, within the general category of "importers" he lists fifty-nine different
activities the most numerous of which were dry goods merchants (89), wine and liquors merchants (89), and
hardware and cutlery merchants (86).
215Albion, Ibid, 77.
216Ibid, 77, 86, 89. "The 'water-level route' from Albany westward to Lake Erie was the one point where the

Appalachians could be taken in flank." Ibid, 84.

Given achieved levels of production and technique, Albion rightfully characterizes the Erie Canal as a "stupendous
undertaking" and feat. Ibid, 85-86.
217Ibid, 77, 79, 87-88.
As a residue of other processes, ashes served as a raw material in the production of soap and glass. Behind flour,
ashes were the second most important item of trade shipped east prior to and in the immediate years following the
opening of the Erie Canal. Ibid, 78.

New York merchants gained access to the interior just west of the Appalachians, as Buffalo,
connected to Erie by lake, was connected to Pittsburgh by canals on both the Allegheny and
Ohio Rivers. Before completion of the Canal, the farmers of the trans-Appalachian West who
had expectations beyond self-sufficiency, in particular those of western upstate New York, the
Ohio Valley south to Pittsburgh, the thin strip of northern Ohio along the lake, and southeast
Michigan, were largely frustrated. But to satisfy these expectations once the Canal was
opened, their production had, of course, not only to transcend self-sufficiency but also
generate a cash crop. But in this early period, exchanges between the western merchants and
trans-Appalachian farmers were conducted strictly without a monetary medium. These
exchanges were not, however, barter. Here the merchant played a singularly important role.
In the fall of the year credit, perhaps in the form of banknotes, was extended by New York City
merchants to their smaller, country counterparts in the West. Credit allowed the rural merchant
to place orders for spring shipment for finished goods (until 1850 product largely of Britain) for
farmers. At the same time, credit was extended by the great merchants of the City to the
millers and processes in western towns. This allowed these producers to pay farmers for the
autumn harvests and proceed with the manufacturer of raw material, especially flour, long
before shipment. Thus, extended credit against spring returns, farmers could place their
orders with merchants in the fall, and their produce would be shipped east by processors
when the ice broke in the spring. New York City merchants carried this trade and profited not
merely from the sale of breadstuffs and salted meat - north to New England and British North
American (Canada), south to the Caribbean (Cuba) and across the Atlantic to Britain, and
Portugal and Spain also - but on the carrying charges, that is, the interest accruing on the
advances made in the fall.218
The development of exchanges between New York City and the trans-Appalachian West
destroyed the trade, particularly in the production of wheat (and wheat processed as flour), in
the now no longer competitive Mohawk Valley, historical center of breadstuff prior to the
creation and completion of the Erie Canal. In American history, this is merely an early instance
of the production of underdevelopment through economic, proto-capitalist (merchant capitalist)
development.219
By 1840, the Canal put the City in touch with the hinterlands of the rising plains city of Chicago
and St. Louis, the oldest western city. At the same time, New York was connected to the true
interior of the old West, to Columbus (OH) and Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Louisville and
their hinterlands. Corn, wheat, rye and barley (breadstuffs), and hogs and cattle (salted
meats) were shipped East from the old West; while clothing, blankets and shoes, iron
implements of all sorts especially those used in farming, china, cooking vessels and other
domestic wares were shipped west. The Erie Canal had made these advances in trade
financially and temporally advantageous: A ton of wheat carried by horse drawn wagon from
Buffalo to Albany in 1840 cost $100.00, by way of the Canal the priced dropped to $20.00;
and, shipping time correspondingly fell from 20 to 8 days.220
[Transportation Geography of Exchange (III)]
Finally, in the 1850s New York City underwent a third development at which it was not,
however, at the transport-geographical center. Beginning in 1849, as explosion of railroad
218Ibid, 92, 94.
219Ibid, 78, 81 and 90 (for destruction of the Mohawk Valley wheat production). Albion indicates that dairy farming

superceded wheat production, but not, as the text makes clear, before numerous farmers and mills were ruined.
For a slightly later case of American-styled underdevelopment, that of the "Butternut" belts of the old West, see the
section entitled "Population Movements, Settlement and the Class Geography of Rural Areas" in chapter 2, below.
220Historical Atlas of the United States, 150-151, 188; Albion, Ibid, 83.

construction took place, the economy of transportation geography was made all over again.
Retracing old overland (and ones that paralleled waterway) routes, and creating new ones into
the West and South, this new dense network of rails produced a qualitatively more
economically integrating form of movement.221 In particular, starting again in upstate New
York, and in central and western Pennsylvania, and in the 1850s, covering the entirety of the
old West and far beyond, rail trunk lines linked the most rural corn and wheat producing zones
first to the western metropolises (Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, etc.), and then
east to New England and New York City. Taken together with the militaristic conquest from
Mexico of the present-day Southwest and southern half of California, this new transport
network heralded the penetration of the whole of the continent.
The City was the financial, if not the geographical, center of these development. For nowhere
else was there the money resources to underwrite the enormous capital outlays involved in
rail construction. On Wall Street, financing the railroads through the sale of railroad securities
raised the money to fund rail development. These financial activities created the New York
money market in the mid-1850s.222
The advent of rails reinforced and tightened the hold of the highly differentiated and stratified
merchant-financial community of the East on the economy of the West. However, as long as
numerous strata in the society of the West benefited from economic expansion, this hold
would not be felt by the economically most active social groups in the West. Only in the
downturn following the Civil War (1867), and then in the Great Depression beginning in 1873,
would western farmers, for example, indict eastern rail owners, merchants, and bankers for
monopolistic control of transport and finance.
At the same time the appearance of the railroads seemed to herald, but only outwardly, the
end of the New York City stranglehold on southern originating cotton exchange. While, as we
noted above, New York's share in cotton (re)export markedly tailed off by 1850 (i.e., at the
same time that rail construction took off), the City's merchants never lost their stranglehold on
cotton exchange. Transport insurance, commissions on both transactions and freight, and
interest charges all guaranteed a large return on cotton exchange would flow back to the
Citys merchants and financiers. By 1837, southerners had become conscious of this fact:
They claimed, with only some exaggeration, that the City's merchants received forty cents for
every dollar realized in the sale of southern cotton.223 Even though imports were far more
important in absolute dollar terms to New York and, in particular, to the nation (since two-thirds
of all United states imports came through the port of New York), and though the benefits of the
Erie Canal were highly publicized, in fact the role of proceeds from cotton exchange far
overshadowed the role of imports either in the U.S. economy or in New York City
specifically.224 The weight of cotton production in the American economy was simply
221The discussion of rails here is exceedingly thin pertaining only to New York City's role. For more on railways, see

the discussion "Population Movements, Technological Change, Class Recomposition and Sectional Alliance" chapter
2, below.
222For elaborations, see Chandler, The Invisible Hand, 90-91, and Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 126-127,
132-148.
223Albion, Ibid, 96, 120 (for southern criticism). Southerners also claimed that the tariff, in effect since the twenties
and designed to protect fledgling northern manufacturers, added forty cents to every dollar realized in cotton
exchange. It too was put in Yankee, this time manufacturers', pockets. William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 255256. In point of fact, collected at ports of entry such as New York, tariffs were the largest component in funding the
severely limited internal improvements undertaken by the national government.
224For the primacy of imports, Ibid, 91 and Appendices II and III, 390-391, where expressed in dollars the ratio of
imports to exports between 1815-1860 ranges from as low as 3:2 to as high as 2:1.
Of $373,100,000 in exports in 1860, $191,800,000 were realized through cotton exports. The next largest category
was specie, i.e., gold, of which $56,900,000 was exported. Beyond this, tobacco was responsible for $19,400,000 in
export sales. The largest category of western exports was woolen goods valued at $37,900,000. Ibid, Appendices IX

enormous: For the United States, cotton was by far the largest single commodity exported or
exchanged in trade from the beginning of the century until well after the Civil War. Through the
revenues derived from its export, especially prior to the development of new forms of
transportation (the Erie Canal, railroads), eastern merchants in New York, Boston,
Philadelphia and Baltimore financed construction of the docks, wharves and warehouses that
had made American trade possible.225 The imports that passed through these ports provided
the national government with the wherewithal (customs fees) to make the limited infrastructure
(internal improvements such as roads and turnpikes) it undertook to fund. These imports were
financed largely through cotton exports. The wealth and fortunes of the New York merchant
and financial community which funded first, canals (including Erie,) and later funded in part
(through bond sales) rail construction, were constituted on the basis of the extraction of a
merchant surplus from cotton exchange.226
In other words, the infrastructural foundations of industrial capitalist development in the United
States, constructed in the process of and with a view to developing cotton exchange, were
immediately and mediately dependent upon that exchange. Similarly, that development itself:
Without the importation of the raw materials and finished products necessary to launch it,
industrialization would have been impossible.227
Political Economy of Class Differentiation and Leading Jacksonians
The enormous development of cotton production after 1815, as well as the rapid expansion of
western agriculture and its exchanges with the East, had its necessary counterpart in the
exchange dependent development of New York City (and other metropolises) and the
opportunities it opened up within a growing merchant community, and its auxiliary occupations
(bankers, lawyers, etc.). For the petty bourgeoisie of New York Citys vast hinterland, the City
itself formed a gigantic magnetic attracting ambitious, greedy small town and village
and X, 400-401.
During the entire period from 1815 to 1860, the dollar value of cotton exports constituted 52.4% of the total dollar
value of U.S. exports. In the years from the opening of the Erie Canal (1825) until the beginning of the rapid rail
construction (through 1845), that percentage in dollar value terms was 47.2%. In the crucial years after the mid-1830s
(1834) through the collapse that followed the panic of 1837 until the revival that got underway in the mid-forties
(1845), that percentage was 53.2%. Calculated from figure in Douglass North, The Economic Development of the
United States, Table A-VIII, 233.
225In New York, "many" wharves were built at City expense and leased to merchants. Presumably, "many" more of
the sixty on the East River (housing coastal traffic) and the fifty-three on the Hudson (housing transAtlantic traffic) built
by 1840, as well as warehouses and, of, course, the counting houses, were built by merchants themselves. Albion,
Ibid, 221, 222.
226 The relative worth, expressed monetary, of southern cotton and western agricultural produce passing through the
Canal was as follows. The most important export (in terms of dollar volume) that moved through the Erie Canal was
western wheat. In 1851, its value was $10,000,000, and, in 1860, $15,400,000. Comparatively, in 1851, cotton
exports were valued at $112,000,000, and in 1860 at $191,800,000. In 1860, the total dollar value of the most
important western agricultural products was $35,000,000. Enumerated in order of value, these products included
flour, wheat, pork, beef, Indian corn, ham and bacon, livestock, cheese, butter, and rye, oats and other grains. Albion,
Ibid, 99, Appendix IX, 400. It should also be noted that exported western agricultural products in 1860 likely included
not only those that passed through the Erie Canal, but those that traveled east by rail.
Finally, note, however, that western goods were exports. The figures presented here do not include those, much more
massive, that were domestically consumed. That latter were directly involved in constituting the interregional EastWest dynamic upon which industrialization after 1850 depended, and which, consequently, shifted American capitalist
developmental dynamics northward. See "Population Movements, Technological Change, Class Recomposition and
Sectional Alliance, chapter 2, below.
227Similarly North, Ibid, 66-70: "In this period of rapid growth, it was cotton that initiated the concomitant expansion in
income, in the size of domestic markets, and creation of the social overhead investment [infrastructure] .... in the
course of its role in the marketing of cotton ... in the Northeast which were to facilitate the subsequent rapid growth of
manufacturers" (Ibid, 68) and a "major consequence of the expansive period of the 1830's [based on the cotton trade]
was the creation of conditions that made possible industrialization of the Northeast" (Ibid, 69-70).

merchants with a view to making real fortunes. Thus, after 1815 the mass of men forming a
merchant-financial community undergoing differentiation did not hail from the great families to
which the biggest of the traditional New York merchants belonged and started out from.
Rather, they came to New York (Philadelphia or Boston) from the small towns of the rural
areas of Pennsylvania, New York state and New England.
Because the early Democracy itself was ideologically nationalistic, specifically oriented toward
territorial expansion of the nation, and opposed to monopoly in all its forms, in New York,
these men became quite comfortable with the emerging form of mass politics and mass
political parties, becoming the captains and lieutenants that provided the internal leadership of
the Democracy within the City. The largest number of them, especially those among this group
who would come to be advisors closest to Andrew Jackson as President, were bankers,
lawyers, politicians, editors and businessmen generally. They matured, as it were, in environs
where the ideas they held as stock and trade were the common currency of men engaged in
practices of a cotton exchange-based expanding merchant community. They were as a group
oriented on the basis of their individual practices toward free trade without state intervention,
their wealth having been created, to use a contemporary expression, under hothouse
conditions of economic growth. In other words, standing close to the origins of a long
American tradition, in terms of their own origins they can best be characterized as
entrepreneurs.228
As entrepreneurs in the thirties, this social group will have traversed a long road by moment of
civil war. At the end of the decade of the fifties, the concentration of the previously discussed
financial activities in New York City made it the center of wealth in the Americas, and many
men of this group, and their firms, were to be found at that center.
At the summit of this entire development stood those financial firms that most concentrated
this wealth, the great banks of Wall Street. The great financiers, mostly directors of the boards
of these banks, had by this time (the fifties) amassed vast personal wealth. Given the nature
of their activity originating in merchant practices that stood outside production and derived
wealth from exchanges with rural farming lands of the West and the slave plantations of the
South, this wealth, and the power and standing in the society provided by this wealth,
furnished the great financiers with both the motive and leisure to elaborate a reactionary vision
of American future that, perhaps more than anything else, tied them to the Democracy.229

228Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, 327-328, 349, 719, and Bernstein, Ibid, 126, 128-129. Albion, (The

Rise of New York Port, 236, 237, and generally 241-250) states men of "decidedly varied backgrounds" came to New
York after 1815. Amongst them, and "far and away the most numerous and successful" of them, were men from New
England, especially Connecticut. Obviously not all members of Jackson official Cabinet or his informal one (the
"Kitchen Cabinet") were men, however, from the East. In connection with the opposition to the Bank of the United
States, Bray Hammond (Ibid, 329-346) enumerates twenty-one leading advisors to Jackson during his two term
Presidency. Of these, just more than half, eleven, were easterners, while five were from New York alone. (Only three
hailed from Jackson's adopted home state of Tennessee.) Of the twenty-one, moreover, seven were bankers, eight
lawyers, five publishers, and four each politicians or businessmen. (Obviously, some of these men had more than one
career and hence have been counted twice.)
229At the top, the extraordinary wealth skimmed by financiers from the vast amounts of money in circulation
necessarily entailed impoverishment at the bottom. This refers in the first place to the surpluses generated by slaves,
and, because in our view, this first case is no need of explanation it shall receive none. In the second place, it refers
to the surpluses generated by tenant farming in the old West. For the latter, see Capitalist Development in the Old
West in chapter 2, below.
For the relation of the great financiers and bankers to the Democracy, see "Summits of Power within and Class
Composition of the Northern Democracy in the Early War Years" in chapter 5, below.
For this reactionary vision and the groups that elaborated it, see the same, specifically New York City (II): Ruling
Class Components, also in chapter 5, below.

Part IV
The American Polity
Politicians in the American Form of Governance
In the North, the origins and status of politicians is fairly clear. They owed their existence to
the caucus system in and through which party electors and candidates were selected. Now
the caucus system originated against the background of rapid population rise, economic
growth and geographical expansion, a socio-economic context which made possible the
endemic struggles in the first thirty-five years (and more) of the nineteenth century by rural
populations and urban artisans to secure enfranchisement. The caucus was the preferred
method of commercial elites in the North and planters of the eastern Upper South to mitigate
potential losses of power and control over state political systems. The regional ruling classes
deflected the nascent "mobocracy" by creating the caucus to substitute a general electoral
ticket for the previous arrangement whereby electors were chose by district. The caucus made
local initiatives "impossible and undesirable. On the basis of the aforementioned fundamental
socio-economic transformations, mass politics, a mass medium of communication (national
newspapers) and mass political parties arose. The Bucktails of New York were the first mass
party in United States history, while the Jacksonian Democracy was the first such national
party. At the center of these parties was the caucus which in part made possible their
"machine" character.230
In the North, then, politicians were of two strips. First, there were those (whether wealthy or
no) hailing from respected old families. The Adams come most immediately to mind. Second,
there were those, and by 1830 they were the predominant type, who were professional
politicians whose personal power rested on leadership of a party machine. Martin Van Buren
was at once prototype and exemplary instance. These politicians, though often men of the
middle strata such as lawyers, men from families of middling merchants and (later)
manufacturers, were committed to ruling class social groups both out of conviction that only
these groups (with the politician's able assistance) could organize society and out of fear of
the "mob" below.
In the South, elected legislatures were dominated by the wealthy, socially prominent and
educated planter. These legislatures secured a minimalist governmental apparatus: Positions
within the southern state governments offered little remuneration because they were designed
to keep non-planter whites out of politics. Here, then, the machine phenomenon did not
develop: The white farming masses were effectively disenfranchised. A machine-like response
was never required because effective political mobilization of the white masses never
occurred. It was unnecessary and unwanted: In the South the old family politician as a type
held its own even against all Jacksonian-inspired mass upsurges since the latter never
achieved any institutionalization.
No livelihood could ever be forthcoming from political positions in southern states. They
remained dominated almost exclusively by the families of planters. The great southern
politicians nearly without fail hailed from the families of the large planters. Importantly, leading
southern politicians were nearly always in close touch with and had an unerring sense of
planter concerns, needs and aspirations - a much more adequate sense than northern,
professional politicians whose machine allegiances mediated their understandings of regional
ruling class perspectives. Thus, in speaking of the great southern politicians we are not
speaking of a stratum separate and distinct from planters.

230For Virginia where the caucus appeared in the 1800 Presidential election among Democratic-Republicans, Harry

Ammon, "The Richmond Junto, 396 (where the citation also appears).

Politicians in the Jacksonian Democracy231

The politicians involved in the Jacksonian coalition began with the Nashville coterie that
organized his campaigns in 1824 and, especially, in 1828. Among these were both the
opportunists, those who saw the making of a historically novel political re-alignment in
American politics and whatever the direction it was moving intended to be atop of it, and those
that supported Jackson both out of conviction and shared political temperament.
This insider group as well the earliest supporters of Jackson would for the most part be
superceded once the Hero had assumed the Presidency (by the previously mentioned
entrepreneurally oriented group of advisors).232 Outside this insider group, the first politicians
to attach themselves to the Jacksonian movement were the followers of John Calhoun - who
was, no less, U.S. Vice-President in the federalist (John Quincy) Adams Administration
opposed by the Hero. Calhoun had himself been undergoing a rather unnoticed political
metamorphosis, a conversion of sorts from nationalist, and a supporter of both tariffs and
activist State involvement in internal improvement to a state rights advocate opposed to tariffs
and federally-guided internal improvements at national expense. His change reflected, in the
first place, a fear of loss of his South Carolina constituency which was rapidly becoming more
vocally opposed to tariffs (and to a strong national State as guarantor of protectionist
measures imposed at American ports of entry), and a recognition that the revenue-generating
tariffs he supported (while a member of the Monroe Cabinet) to finance naval fortifications,
primarily against the British, had served their purpose and were no longer necessary. Calhoun
had never supported tariffs out of protectionist sentiment: Support of fledgling manufacturers
was a specifically Yankee phenomenon.
With Calhoun came Van Buren who in 1826 committed his political machinery, including the
massive New York electoral delegation, to Jackson. In their own way, Van Buren and the
Regency were state righters also: With the failure of the national government to financially
support construction of the Erie Canal, New York's Democratic politicians had found the
wherewithal to do it themselves. Thereafter, they had opposed all national funding for in-state
improvement projects. Van Buren, in particular, opposed and was crucial as Vice-President to
undermining the Bank of the United States. He sought to (re)capture national power for New
York (and himself) by (re)establishing the old New York-Virginia axis. He spurred Thomas
Richtie, a leading figure of the "Richmond Junto" - the informal center of planter power inside
Virginia's Republican party, on to consider reconstructing the old alliance through 1828
support of Jackson, a reconstruction that would also serve as a means to preventing the
formation of an anti-slavery party in the North.
In 1826 and again in 1827, Van Buren toured the South, especially North Carolina and
Georgia, in order to convince old Republican planters to support Jackson on these terms. With
memories of the divisive Missouri Controversy (1819-1820) still fresh in the minds of many
planter-politicians, on tour Van Buren was able to successfully reconstitute, now in a new and
broader form, the old New York-Virginia axis. Historically that success meant state rights
doctrine would become intertwined with pro-slavery politics, that Democrats would be
committed to suppression of national debate on the slavery issue, and that both would be
central features of the Jacksonian Democracy. Anti-nationalism in defense of rural liberty, no
longer historically relevant, had traveled a long road, for hereafter it would become state rights
in defense of slavery.233
231Our account closely follows Michael Holt, " The Democratic Party, 1828-1860, 501-502.
232Seen Political Economy of Class Differentiation and Leading Jacksonians, and n. 52, above.
233The line of thought in this last sentence is developed (minus the remark about historical relevancy) by Charles

Sellers. The formulation here, paraphrased, can be found in his The Market Revolution, 120. Note also our remarks,
penned a decade ago in the analysis of militant English, military republicanism that was elaborated in a critical

Part V
Planter Ascendancy and Jacksonianism
Planter Ascendancy in the Democracy
Van Buren's successful efforts to persuade planter-politicians in Lower South to support
Jackson in 1828 had the effect of broadening the planter base within the newly forming
Democracy. Yet two planter groups continued to remain anti-Jacksonian. The first consisted in
those nationalist, later "Whig" elements who - centered around Henry Clay - were
predominate in the Upper South. The second was made up of extreme state rights elements
who were concentrated in South Carolina (and, though he was later to become their
spokesman, were further to the "right" than John Calhoun).
Nationalists were found among the politically weightless, ineffectual and tiny middle strata of
merchants, lawyers and newspaper editors in small southern "towns": Politically, there was no
middle ground between northern nationalists suspicious of southern sectional commitment to
slavery and state righters hostility toward national power, because an antebellum southern
Whig after 1820 was a practical absurdity, the notion of one self-contradictory. The
"accidental" Presidency of John Tyler was at once case in point and proof of the dilemma. Had
Henry Clay lived longer, he too would have confronted the quandary of all southern
nationalists tied to the planter class: Based upon slavery, the tendential direction of southern
development entailed a qualitatively different and antagonistic trajectory relative to northern
capitalism. In the North, on the other hand, the presence of men like Stephen Douglas was no
anomaly: Douglas Democrats in the 1860 election were overwhelmingly southern, found
especially in border states as small subsistence farmers but not among planters.234
State righters were altogether different. Not organized into parties until the mid-1830s, and
never into a sectional party much less a national party, state righters were always a minority, a
assessment of the army in relation to Cromwell's early Protectorate: "In a tradition in the West which acknowledges
the reality and weightiness of a material substratum to social life, the radical democracy of freeholders is one of two
great visions of community (communism is the other). The military republic is at once variant of former, and its
aborted aufheben. Because the freeholders' democracy is a rural vision, it is predicated upon the precapitalist, selfcontained household economy (oikos) that dominated the West in various forms (small property to manor) down to
the mid-sixteenth century England, and, still later, down to early nineteenth century America (to mention the two
Atlantic societies in which republicanism was, accordingly, able to root itself). English republicanism never had the
opportunity in an actual historical sense to confront the choice between a small, freeholders' land property and a
commercial economy predicated on market exchanges (with a large explicitly commodity producing rural 'sector'). By
mid-17th century England (i.e., moment of the emergence of republican theory in English political thought), the latter
had already triumphed. Thus, the historical presuppositions for the defeat of republican theory on English soil, viz., its
articulation as the perspective of opposition whose objective position in English society was that of integrated
otherness (because it de facto accepted the historical irreversibility of the commercialization of this society), had
already been established prior to the momentous social upheaval (civil war) that had created the opening for
theoretical formulation. ... The militant 'people' may have replaced the estates (Stnde) of precapitalist societies in
the West, but this proto-nationalist (latter rabidly so) concept itself no longer referred to a reality on the ground:
Commercialization inevitability brought the (mercantile) triumph of the city over the countryside, and specialized,
urban classes created through the growing division of labor. ...For us, the theoretical synthesis which attempts to
develop and go beyond militant republicanism is doomed, since the latter has no capacity to advance and grow, has
no relevancy to, the critique of capitalism. (Why should it? It was developed on the seemingly unshakable, thousand
year old, unchanging foundations of the oikos or household 'economy'?). Military republicanism was rendered
theoretically and practically obsolete by the mercantile capitalist-engendered transformation of society, it was no
longer at home in the world, because the world was no longer the same. Moreover, it appears invariably in history as
the perspective of oligarchical and aristocratic elements 'on the out,' who rest their wealth, power and prestige on the
same social foundations of ownership and exploitation as the 'One,' a tyrant, to whom they oppose themselves."
[Though the "liberty defending" republicanism of great planters was not military, here we may nonetheless read
"northern capital" for "the 'One", and arrive at a statement of the social position great planters thought themselves
situated in relation to the Quincy Adams Presidency, i.e., prior to the emergence of Jackson.] Will Barnes,
Revolutionary Theories in the English Civil War, 69-70. (Emphases deleted.)
234For the southern middle strata, Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 361; for the relation of John Tyler to this dilemma
(formulated somewhat differently), Ibid, 363-364.

small albeit a vocal and articulate minority, right down to the secession crisis of the winter of
1860-1861. State righters opposed Jackson on two counts, first, because he was a nationalist
as was exhibited in his early indifference to the tariff as, allegedly, a vital issue to the sectional
interests of the South; and, secondly, because the Democratic party's "whites' only"
egalitarianism was in principle incapable of establishing the proper balance between the class
line and the color line, that is, Jackson's courting of "po' white trash" always threatened to spill
out over the color line and endanger planter hegemony. Nevertheless the relations between
the Jacksonian Democracy and planters as a class, especially its most determined, extreme
state rights element, were fluid. In 1836, the latter refused to support Van Buren, the Hero's
preferred successor, because he was too soft on abolition; in 1840, favoring Van Buren many
state righters opposed another hero, William Henry Harrison with his Whiggish state rights
running mate - John Tyler, because Harrison had once spoken of gradual emancipation of
slaves and because he ran as a member of a nationalist party. The successful nomination of
James Polk as Democratic party Presidential candidate in 1844 and the denial of that
nomination to former President (1837-1840) Martin Van Buren, however, at once revealed the
strength of the extreme element within the planter class and signified the ascendancy of the
southern, planter wing of the party over the entire Democracy. Van Buren, the popular favorite,
had opposed the immediate annexation of Texas as a slave state and for this reason was
denied the nomination.235
The logic of southern development was more and more clear to planters: As they became
more conscious of themselves as a class, planters at first sought to dominate the entire
political system through control over the Democracy and mobilization of the class coalition at
its base. But as property owning capitalist farmers in the North and West, having differentiated
themselves out of the yeomanry, grew larger and more prosperous (i.e., after recovery from
depression that followed from the Panic of 1837 was underway), and especially as tenants in
the old West increasingly confronted the reality of effective proletarianization on the land, both
classes began to see that the planter opposition to cheap lands followed logically from the
commitment to slavery, that slavery was inimical to "free soil. By 1848, the former were
beginning to line up behind the Free Soil party and in the mid-1850s both classes were won
over to the newly forming Republican party en masse. Thereafter the ideological position of
state righters became more tenable within the planter community as a whole, and planters
tended to project the necessity of making a political break with the liberal capitalist North, that
is, finding a political form that would embody in its fundamental law legal sanction for the
institution of slavery. (In this light, reactionary anti-modernists such as George Fitzhugh and,
at times, Calhoun, constituted the most coherent spokesmen for this development, and
demonstrated that the romantic and anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal and anti-capitalist direction
- a piece with the restorationist reaction sweeping Europe after 1848 - was the only consistent
direction that Civil War-triumphant southern development could have taken.) This pursuit was
a practical necessity because the differentiation of the yeomanry and the emergence outside
the South of numerous strata, some quite large, devoted to capitalist farming had sundered
the social base of the Democracy. The 1860 election of Lincoln largely proved that for the
moment it was no longer a viable national party.236
235For state righters refusal to support Van Buren in 1836 and their reversal in 1840, Ibid, 358, 360, respectively.
236Fitzhugh elaborated a neo-feudal theory of ranks and orders that sought to ontologically underpin white

supremacy (see Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, passim). Such a perspective preserved not
merely the color line but also the class line, which, at any rate, was its intended function. Obviously, such a view
would not have been amendable to the non-planter, non-slaveholding, southern white masses. Racism, that is,
convictions concerning the biological and natural inferiority of blacks, even if unstated as such, was much more
congenial to them since it allowed them to feel comfortable in their Jacksonian, white equalitarian illusions, and
thereby, it, from the planters' side, guaranteed mass defense of slave labor against Yankee abolitionist assaults.

Jacksonianism as an Ideal Hegemonic Form

Ideological Expression of a Class Alliance Based on White Egalitarianism and Black Slavery
Jackson himself had spend a good deal of his time during his Presidency attacking the
concept of concentrated power embodied in the idea of a national bank while practically
circumventing the operations of the Second Bank of the United States. In fact, the party of
Jackson had demagogically stood against the domination of the yeomanry (and artisans) by
northern commercial interests and large southern slaveholders as well, instances no doubt of
the monopolistic power he and they so detested.
If the party culture of the Democracy was opposed to a "slaveocracy" (a form of concentrated
power) that, after 1844, actually controlled it, the argument against monopoly (allegedly, the
essence of concentrated power) went something like this: All Jacksonians agreed that white
males were equal. But this equality was constituted on the dual foundations of slavery and de
facto gross economic inequality precisely to the extent that all experienced open or "equal"
opportunity in the marketplace: On the one hand, all whites shared a common identity
constructed out of political, civil and moral equality of white, male citizenship; and, on the
other hand, this inequality of wealth was not deemed wrong or harmful as long as individuals
competed freely. It was government with its legislation of privilege, with its insider tracks, etc.,
that created "permanent advantage" and thereby "constituted special privilege...[,] the
essence of old world aristocracy ...[that] had no place in new world democracy." Accordingly,
all legal monopolies, such as chartered banks, incorporations, and, in particular, the Second
Bank of the United States, were monstrosities. An element of yeoman and artisan (as well as
planter) class hostility was patent in the attitude toward banks, which were believed to be the
source of the monopolistic socio-economic and political power of the eastern, urban old worldstyled Whiggish "aristocracy. Monopoly was detested because it was parasitic; it was, after
all, the cultivator, but also the artisans and the small tradesmen that produced wealth, that
were simple, industrious and frugal, from whose simplicity civic virtue sprang. Anti-monopoly,
then, was the first element of Jacksonian as a pre-ideological, ideal-cultural hegemonic
form.237 Hostility to monopolies, of course, presupposed the whites' only patriarchal
equalitarianism that was operative in the practice of yeomen.
For a predominately agricultural nation with an exploding population, one open to immigration,
"equal" opportunity presupposed an expanding land base to accommodate a mostly free
white, yeoman population. Territorial expansion was, in fact, the second, central ideal
component of Jacksonianism, a conscious expression of the Hero's own practice as well as
that of yeomen and planters, as recent expropriations of Indian communities (in e.g., Florida,
Georgia and Tennessee) in order to open new land to settlement vividly demonstrated.
Territorial expansion was a necessary historical premise of the economic growth that made
open opportunity so compelling; and, the latter, as long as slavery and the plantation system
appeared to be geographically restricted (i.e., soil exhaustion had yet to shift the central of
Somewhat similarly, Sellers, Ibid, 409. For the original development of this as a practical planter strategy in early
colonial Virginia, see "Racial Slavery as a Planter Strategy to Secure Rule" in the Preface, above.
237On the ideological moments of Jacksonian Democracy we have closely followed Alexander Saxton, The Rise and
Fall of the White Republic, 142-144 (citations appear on 143).
For a different view than that developed here, one which not only derives anti-monopolism from a powerful tendency
toward equality in democratic thought, but also stresses the socially leveling character of this tendency, see John
Ashworth, 'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 23-31, and passim. Ashworth's account, in our view, relies far too heavily on
what, above, we called the "ideal, civic elements in the consciousness of yeomanry, failing, as we have undertaken in
this section, to critically describe the shape of these ideal elements in terms of their mediation by, and refraction
through their relation to, social practice. The same criticism can be extended to his "practical" discussions where the
excuse of doing "intellectual history" is no longer valid, see, e.g., his account of Van Buren's "war" against the "Bank,
Ibid, 87-88.

gravity of slavery westward into the territories), was compelling because it was experientially
real for enough of the free white population, to constitute, as it were, the material foundations
of a "producers' republic.238
Chauvinist commitment to the "producers' republic" was, then, an ideal element of the
yeomanrys awareness, shaping his concerns and motivating much of his political actions.
Thus, nationalism was the third central component of the Jacksonian ideal-cultural synthesis.
The practical efficacy of this emotion laden concept of nationalism was brought clearly to view
in the vast territories ceded by Mexico as a humiliating consequence of defeat in war (18461847) with United States. These territories, ceded after the annexation of Texas (1845) had
become an accomplished fact, included present day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico
and most of Arizona. This expansion, one that still required a struggle against the indigenous
Indian populations before settlement could be fully undertaken, were justified in terms of "rural
liberty, a "'great experiment in liberty and federal self-government'" and was otherwise known
as "manifest destiny.239
At the same time that planters had consolidated control over the Democracy, Jacksonianism
had become ideologically fixed: It had become frozen in a manner which exhibited ideology at
work, viz., denied planter hegemony over the party all the while, in fact, planters, with northern
entrepreneurial and financial classes as their lieutenancies, exercised that leadership and
control.
The Assimilation of the Democracy to the Slavepower
In 1830, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road bill, an internal improvement designed to aid
Kentucky, in order to reassure southern planters within the Democratic party that he favored
limitations to national power. Thereafter opposition to (federally-directed) internal
improvements was equated with support for state rights. In the same year, the same planter
element supported Jackson's veto of a bill re-chartering the national bank on the grounds that
national centralization reduced the viability of state-initiated actions. After 1832, the
Democracy opposed tariffs: Basing themselves on, in particular, eastern merchants and
financiers tied to cotton exchange, Northern Democratic politicians supported their southern
counterparts, who, in turn, were responding to pressure from their state rights "right" flank.
Jackson and enough Democrats outside the South supported southern planters with a view to
tariffs and internal improvements, while the latter supported the former with a view to the
banks. An alliance at the top of the Democratic party had been fully formed. President Van
Buren's removal of federal funds from designated state banks in autumn 1837 following that
year's financial panic cemented this alliance to such an extent that it would remain more or
less intact for the nearly twenty years (while making him one of its victims): State righters were
pleased inasmuch as they interpreted the action as an attack on government interference in
the economy, viz., as a counter-thrust against the centralizing tendency of the national
government. But Van Buren's action also confirmed the Democratic party's commitment to its
popular base, since the same action was in accordance with hard money views (and
corresponding detestation for paper money) of urban workers and yeoman farmers. That
mass base allowed the Democracy to make its positions in Congress stick, while, tied to that
base, Democratic representatives in Congress were stuck supporting legislative action in

238Saxton, Ibid, 145. Charles Sellers notes, "[Around] Indian removal, a historic-political coalition gathered to

champion the equality and independence of white male farmers, workers, and small entrepreneurs." The Market
Revolution, 309, 312 (citation).
239Ibid, 145-147; for the territories, Freehling, Ibid, 367 (map).

accordance with views, especially those dealing with banks, some might have otherwise
repudiated.240
The dynamics of northern capitalist development neatly, if only temporarily, dovetailed with the
complex dynamic of southern soil exhaustion in that both could be and were politically
mediated by a policy and practice of national expansionism.241 And as long as the
infrastructural presuppositions (nationwide rail, telegraph and ocean-going steamship)
remained undeveloped, i.e., prior to 1850, and as long as the growing prosperity of the period
of the development of those presuppositions (1847-1854) still lay in the future, and,
accordingly, the political ramifications of the full differentiation of various strata out of the
yeomanry committed to capitalist farming had yet to develop, the southern planter-dominated
Democracy controlled the national political system. With their attention turned to the banks,
"monied interests" and aristocratic Easterners as corrupters of republican virtue, yeomen and
artisans, organizationally committed to a Democracy hegemonized by the great planters, were
culturally-ideally tied to the same planters by a populist nationalism justified in white
patriarchally grounded, egalitarian and expansionist terms.242

240For Congressional issues in 1832 in relation to the planter-Democracy axis as well as Van Buren's 1837 response

to the Panic, Michael Holt, "The Democratic Party, 1828-1860, 505. Sellers (The Market Revolution, 273) claims
opposition to internal improvements, what he calls "anti-developmentalism, cemented the alliance between planters
at the top and northern farmers and mechanics at the base. Poor farmer and worker opposition were grounded on
an anti-market "use-value ethos, the one rooted in yeoman self-sufficiency and the other in artisan independence. In
the South, he suggests that black revolt and Yankee capital (reference is to Nat Turner's rebellion and tariff-based,
section unfairness) "forced" planters into an alliance with the Democracy as a lesser evil to southern "white farmer
democracy" (Ibid, 278-279, 320). He simultaneously suggests this compulsion took the form of an unpleasant planter
embrace of Jackson, an embrace that was pursued as conscious strategy (Ibid, 278). As strategy, one might be
inclined to think compulsion was at best irrelevant.
In stressing the central role of anti-Indian racism in forging democracy's coalition of "white male farmers, workers, and
small entrepreneurs" (Ibid, 312 and the citation appearing in n. 61, above), what is really revealed is the centrality of
those ideological moments (enumerated in the previous section) for integrating these class strata, i.e., demonstrated
was the role of yeoman farmers and artisan workers, men whose awareness still exhibited precapitalist concepts,
orientations and attitudes, as battering rams in a project of democratizing capital, in knocking down barriers to
accumulation wealth, and appropriation of the corresponding status and power, by any man with sufficient
entrepreneurial flair.
241On this basis, it was the planter-controlled Democracy that made it possible for the South to get a slave state for
every free state the entered the Union.
242After 1854 Nebraska debacle, the Democracy managed to maintain a solid hold on national institutions. In 1856,
James Buchanan, a New Hampshire Democrat and a firm adherence to the traditional policy (established by Martin
Van Buren) of keeping slavery debate out of national forums, was nominated by his party for the Presidency. [For this,
see the following chapter.] His victory in the national election that year was not surprising - what was surprising was
the strength of his Republican challenger, John C. Fremont, a radical: The Republican party was ascending and the
Democracy declining.
Symptomatic of this decline, that is, of a political organization that had ruled too long on the terrain of the bourgeois
State without serious "ideological" opposition (even though it occasionally lost an election), were the internal disputes
and rivalries within state party organizations. Pronounced differences within the Democracy surfaced periodically in
two regular events in the life of the party, namely, in nominating candidates and the struggle over patronage spoils.
New York was the case where these process of sundering were most manifest. It occurred along two axes, first,
city/country (urban/rural) - with all kinds of intermediate moments (towns) that point to the other axis, namely,
differentiatedly articulated class interests. The problem of representing a vast heterogeneity of different, sometimes
truly antagonistic class-based interests within a single organization was most manifest in Pennsylvania.
Because the Democracy had for so long not had serious ideal-political opposition, it developed a machine-like
organizational character. Patronage reinforced and fueled this development, while the culturally diffused nature and
the triumphant hegemony of Jacksonianism was the condition of this development. Let us call American political
culture, say between 1832 and 1854, definitely Jacksonian. Class differentiation in the West, on the other hand,
undermined Jacksonian hegemony and the Democracy as its organizational form and expression.

Note1: The Second Bank of the United States

Andrew Jackson surrounded himself during his two terms in office as President with men who
largely opposed renewing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States. Undoubtedly a
couple or three of his advisors (and, relatively speaking, a smaller number of his passive
supporters among the popular classes) supported him for purely agrarian and Jeffersonian
reasons. The motives for his advisors' opposition, however, by and large involved wealth and
power, and, wrapped up in these motives, petty resentments against the old, established and
traditional merchant-financial ruling class social groups who, reincarnating the National
Republican and Federalists commitment to the national State as the motor of economic
development, had hitherto been dominant. If Bray Hammond, historian of the Bank, is to be
believed, the (by now) old Hero's motives were ruled by ideal components (i.e., by a
"principled, Constitutionally-grounded opposition to the Bank), and that he was used, duped if
you will, in this respect by men who otherwise largely engaged in demagoguery and
conscious dissembling.243
With its twenty-five chartered branches in twenty states and the District of Columbia in 1830,
the Philadelphia-resident Bank of the United States placed a premium of 8% on local banks'
subscription: The former's purchase of specie (gold or silver coin minted by the Treasury and
issued by the Bank) was conditional upon an 8% interest charge before the latter would
accept payment in the form of latter's paper, notes or checks. In New York City, custom duties
on imports that came through the Port were remitted to Philadelphia. This galled those newly
emerging self-made men involved in the "financial sector" (another contemporary term, this
one of limited value because it assumes an institutional differentiation that had not yet come
into being). A number of these men stood to make enormous material gains if the Bank was
dismantled: The premium would be lifted, and so would all constraints on free lending. Flowing
from expansionary policy based on easy credit (which, mediated by a loss of depositor
confidence, in fact led straight to the financial Panic of 1837), economic development would
no longer be restrained, or so it was held, by the fiscal conservatism of the Bank.244
On the one side, Jackson temporarily supported the state banks against the Bank of the
United States in order to, as he had it, rid the country of the "monster" corrupting the people.
Latter he also intended to destroy the state banks, as least as repositories and issuers of
paper currency.245 On the other side, his sycophantic advisors supported various different
state banks (Taney had interests in a Maryland bank and David Henshaw owned a Boston
243For demagoguery, see, Hammond, Ibid, 330-331 (Isaac Hill, banker, newspaper editor and U.S. Senator, on the

Bank monstrosity and old rich money); 405-410 (Jackson's veto message written by Taney and Kendall); 423-427
(Taney in defense of the transfer of funds out the Bank to private, "pet" banks), 429 (Henshaw in defense of the
same), 430-431 (Jackson abusively resisting rectifying the problems of credit overextension after the transfer of
funds).
For an opposing account of the "Bank War, which takes the populist, democratic and hard money radicalism of
Jacksonian rhetoric at face value, Sellers, Ibid, 321-326, 334-337, 341-348.
A different perspective on the "Bank War, one which theoretically and ideologically derives opposition from an
agrarian hostility to monopoly can be found in Ashworth, 'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 43-46. The account is ideological
because it makes no effort to relate the ideal elements of opposition to the social practices of those who actually bore
that opposition, and because it, consciously or no, inverts and thereby masks the specific intent (aggrandizement of
wealth, petty resentments, etc.) animating those practices as well as the role of the authors of that intent (Jackson's
advisors). It neither asks, for whom? or why?
In this regard, a regularly cited "agrarian" (by, e.g., Sellers, Ashworth) is Amos Kendall. For Kendall, see fn. 75, below.
244Ibid, 328-329.
245Jackson's intent vis-a-vis the state banks is clear from a 1837 letter he wrote Van Buren shortly after the latter had

assumed the Presidency and at the time the Panic had compelled banks without exception to suspend payment of
specie, i.e., refuse to honor debt or note repayment in hard currency. Van Buren, of course, ignored the old Hero. The
letter is excerpted by Hammond, Ibid, 491.

bank, both "pets, i.e., largely Democrat-controlled banks in which Federal funds from the
Bank of the United States were deposited),246 for reasons of self-aggrandizement and power.
Once Jackson, ideologically an agrarian and a "hard-money" man who believed only metal
(coin) as opposed to paper currency and bank notes was constitutional, left office, his
"program" was, so to speak, short-circuited. State-based, "free" banks were triumphant, and,
among them, the emerging great New York banks were most triumphant of all. Wall Street
was henceforth established as the financial center of the American economy. Perhaps that
was fitting: Based largely on the Port's trade (and hence the custom duties imposed on
imports), the New York banks' remittances had, it might be noted, by the mid-1830s formed
third-quarters of all deposits in the Bank of the United States.247
Outside the East, particularly those states in the old West, the same situation did not prevail.
Yet here the character of Jacksonianism was even clearer. Michigan provides a lucid, and
telling, example. There, in the territorial legislature prior to statehood (1836) and in the
overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature, the leading advocates of banking were
Jacksonians. Opposition was not to banking as such, but to the restrictive, regulatory features
of centralized banking. Nonetheless, not only did a state bank, the bank of Michigan, retain its
charter, in 1836, nine new banks were chartered and in no case was there a veto forthcoming
from the Democratic governor (Stevens T. Mason).248 Here, the "poor, popular, and "radical"
element was opposed to the regulation and centralization of banking. That is, it was hostile to
the establishment in law of control over banks by large investors who limited, restricting or
regulating, the bank stock ownership to wealthy investors like themselves. Such banking was
based on state (or federal) charters, and entailed a banking system, i.e., the institution of a
"central" bank (set up by the state legislature or Congress) and subordinated banks, in which
the "central" bank not only restricted investment but controlled credit through disposition over
the terms it set for reserves (specie). The "democratic" element, on the other hand, favored
"free" banking, that is, it opposed restrictions on the size of bank stock investments and,
according, the control of a "central" bank over a group of subordinate banks. What this really
meant was that popular, social strata wanted easy money, readily available, if not in coin then
in paper form, in order to fuel land purchases, speculation, and rapid economic growth. "Free"
banks were invariably incorporated and not subject to a state or national, a central, bank.
Instead, the ownership of such institutions was usually required only to have purchased state
bonds as security for the notes it would issue. Lacking reserve requirements, "free" banks
could, of course, lend "freely. Because they were a source of easy credit, they were what was
wanted in the West: The areas of increasing demographical density west of the Appalachians,
areas that were obviously outside the eastern centers of old mercantile power, were starved
for an exchangeable medium, particularly after 1834 when the Hero began to undertake
earnest attempts to render currency "constitutional" (i.e., gold based) and cotton and land
sales booms encouraged local developmental schemes. The contraction of paper money and
246Ibid, 419.

Typical of the relation of a "pet" bank to the Democracy were the Bank of Michigan and the Michigan-based Farmer's
and Mechanic's Bank. In the former case, while wealthy New Yorkers held most of the bank stock, the biggest local
stockholder was Michigan Democratic powerhouse and political boss Lewis Case. In the latter case, the largest
stockholders were Democrats, i.e., Jacksonians, who comprised a full 90% of the bank's directors. The Bank of
Michigan had been a federal depository since 1831, while the Farmer's and Mechanic's Bank was made one in 1834,
that is, after the removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States. William Shade, Banks or no Banks,
34-35.
247Between the transfer of Bank funds to the "pet" banks in 1834 and 1836, 200 new banks had been established.
New notes in circulation in this period increased 50% in the East, 100% in the West, and 150% in the South.
Hammond, Ibid, 453; for New York banks remittances to the Bank, Ibid, 392.
248Shade, Banks or no Banks, 36. For other states (Ohio, Illinois, Indiana) in the old West, Ibid, 20-33.

bank notes in these areas, albeit limited, made easy credit, hence "free" banking, the order of
the day.
Now, "large investors" favoring regulation and centralization and the "popular, "radical" and
"democratic, i.e., Jacksonian, elements favoring "free" banking invariably had class
coordinates: The former consisted in various strata of the mercantile community (older familybased, established bankers and merchants primarily), and the latter were the so-called
"farming" or "artisan" or "mechanikal" element, and men on the make particularly land
speculators (and smaller land purchasers), promoters, and locally-based men pursuing local
economic developments (construction of a road or bridge, construction of a mill, etc). The
leading Michigan newspapers of the day, in reprinting articles from New York papers similarly
engaged in staking out positions on banking, revealed in transparent terms that it was
precisely these class strata who were really engaged in the debate. The terms of this debate
and the positions taken (which cut across party lines such as in Michigan), both of which
suggested a struggle to democratize access to capital, did not change until after the Panic of
1837 and the depression that followed the specie suspension of October 1839.249
Consider these self-made men, promoters, entrepreneurs, financiers and land speculators.
"Self-made" was a conscious, and crucial characteristic of these men: They opposed
themselves to the aristocracy of the established, older and well-to-do families whose wealth
was based on the old mercantile economy centered in the Northeast. They found it particularly
galling that each new generation of this old aristocracy of wealth and power merely had that
wealth transmitted to it. (In this way the early Jacksonian populism was based largely on a
conflict between old money and new money.)250 To these men, the Bank institutionally
symbolized the "privilege, "advantage, regulation, and Old World ways that had all impeded
their rise and stood in the way of their designs for self-aggrandizement. Thus, ideationally they
were committed to laissez faire: They embodied the "spirit of enterprise. In the narrowly
economic sense of the classically liberal period of nineteenth century, they were "democratic"
(i.e., sincerely felt and thought they, or any white man for that matter, should have access to
the opportunity to make himself as wealthy as he could) and, to be sure, bourgeois, though
Hammond is simply mistaken to call these men "capitalist" (a concept that, on the basis of
future development, can only be retrospectively projected).251
The central figures, however, in the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States were
Amos Kendall,252 Roger Taney and Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was exempliary. His
commitments inseparably tied state rights and the will to power together: On the one side, he
believed New York, specifically New York City (not Philadelphia) and her banks (to which the
Albany Regency, the Democratic party machine he controlled, was closely tied253) was central
to American economic development, wealth and power; and, on the other side, he wanted to
be President.

249Ibid, 36-37, 39.

250For example, see Hammond, Ibid, 408-409.
251Ibid, 334, 337, 341, 346-349, 349 and passim.
252Amos Kendall was Dartmouth educated, newspaper editor, ideologue and entrepreneur extradinaire (e.g., founder

and organizer of the commercial telegraph system in the United States, Ibid, 332). Curiously Sellers (Ibid, 341)
renders Kendall a barometer of the stress of "capitalist transformation": His frequent visits to kin near Lowell,
Massachusetts gave him a real feeling, or so Sellers appears to think, for the destruction of popular, anti-capitalist
democratic impulses, and, in a Jacksonian idiom (takeover from the Heros Farewell Address), the corruption of the
people by aristocratic stockjobbers, land jobbers and every species of speculator.
253Ibid, 391-393, 479, 491.

Note2: Anti-abolition Mobs and the Psychology of Class Oppression

According to Charles Sellers, a precapitalist, agrarian impulse, embodying a "use-value"
ethos, underlay the opposition to the aristocratic Second Bank of the United States. 254
Nonetheless, the Bank War itself was conducted on high by Andrew Jackson and his
entrepreneurial confidants (Kendall, Taney, etc.) against the Second Bank's director, Nicolas
Biddle and his small circle of colleagues. In this very importance sense, the battle was "class
struggle" only at a distant remove.
At any rate, the debate over a "Bank War, i.e., an intra-elite fight over the continued existence
of the Bank, began with an albeit disputed, bourgeois historiographical insight that dates from
Arthur Schlesinger Age of Jackson (which, by the way, comes in for heavy citation in the
Seller's narration of said "war"). Seller's contribution was to suggest that a revolt against the
penetration of market relations into the domains of daily life, penetration realized most
forcefully by the institution of the Bank, was what truly drove this "struggle. But in a crucial
respect this misses the point. To really find masses of artisan workers and farmers actively
engaged in opposition to other groups in Jacksonian American society, we must, at least in the
case of these workers, turn to strike actions. We might also consider the reputedly major mass
actions of the central decade of the Jacksonian era, the thirties. But once we have done so,
the question immediately arises as why men "possessing" precapitalist mentalities would not
respond to the leadership of men who defended the older mercantile economy of preindustrial America.
If we briefly survey the historical sequence of events, we can suggest a different
reconstruction.
Cotton prices took off after 1832. Up from $.09 per pound in 1832, in 1833, a pound of cotton
fetched $.1232, in 1834 $.1290, in 1835 $.1745, and in 1836 $.1650.255 At the same time,
causally (in the motivational and historical sense) related to both the rise of cotton prices and
Jackson's Bank charter veto (10 July 1832), land prices rose as Eastern-based speculators,
grouped together in firms like the American Land Company, began buying up public lands in
the old West (Indiana, Illinois, southern Michigan),256 and planters expanded cotton production
in the southwest (Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and East Texas). Then came the so-called
transfer of Bank funds: After October 1833, current receipts from customs and land sales were
no longer deposited with the Philadelphia Bank but with chosen banks (the "pets") mostly in
the East. Thereafter, bank charters in the various states shot up across the board. (In the
following three years, the existing number of banks rose by half as over two hundred new
banks were established.257) First, Jackson's veto and, then, the transfer of federal funds had
given enormous impetus to entrepreneurial activity. By mid-1835, a speculative boom had
already reached a feverish pitch. But the rise in cotton prices underlay all other economic
activity.
Now consider another sequence of events within the same historical universe. In January
1831, abolitionists in the Northeast established the New England Anti-Slavery Society,
launching at the same time a newspaper called the Liberator under the editorship of their most
articulate spokesperson, the uncompromising William Lloyd Garrison. Abolitionists had their
first public format and center of activity. This activity grew rapidly. The need for organizational
254See the references to Sellers' The Market Revolution in fn. 66, above.
255 Douglass North, The Economic Development of the United States, Table A-VIII, 233.
256Paul Wallace Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier, 54, 56, 63, 111, 145, 204, 243. See also the

section headed "Capitalist Development in the Old West" in chapter 2, below. Land sales, which had been about
$2,000,000 annually in the 1820s, rose to $5,000,000 in 1834, $15,000,000 in 1835, and $25,000,000 in 1836.
Sellers, Ibid, 344.
257Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, 259.

forms to coordinate this activity was felt immediately. In 1832, four local societies in two states
existed. Before the end of 1833, forty-seven local societies in ten states had come into being.
On 1 October 1833, the New York City Anti-Slavery Society was established, while a wellfinanced national center, the American Anti-Slavery Society, operating out of New York City
(and overlapping with the local society) was formed in December 1833. As the cotton-based,
speculative bubble expanded, so did abolitionist activity. Reaction against historical progress
in the form of an anti-abolitionist rampage erupted also simultaneously: "Northerners
dragged ... Garrison through the streets of Boston in [October] 1835; broke up a convention
of New York State Anti-Slavery Society at Utica the same day; petitioned in 1835 and 1836 for
legislation to make the propagation of abolitionist sentiments a criminal offense; supplied the
necessary votes to pass the famous gag rule which was renewed at each session of
Congress between 1836 and 1844; established the Connecticut gag law in 1836 to bar
abolitionist lecturers from Congregationalist pulpits; murdered the abolitionist editor Elijah
Lovejoy at Alton, Illinois ... [on 7 November] 1837; burned down Pennsylvania Hall in
Philadelphia in [May] 1838."258 Note two orders of anti-abolitionist activity are indiscriminately
presented: In the streets, there was intimidation, beatings, murder, and the destruction of
property, in other words, extra-legal violence aimed at immediate repression of persons; and,
there was also political action on the various terrains of the State aimed at institutional
repression of a movement while at the same time sanctioning reaction in the streets. We
might well ask, "What was at stake that was so critical that it required such extensive and
massive repressive?"
Leonard Richards, our best historical analyst of these events, has graphed the incidences of
both mob action and anti-abolitionist rioting for the decade of the 1830s.259 From the
beginning of 1834 anti-abolitionist rioting grew rapidly until it almost disappeared in late
autumn 1837. Graphically speaking, in mid-1835, the line representing that incidence (of both
general and specifically anti-abolitionist mob activity) comes together and shoots straight up,
ascending at nearly a ninety degree angle, reaching its apex in November 1835, and then
falling just as precipitously for the next three months. Thereafter, the two incidences come
apart, a more gradual decline of anti-abolitionist rioting occurs until its more "normal" and
nearly invisible incidence is reached in late 1837. What is patent is that from mid-1835 until
late spring 1836, mob activity generally is indistinguishable from anti-abolitionist rioting.260
How are we to understand these two intersecting, historical sequences of events?
At the top, action against the "aristocrats" was taken by Jackson and his coterie. It prompted
little response from the array of classes making up Jackson's "agrarian" coalition. To be sure,
seeing what had happened they began to cheer him on, i.e., to provide, in the historically
efficacious sense, passive support. On the other hand, the expansion of anti-abolitionist
activity, and in particular a single event, sent a shutter of fear down the spines of the
"notables, "gentlemen of property and standing, i.e., entrepreneurs, lawyers and bankers,
the larger, urban merchants and tradesmen, land speculators, lawyers and large newspaper
editors, officials of the State at every level including mayors, judges, governors, state
258Leonard Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing, 3 (citation); 23, 25, 27, 49 (local societies and national

organization); 101-110 (Lovejoy and the Alton struggle); 113 (burning Pennsylvania Hall).
259Richards (Ibid, 12) also reports the incidence of mob activity generally for the roughly the end of the first decade of
the nineteenth century to mid-century (i.e., until the Compromise of 1850 and, with it, an entirely new order of antislavery disturbances). Incidents cited for 1812-1819 numbered seven, for 1820-1829 twenty-one, for 1830-1839 one
hundred-fifteen, and for 1840-1849 sixty-four. It is clear that the thirties were the crucial decade in which more than
half (55%) of all mob activity for the forty year period took place.
260Ibid, 15 (for chart).

legislators, Congressmen.261 That single event was the launching of the pamphlet or postal
campaign in July 1835. Technical innovations in printing had in the thirties made possible the
cheap, mass production of newspapers and printed documents of all sorts as well.262 The
abolitionists, previously considered largely a mere nuisance,263 engaged in mass petition
drives before legislatures and the Congress to elicit slavery condemnations, and they sought
to inundate the entire country, including the South, with newspapers, cheap tracts, and
accompanying these appalling pictorial representations of the brutality of slave master
behavior (thereby invoking sympathy for slave). These mass produced documents and
appeals went over the heads of established, official bodies and personages directly to their
targeted readership and viewership which included women and children.264 Because this
campaign (which was in full knowledge unconstitutionally suppressed by the Postmaster
General with the explicit support of Jackson and his Cabinet) undercut the traditional modes of
redress of grievances, it thereby rendered the existing municipal, state and national authorities
irrelevant. Moreover, because it took direct, undeviating aim at slavery, and with the latter the
entire system of social and political relations which was formed over it, the pamphlet
campaign was met with the angry, worried uproar that we alluded to above. This state of
affairs frightened the hell out of all those upstanding, propertied citizens, whose, wealth,
power and standing were tied up with the social order in its existing form. It unified all ruling
class social groups, in particular those strata allegedly at "war" with one another - the
"aristocrats" and "agrarians" beginning with the President himself, in a loud chorus of
condemnations of anti-slavery practice.265
The denunciations were of four sorts. First, the pamphlet campaign sought to undercut the
constitutional compromise on slavery. Thus, it threatened national unity and entire existing
political structure. In this context, remarks were made about dismembering the Union,
"endanger[ing] the south and our own institutions', "'disturbing' ... 'the peace of this Union'. In
most instances, these arguments were underpinned by a fear of the loss of authority, and
often the imputation of British support to treasonous abolitionists, pointing to a "conspiracy" to
dismember the Union and make territorial inroads into the American portion of the continent.
The real menace here, of course, was servile revolt. Abolitionists were exciting "'niggers to
rise and murder their masters, and the white population.'" They constituted an assembly of
"traitors and instigators of slave insurrection."266 Second, often closely allied with the first
accusations, the abolitionists' campaign would, it was charged, undermine commerce. This
was particularly clear in the two riots (1834, 1841) in a city, Cincinnati, where trade relations
with the South where direct and palpable. The successful distribution of abolitionists' pamphlet
literature, not to mention realization of the antislavery program of immediate abolition, would
261"Notables" is Sellers' term, Ibid, 388. "Gentlemen of property and standing" is obviously Richards' term (appearing

as the title of his book). For enumerations of prominent citizens, Richards, Ibid, 5, 27, 29, 32, 50, 85, 86, 94, 95, 106,
131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 149.
262Ibid, 51-62, 72-74.
263Ibid, 48.
264Abolitionists "systematically bypassed local elites and appealed directly to all men, women, and children...

[Thereby they] threatened customary forms of deference." Ibid, 149.

For the technical innovations, Ibid, 72-73, and more generally Sellers, Ibid, 369-372.
265Jackson's denunciations were made in an annual message to Congress in December 1835.
266For dismemberment, citing remarks by Harrison Gray Otis, old Bostonian Federalist, Richards, Ibid, 58-59; for

endangering the south, etc, citing remarks by Congressman Samuel Breadsley, Ibid, 88; for subversion of authority
and a treacherous conspiracy, Ibid, 62-71; for fears of slave insurrection, Ibid, 52-53; for rising and murder (Ephriam
Hart, a Connecticut merchant speaking to an anti-abolitionist meeting prior to the October 1835 riot in Utica) 90; and,
for instigators (Richards' characterization of the Commercial Advertizer, New York City's leading anti-abolitionist
newspaper, prior to the July 1834 riot) 116.

"jeopardize the city's southern trade" "'undermining [every citizen's] business and property.' It
formed a "'nefarious conspiracy ... against Southern rights, and our own business
interests.'"267 Third, almost universally in the North, the only alternative to slavery was
considered colonization, i.e., forced expulsion of blacks (which today, euphemistically referred
to as "ethnic cleansing" including deportation, is viewed as a crime against humanity.)268 The
other unthinkable alternative, which could only come to fruition if abolitionists were allowed to
pursue their pamphlet campaign, and if successful in overthrowing slavery, would be "mixing"
of the "races, or more popularly, "amalgamation. This was considered radical social doctrine,
and in promoting it "'abolitionists had entered into a conspiracy against the human species by
promoting marriage between blacks and white.'" The issue of such a union, would "'mulattoize
our prosperity' and degrade 'a nation of white men ... to the condition of mongrels.'" 269 Dread
of "amalgamation" was, among all strata of those involved in rioting, a crucial, depth
psychological motive for their actions:270 Panic rising from black lustfulness of black male
prowess and black female passion, arcane fears of Negro filth and dirt, and anxieties over
black bestiality (African cannibalism, black male rape of white females) were all emotionally
charged fantasy projections of repressed longings and suppressed sexuality. Fourth,
inseparable yet distinct from the first point, the pamphlet campaign augured the overthrow of
established, politically instituted, social and moral, patriarchal authority. The proposals put
forth in the campaign by abolitionists threatened "'the very fabric'" of Northern society posing a
danger not only to slavery, but an attack on our "'heritage,' "'institutions'" and the very being
and reality of "gentlemen of the 'highest character.' Aimed at women, children and ill-bred
men, abolitionists sought to "dis-orb" the world of daily activity, creating a situation in which
not even "'the disastrous shock of comets, striking our trembling globe, outmeasures the evil
that might follow', and create "'pretensions and privileges that they [blacks] never deserved
nor could appreciate.'" Thus, abolitionists, in preaching to blacks - bringing them into their
local societies, rendered all social distinctions profane and irrelevant, engendering a world
without deference and social control, a world upside down.271
On the foundations of their activity in production and exchange, the leading elements in antiabolitionist rioting grasped the spread and success of anti-abolitionist activity, because it
undertook an assault on slave production and the institution of slavery itself. Accordingly, this
activity directly threatened trade with the South based upon cotton exchange, the structure of
the American economy as well as the boom that was enriching these elements and which was
rapidly expanding the domains of economic activity, the Constitutionally sanctioned
compromise on slavery on which the political form and structure itself rested, and the status,
authority and deference which accrued to those men who held official positions within the
267Ibid, 94, 96 (first internal citation, a handbill distributed in Cincinnati just prior to the 1834 riot), 124 (second

internal citation from the Cincinnati Enquirer, 9 September 1841).

Richards' insightfully comments, "Onto the Negro the anti-abolitionists projected their own view of the American way.
Marrying 'well', they assumed, was the only real sign that an 'inferior' had arrived. And since all 'inferior' nationalities
and classes measured their standing on the basis of their access to a 'superior's' women, it followed that the most
'inferior' of all would do likewise." Ibid, 44-45.
268Garrison, in this respect a man far ahead of his time, called African colonization "a libel upon humanity and
justice. Cited in Ibid, 22.
269On promoting interracial marriage, New York Evening Post, 8 July 1834, Ibid, 115; and, on "mulattoization, James
Watson Webb, the "North's most vehement anti-abolitionist spokesman" (Ibid, 31), writing in his New York Courier
and Enquirer, 14 July 1834, Ibid, 122.
270Ibid, 45.
271For assault on "the very fabric" Webb, Courier and Enquirer, 4, 12, 18, 22 July 1834, Ibid, 32; and, for "dis-orbed"

(quoting Thomas Russell Sullivan writing for the Boston Courier in 1835), Ibid, 60; for "pretensions, Cincinnati
Enquirer, 10 September 1841, cited in Ibid, 123.

State. The polity was particularly important, since it unified otherwise antagonist social groups
within the ruling class, or better, made it possible to speak of a unified ruling class in the first
place.272
Thus, Whig or Democrat, new or old merchant, it made no difference: Each and all recognized
the immediate abolition of slavery would bring down this entire edifice. While Richards' data
leads him to correctly conclude the bulk of men actually composing the "typical, i.e., antiabolitionist, mob were property owners rooted in pre-industrial, mercantile exchange whose
traditions of expected deference and actual political control were threatened by the antislavery vanguard's novel efforts to mobilize masses of men and women against slavery, he is
mistaken to the extent he holds that it was their and only their social dominance that was
challenged by the abolitionists. That the wealth that built the American economy was derived
from cotton exchange with its foundations in slave production did not simply accrue to the old
mercantile ruling groups, nor by the 1830s was the State resting on a Constitutional
compromise on slavery exclusively their preserve.273
So in the cities and the country townships, the unleashing of enormous repression was
unquestioning desired by those who could lay claim to rule at whatever level rule was
conducted. Here, then, is the answer to the question, "What was at stake that was so critical
that it required such extensive and massive repressive?" That answer also provides us with
the motivation that accounts for why it was these notables and political leaders - precisely
those who had nothing to fear in the way of public opprobrium or legal sanction for their
actions,274 who planned and instigated the typical anti-abolitionist riots and who formed the
largest body of the actual rioters.275
Typically, however, it was not, according to Richards, artisans undergoing proletarianization
who were involved in mob action.276 (Instead, those involved at all were much more likely to
be involved in abolitionist activities.) Yet if these artisans, "mechanics" such as chairmakers,
coppersmiths, printers, glassmakers, blacksmiths, carpenters and joiners, were bearers of a
pre-industrial "use-value ethos, it would seem on the face of it that should have been just as
liable to participation in anti-abolitionist mobs as were those notables closely identified with
the mercantile economy of Jeffersonian and early Jacksonian America. The former, according
to Sellers, were menaced by "capitalist transformation" just as, according to Richards, the
latter were. In point of fact, skilled artisans at the heart of the urban, democratic plebeian
strata, though facing proletarianization, were more modern, and more likely to be bearers of
rationalist, universalist and Enlightenment ethos. In this respect they were qualitatively similar
to their English counterparts (for whom Tom Paine's The Rights of Man was absolutely
central).277 Accordingly, one might expect to find a larger layer among them in the abolitionist
camp.
272For elaboration, see the fourth critique in our Community and Capital.
273For the ubiquitous political coloration of recognition of the consequences of "immediatism, Richards, Ibid, 148.

For the claim that its was exclusively the old mercantile "elite" tied to the pre-industrial economy centered in the
Northeast that sought to salvage its hegemony through mob action against abolitionists, Ibid, 133, 140-142.
274Ibid, 5.
275Ibid, 84-85. Richards states three-quarters of the participants in the typical anti-abolitionist mobs - exemplified by

Utica (1834) and Cincinnati (1834) - were either great or small men engaged in commercial activities (lawyers,
bankers, financiers, merchants, or clerks, shopkeepers, tavern keepers). Ibid, 136-137.
276See the charts appearing in Richards, Ibid, 140, 141, where participation of artisans as a percentage of the whole
of the typical anti-abolitionist mobs in Utica and Cincinnati is presented. Richards' findings demonstrates the limited
presence of artisans in such mobs.
277E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 77-185.

Nonetheless, there were some mobs in which skilled artisans did participate heavily. These
riots aimed at the destruction of black property and institutions. Exemplified by the New York
City riot of July 1834, they are designated by Richards as atypical (since they amounted to
about a quarter of such riots in the period in question). 278 Phenomenally, then, it may seem
that here was a type of riot which would validate Sellers' thesis concerning the participation of
men bearing a precapitalist mentalit in activity whose inner meaning centered on opposition
to "capitalist transformation" (insofar as the latter could intuitively be seen to challenge white
mastery resting on racial slavery).
A more probing examination of the rioters motives begins with the class and racial geography
of the riot zone. First, it might be noted in areas in which men walked, the riot locale was
contiguous with the living and working quarters of the artisans who participated. Second, and
this is by far the more important, the four riotous wards in which black homes and churches
were razed contained over half of the black population of Manhattan. Sixty-five hundred
largely impoverished black men, women and children, ten percent of the four wards total
populace (which by Jacksonian standards was a huge black population in any northern city),
lived amidst some fifty-eight to fifty-nine thousand, predominately artisan whites. 279 Believing
that the abolitionists and blacks sought to "mulattoize" them and their offspring, the rioters,
here artisans in significant numbers, engaged in unprovoked brutalities, intimidation and
terror, and the destruction of the personal property of blacks and the institutions of the black
community, not in some oblique and mediated response to the pressures of the capitalist
market by men still guided by a "use-value" ethos, but, because in a volatile, charged and
fantasized projection they dreaded racial assimilation,280 or, more prosaically, they feared loss
of white supremacy in a social order within which awareness of class division and its
debilitating consequences were (and are) suppressed.
With a view to involvement in the crucial events of the decade, Jackson's action at the top
against the "aristocrats" was not merely incidental. While it did not unleash furious mob
activity on the ground, it did signal that such activity would not encounter opposition from the
State. But it was incidental in this sense: On the ground and in the streets and, we suggest, in
the country towns also, the real yet mystified object was and was not the institutions of or
personages embodying class Power. Was not? In point of fact, this "object" was the lowliest of
the low, society's most oppressed and despised social strata. In the anti-abolition mob, and in
the anti-black riot particularly, the characteristic elements of mass struggle throughout
American history are found. For here, we once again discover that race dominates awareness
and impels action, for, as we argued above, race had come to be central within a societal

278Richards, Ibid, 150-152. Roughly forty-five percent of these rioters of record were artisans. At four percent of the

rioters, the "dangerous classes, prostitutes, pimps, thieves, paupers, etc., played very little role in the mob. Ibid, 151.
279Ibid, 152, 154.
280Ibid, 155. As the riots were not mediated responses to the pressures of the capitalist market, the "Bank War" was

not a rarefied class struggle, but a fight to democratize capital, combat at the top between nouveau et vieux riche.
The case with rural yeoman is, in our view, different: Here it is legitimate to speak with Sellers of the survival (well, we
might add, into the nineteenth century) of patterns of patriarchal domination in yeoman communities, of at this level
self-sufficiency, and hence of a pre-industrial (if not "use-value") ethos. See the scattered discussion in the following
sections of chapter 2: "Population Movements, Settlement and the Class Geography of Rural Areas, "Population
Movements, Technological Change, Class Recomposition and Sectional Alliance, "Capitalist Development in the Old
West, and "Town, Country and Politics in the mid-Nineteenth Century American West"; and, the Prologue to chapter
10, below.
Richards' is no help on this score, since, while statistically noting that half of the riots (51 of 100) known to us were
rural in origin (Ibid, 14, chart) he examines none of this order (unless Alton, Illinois in which Elijah Lovejoy was
murdered is counted as "rural. If so, then "rural" would have the meaning of country towns).

totality for which class is primary: Here race exists as objectively necessary illusion, at once
as real determination of action and as ideational mystification.281
What is at work here is the psychology of the oppressed. Sellers explicitly recognizes this, but
rationalizes it away by mischaracterizing the practical outcome as "tragic. "Capitalism
disarmed opposition by setting the most exploited at each other's throats. Phobic contempt for
failure both energized effort and turned the abuse of proletarianized whites against even more
vulnerable blacks and immigrants... Both the job insecurity and psycho-social pain of white
failure found surcease in dehumanizing 'niggers' - as stupid, lazy, obsequious, larcenous, and
immoral... Sporadically white mobs targeted 'uppity' blacks who blurred the caste boundary
sustaining shaky white pride, especially when prostitution or miscegenation raised the dread
spectre of 'amalgamation'."282 Clearly, a sympathetic account here of white racist violence
turns the actual situation upside down by making victims of those engaged in that violence.
While northern free blacks in particular, did fight back, as oppressed they could not have been
said to have been at the "throats" of white workers or farmers: Instigation of violence and,
then, the actual assaults - in the first case undertaken by notables and gentlemen, in the
second "atypical" case carried out by the white artisans (and rural farmers in danger of losing
their land) - was invariably the activity of white men.283
Nonetheless, what was constituted socially and historically has become sedimented and
buried in the depth psychological substructure of awareness. Thus, there is something
missing from Sellers' analysis: The insight that white violence was "tragic" is valid if and
insofar as "tragedy" suggests a fatal flaw, a structural characteristic of a social type, an
abiding and practice-mediating element of the class psychologies of the white worker and
farmer:284 To generalize from the historical contents of struggles in America, it is only because
the social relations of domination and subordinate in work, and the entire social order they
support, are without question accepted as an eternal donn, that the oppressed will
immediately turn to someone "beneath" them (and those who "represent" them) on whom they
can vent their murderous anger that, in a socially primary sense, begins with frustrated
expectations of equitable, non-exploitative relations in work. Thus, we should not be surprised
to find the "struggle" over the Bank was conducted between a handful of leading personalities
on the terrain of the towering institutions of Jacksonian society; while the "struggle" in the city
streets and in the country towns was carried out by far larger numbers of men who turned out
to be a mob. Nor should we be surprised that this mobs fury was aimed at the socially most
oppressed and at those, "white traitors, who had the audacity to build organizations to
articulate their needs, defend their interests, who, in others, explicitly asserted "they, blacks,
were part of and not outside the human community.
281See "The Meaning of 'Race' and its Relation to Class" in the Preface, above.
282The Market Revolution, 386-387. Compare our analysis of seventeenth century white settlers in relation to native

peoples in the section entitled "Settler Psychology" in the Preface, above, beginning with: "[The murder of Indians
provided] a displaced, if psychologically unacknowlgeable, fight-back against their social betters. [The mass of
settlers] ... had grievances, real ones, against gentlemanly Power, but as long as that Power appeared stable they
would not voice their grievances for fear of retaliation."
283Sympathy also raises up the vile notion of "miscegenation" instead of revealing it for the racism central to it: "Race
mixing" explicitly assumes a moral inferiority and subhuman status that is natural, inherent or (as after 1870 we are
inclined to say) biological. It, to be sure, altogether fails to grasp that it is socially and historically constituted,
fantasized and projected differences that, in functioning on behalf of Power, separate "whites" from "blacks.
284The "tragedy" of egalitarian sentiments resting on racist animus, perhaps because it seems "fated, inevitable,
appears to be a singular motif among historians who are Jacksonian Democratic sympathizers. See also John
Ashworth, 'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 223, where the "expansion" of democracy founded on this vile bigotry is referred
to as the "great paradox ... and the great tragedy" of the antebellum period.

Clearly, Jacksonian America, and not just in the urban East, was a society undergoing the
wrenching, even if only initial phase of transformation generated by development of capitalist
exchange and work relations. Because urban workers (and some rural farmers) had already
accepted the inevitability of this change (productive-based autonomy and civic virt were ideal
lodestars, yet waged dependency, potential landlessness, and socio-political marginalization
was their real situations), the world could be turned no further upside down: Because they
could not mount a challenge to real Power, because, accordingly, the anxiety and fear this
transformation provoked were lived but not understood and already canalized, the defense of
black existence as human was intolerable. "Raising up" blacks made the lowliest of whites no
better than blacks. Without putting blacks back in their place, objectively and subjectively
white identity and self-respect would disappear. What their social betters told them, or it was
rumored they said about them, would actually be true: No better than the "indolent 'niggar',
proletarianized and landless whites would be the lowliest of the low. The only tragedy here
was that blacks, always outnumber, always outgunned, did not have the wherewithal to
mount a successful fight-back.285

285Always outnumbered, Always Outgunned is the title of a novel, published in 1998, by Walter Mosley.

2.
Free Soil and Slavery: The Republican Party at its
Origins, 1854-1860
I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen. I would preserve to free white labor a fair
country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and color, can live without
the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.
[The] motive of those who protested against slavery extension [has] always really been
concern for the welfare of the white man[, not an] unnatural sympathy for the negro.286

Methodological Orientation toward Classes at Foundation of

Party Parties and toward World Visions as Infrastructure of Social Classes
Typically, analyses of the origins of party organizations in American history take political
perspectives, theoretical differences and questions of organizational power as their point of
departure. While analyses of this sort are with a view to factions and sects largely adequate,
the origins, in particular, of a mass political party cannot be satisfactorily accounted for in
these terms or, for that matter, in terms of the activity of politicians.287
The moral-political crisis that after 1844 sundered the Democracy led a decade later to the
formation of a new organization rooted in a coalescence of organizations, splinters and
factions. A movement of northern party professionals constituted one very decisive component
in the formation of the Republican party. Yet underlying this political crisis was a rupture of the
central class alliance, that between southern planters and a geographically diffused American
yeomanry, on which the Democracy had been based. The condition of this rupture was a
transformation in the structure of that yeomanry, i.e., the emergence in the old West of a
polarized society of large capitalist farmers and a mass of tenants and rural waged laborers
for whom (especially the latter groups) the specific form of and practical limitations on
territorial expansion imposed by the planter hegemony inside the Democracy were no longer
acceptable. Thus, the emergence of tenancy and the material premises of its formation make
up the point of departure for a coherent analysis of the origins of the Republican party as a
mass political party.
At the same time, social classes are unintelligible without a grasp of those ideational moments
that mediate their development and practice. For classes that effectively act in history (i.e.,
transform its foundations in productive activity), these moments are both visional and
ideological, and, moreover, are generally borne along by an organizational incarnation. While
in the practice of large groups of men world vision and organization embodiment are
inseparable, for analytic purposes we have considered the latter (the Republican party) here
and will take up the former (the vision of a free community of free men) in chapter 7 below.

286David Wilmot defending in Congress in 1847 the bill bearing his name banning slavery from the territories of the

Mexican Cession. Second citation from remarks by William Seward, New York Republican and party leader, in 1860.
Cited by Rawley, Race and Politics, 148, 260.
287Schlesinger (ed), History of U.S. Political Parties, V. I, is replete with just this phenomenal sort of analysis of
nineteenth century parties (viz., Federalist, National Republican, Whig, Democratic, Free Soil, etc., parties); similarly,
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, with regard to the Republican party and Theodore Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil
Parties in the Northwest, regarding those third parties named in the title.

Part I
Institutional and Objectified Foundations of Anti-Slavery
in the Historically Changing Structure of Daily, Productive Life
The Financial Panic of 1837 and its Aftermath
The panic of 1837 was directly related to the speculative boom that gripped American society
after 1832. There were several, overlapping and intertwined economic developments which
were involved, but, for purposes of this reconstruction, we shall treat them to some extent
separately.
[Boom Conditions, Inflationary Pressures]
Examined extensively in the last chapter, the cotton boom will receive mere cursory treatment
here.
After 1832, prices for cotton had begun to climb. Thus, in 1833, a pound of cotton fetched
12.32, in 1834 12.90, in 1835 17.45, in 1836 16.50, and in 1837 13.25. And, of course,
at the same time the demand, primarily English, for southern, slave labor-produced cotton
continued to grow.288
The movement of cotton prices in the middle decades of the thirties put additional money in
the pockets of those involved in cotton exchange, especially in the forms of commissions on
profits (importers, exporters, brokers, bankers) and advances on cotton sales. In the latter
case, planters, who were accustomed or at least aspired to luxury consumption, often spend
their summers in the North, in resorts outside the great eastern cities, while doing their
shopping (e.g., for fine clothing, household utensils, etc.) among merchant retailers in those
cities. Reflected in the figures for American imports, large parts of those growing incomes
went into the purchase of British finished goods.
While luxury consumption was merely one component of these imports, a brief examination of
the rise in imports hints at the inflationary pressures that were building in the American
economy by the mid-thirties. Between 1822 and 1830, on average goods totally $59,000,000
were imported annually; from 1831 to 1833, the dollar amount climbed to $83,000,000
annually; and between 1834 and 1837, annual imports on average totaled $130,000,000. (In
1836, in relative terms goods valued at an extraordinary $168,000,000 were imported.) Placed
in historical perspective, the balance of trade consistently was in deficit; but in 1822 that deficit
was merely $4,000,000, while in 1836 it was $61,000,000.289 Though an occasional,
unexpected event exacerbated a deficit (in 1836, the harvest of wheat, normally a major
American export commodity, was so poor that the United States was a net wheat importer),290
the direction of consumption nationally during the boom was unmistakable.
Cotton production, of course, was not the only activity undergoing dramatic expansion, its
reified movement as price not the only abstraction that was dramatically rising. Driven by the
frenzied activity of speculators, the massive increases in land sales and their thingly
objectification in the mounting "price" per acre of land sold west of the Appalachians,
examined in some detail below,291 also played a major "objective" role in creating inflationary
pressures in the "Jacksonian 'economy'." Similarly, locally-based mania for "internal
improvements" gripped much of the West. William Shade relates that Michigan in the twenties
and thirties, for example, "was a booming frontier community passing from the territorial stage
into statehood. Its population rapidly increased as a steady stream of immigrants poured in,
288Douglass North, The Economic Development of the United States, 1790-1860, Table A-VII, 232. Volume for the

same years as measured in bales of cotton was 559,210; 641,435; 760,923; 788,013; and, 916,960. Ibid.
289 Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics, 452.
290William Shade, Banks or no Banks, 43.
291See "Capitalist Development in the Old West," below.

drawn by 'the prospect of speedy and golden fortunes.' Cities of the future were laid out on
paper complete with 'hotels, warehouses and banks ... like places in a fairy land, piers
projected into harbors, and steamboats were seen entering.'" In less than a year prior to
statehood in the mid-thirties, the "Michigan legislature organized 57 townships, provided for
66 state roads, chartered 11 railroads, and permitted erection of 13 dams to provide water for
manufacturing."292 Brought together through the different capital markets in the East (Boston,
Philadelphia and New York), the funds raised by the bond issues involved in financially
internal improvements within the various states were concentrated in the hands of English
investors.
Exuberance-generated expansive visions, risk-taking and spending beyond one's limits are all
characteristic of the social psychology of a market-based boom. The run-up to the Panic of
1837 was exemplary in this regard.
[The Jacksonian Counter-Offensive]
Andrew Jackson was attuned to the charged atmosphere in which the boom was developing.
He was frightened by what he saw, and he hated it. The (July 1832) veto of the Bank charter
and then the removal of federal depository funds (beginning in October 1833) were, after all,
designed to curtail the activities of the promoters, speculators, "aristocrats" and other
parasites, who, nonetheless, appeared to be thriving. It was as if the entire economic-cultural
environment in its dumbest, thingly aspects was alive with expectations of easy, rapid wealth
accumulation: More corruption was rampant, the monied interests sullied the honor and
degraded the activity of honest simple farmers and industrious tradesmen. Determined to
secure the conditions for the return of virtue, Jackson's actions were counterproductive. They
contributed in no small means to enhancement of inflationary pressures.
Take, for example, the retirement of the public debt of which Jackson was so proud. Resting
on the dual ground of increased land sales and tariff revenues, particularly the 1828 tariff
infamously known as the Tariff of Abominations, debt retirement "cut off an important field of
conservative investment." Instead, by paying off bond issues, it returned funds to investors
who, finding other outlets, created greater demand and drove up the price of those other
investments (especially land).293 Similarly, both consistent with an earlier pledge and in an
effort to curb the amounts of paper money in circulation, Jackson requested Congress to
enact a "deposit act," that is, legislation that would mandate "return" to state governments of
any surpluses that might accrue to the national Treasury.294 Such a law was passed by both
Houses (23 July 1836), and was signed by the President. The effects of this enactment, at
once comic and disastrous, would become apparent in the course of the first (1837) Panic.
Then, not three weeks later, Jackson instructed his Treasury Secretary, Levi Woodbury, to
issue a "Specie Circular." This Executive directive enjoined federal land agents to accept only
specie (gold or silver) as payment for purchase of public lands. A hard money, agrarian
measure, designed to prevent "frauds speculations, and monopolies in the purchase of public
lands" as well as the "excessive bank credits" utilized in such purchases, it actually spared the
speculator and hurt the farmer-settler it was intended to protect.295 In the West, where lands
292Shade, Ibid, 34. The internal citation is from a renowned memoir by Bela Hubbard (Memorials of a Half-Century.

New York, 1887: 93-105).

293 Hammond, Ibid, 454.
294Effective 1 January of each new year, any amount in the federal Treasury over $5,000,000 was targeted for return

to state governments in amounts that reflected their House representation.

295Hammond, Ibid, 455 (citing Jackson's remarks concerning the directive), Shade, Ibid, 43.
The speculator had far greater access to specie than the settler. The Circular thereby heightened the former's
advantages in land dealing.

sales were at any rate being made, the Circular constituted an assault on easy credit which is
what the farmer-settler relied on for his land purchase in the first place.
[The Panic]
The Panic of 1837 was not rooted in, or not primarily grounded on the over expansion of
domestic, American credit. It was inextricably bound up with the transAtlantic trade in cotton,
and speculation on the trade by English investors. Jacksonian measures had made the Panic
more likely, but were not in any its "cause" in the reified, objectivistic sense that concerns the
motion of the "economy."
England, the United States' primary creditor in transAtlantic trade, had itself undergone rapid
banking expansion in the thirties. In 1836 alone, forty-two new banks of issues were
established with branches that brought the total to two hundred new institutions. The total
number of banks in that year came to a full six hundred seventy. Seventy five percent of these
banks issued their own notes.296 This enormous expansion of demand stemming from these
"country" banks and, most importantly for the course of events, from investment houses tied to
the American trade, stripped the Bank of England of much of its gold reserves. In response to
this depletion of reserves, James Pattison, the Bank's director, raised the Bank's discount rate
in June 1836 from 4% to 4%. Following the failure of a major Irish bank, in August, Pattison
found it necessary to repeat this measure. He raised the rate from 4% to 5%, in order to
counteract the continuing drain on gold reserves.297
As it began to dawn on its directors that the British money market was concentrated squarely
in transAtlantic trade with the United States, word of the Specie Circular directive reached
Pattison. He was alarmed. Now the Bank of England was effectively a central bank in the
modern sense: All the power that normally accrues to a centralized banker was available to
Pattison. He leaned on British import houses whose activities were centered on American
trade: He did so by instructing the Bank's Liverpool agent to refuse the notes of specific
investment houses whose trade was predominately American based. By October,
bankruptcies among mercantile houses and trades in the East began to appear. Still the price
of cotton, brought to market in October (following a late August-early September harvest), held
up. Nonetheless, while there had been no stampede to liquidate inventories, an agreement
between the Bank of England and Biddle's Philadelphia-based bank, still for the English the
bank representing American interests, had not been reached: The prohibitions on specified
English houses remained in effect.298
Then, in the late winter British manufacturers' demand for cotton slackened and its price fell.
As a result, in early March 1837, an important New Orleans firm, Herman Briggs and Co.,
failing to meet its obligations incurred in cotton purchases (due to the inability to realize an
adequate amount on its sales), went belly up. In New York and New Orleans, the same
scenario was repeated, this time by several firms. On one side of the Atlantic, demand from
British manufacturers for cotton was collapsing, and the Bank of England had proscribed the
trade of certain houses with, to prevent further deepening of, their already overwhelming
dependency on the American trade (cotton); on the other side of the Atlantic, the "Americans
found themselves unable to sell, unable to buy, unable to borrow, unable to pay." Business
was coming to a screeching halt, and panic was setting in. On 1 April, Joshua Bates, the
American partner for the really big, economically significant firm, Baring Brothers, declared
296H.N. Hyndman, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century, 43.
297Hammond, Ibid, 457; Shade, Ibid; Hyndman, Ibid.
298Hammond, Ibid, 458-459.

himself "'in a great fever' to liquidate the firm's commodity holdings, 'tea and indigo and
everything else'."299 The Panic of 1837 was underway.
In the United States, a national government under the new Presidency of Martin Van Buren,
Jacksonian on bank matters to the bone, refused to treat in anything but metallic currency. It
essentially stood by as American banks were presented with their notes, and in short time
were unable to meet the suddenly overwhelming demand for specie. In May, beginning with
those in New York, banks refused to honor their own notes. Suspension was soon
generalized. By the end of the year, six hundred eighteen banks had failed.300
[Aftermath and Depression]
The crisis was not merely urban and commercial, but engulfed the large eastern cities and
their immediate hinterlands, i.e., the East in its entirely - that region of the country which had
gone the furthest down the road of capitalist development, that is, integration into the
transAtlantic commercial economy. In the West, even after payment of specie had been
suspended, grain and livestock prices (though they also fell) held up fairly well throughout
1837 and 1838.301 Resumption of payments on returned notes had, at any rate, occurred quite
early on, in New York on 10 June, in Boston and New England shortly thereafter, in
Philadelphia in July followed soon thereafter by banks in the West and South.302
Suspension did not in any case have the same meaning in 1837 that it does today (or, more to
the point, in 1929): In 1837, among those banks that remained viable doors did not close, and
outside commercial circles, those doing banking continued to do so. People got their money,
actually more of it: It was just that depreciated in value. As late as 1838, the West had yet to
be pulled into the financial storm: Here credit actually underwent an expansion, where there
was "a tremendous rise in expenditures for internal improvement projects." 303 Producing
cotton, thus central to its exchange and integrated into its transAtlantic circuits, southern
planters had, however, felt the crush immediately and responded brutally: In 1837, the price of
cotton fell twenty percent and planters savagely exploited their chattels realizing an increase
in production of a sixth (16.3%). Incomes nonetheless fell nearly a third. Another large fall in
the price of cotton in 1838 was followed by a corresponding rise in 1839.304
Thus, any economic optimism (say, in the old West) was short-lived, but, in objectivistic and
reified terms, its "cause" lay outside the American economy proper. In an advanced industry,
new centers of textile production (beyond Manchester, Lyons and Lowell) appeared in Saxony,
Prussia and Brussels, Belgium and taken together knit the nascent capitalist world into a
global economy. These recently opened spinning mills increased world capacity, and cut into
the English share of that market. Commercial houses responded with failures in Canton,
Calcutta, Brussels and La Havre. A European recession began to unfold. In Britain, grain
harvest, poor in 1838, failed in 1839: Wheat and other grains had to be imported. Coupled to
an inordinate and massive development of British railway construction and excessive stock
speculation (that included the aforementioned immoderate purchase of American bonds),
Bank of England gold reserves, large amounts soaked up by industrializing projects, had flown
out of the country to pay for imported grains: Between January and October 1839, the Bank's
299Ibid. (459, for Hammond's summation of the American situation; 458, internal citation from Bates' manuscript

letter).
300Hyndman, Ibid, 46.
301Shade, Banks or no Banks, 60. Shade asserts that the crisis was urban and commercial. Ibid.
302Hammond, Ibid, 489, 479.
303Hammond, Ibid, 479; Shade, Ibid (citation).
304Cotton brought 10.14 per pound in 1838 and 13.36 in 1839. Production in bales was 788,013 bales in 1836 and

916,960 in 1837. North, Ibid, Table A-VII, 232.

gold reserves had been drained (from 9.3 million to 2.5 million). Pattison raised the
domestic borrowing rate to 6%, and was forced to borrow abroad (from the Bank of France).
Suspension of specie payments was again imminent.305
English manufacturers cut deeply into their purchases of American cotton. In the United
States, Nicolas Biddle's Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, no longer a federal
depository and heavily involved in cotton exchange since the Panic of 1837, its specie
reserved drawn off in this maelstrom of events, suspended specie payments in October 1839.
Other American banks soon followed. Metropolises within the commercial capitalist world
undergoing incipient industrialization had been subject in those industrializing centers to
simultaneous crises, financial and industrial (overproduction). They dragged their hinterlands
into a full-scale depression: In the old West, that depression descended in 1840, as banks
suspended (and disappeared, 15 of 23 in Ohio, as their charters expired and were not
legislatively renewed. Nationwide, 959 banks failed in 1839.)306 Across America particularly in
the West, state driven internal improvement projects were abandoned; in the South the price
of cotton collapsed falling by 1842 below half its 1835 price; and within mercantile community
in the East merchants lost fortunes, some up to two-thirds of their wealth, while many simply
went bankrupt.307
Business failures multiplied, a quarter of all firms in New England had already gone under. An
estimated 90% of all factories closed before the beginning of 1838. The working classes of the
East were ravaged; among the remaining employed, the wage structure collapsed; meager
state and privately philanthropic social set nets were established; social and class conflict
intensified as classic bread riots (New York City) and anti-rent riots (upstate New York)
erupted, sheriffs were forcibly removed from office in Mississippi, nativism raised its ugly head
in the big cities of the East, and the constitutional, propertyholder's paradise, the government
of Rhode Island, was overthrown (Dorr Rebellion); the New York Democracy split, and Martin
Van Buren, losing his Presidency, was shoved aside by the rush of history; eight state
governments were in default and at least two more repudiated their debt (all endearing them
to British investors), debtor relief laws offering various degrees of debt alleviation were
enacted (while at least five states legislated huge tax increases thereby pushing many,
farmers in particular, into debt and propertylessness negating the benefits of debtor relief),
and Congress enacted a bankruptcy act (1842) which, though revoked in the next session,
affected nearly a million debtors and deflated $450,000,000 worth of assesses to nothing
(eliminating that amount in debt).308 All the debt relief retrospectively magnifies the fact that
the depression that followed renewed (1839) panic was an early instance of a classic shake305Hammond, Ibid, 502-503, Hyndman, Ibid.
306Shade, Ibid, 61; Hyndman, Ibid.
307For the East, Shade, Ibid; for the South, the price of cotton in 1840 was 8.92 a pound, 9.5 in 1841, and 7.85 in

1842, North, Ibid; and, for the West, Samuel Rezneck, Business Depressions and Financial Panics ("The Social
History of an American Depression, 1837-1843"), 76.
Thrust upon Van Buren, popular blame for the depression is neatly summarized in a 1840 Whig campaign ditty that
ran, "Little Van's policy, fifty cents a day and French soup; Harrison's policy, two dollars a day and roast beef" (cited
by Rezneck, Ibid, 97).
The Panic produced a split in the New York Democracy: In particular, the Loco-Focos emerged as a hard money and
anti-bank, "extreme" democratic and whites' only egalitarian, urban plebeian faction heir to the artisan "workies" (see
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 386-388, Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics, 493-499, Rezneck, Ibid, 9091). Moreover, the Panic hardened the ideological line between Democrats and Whigs, freezing it in the form that
would become characteristic of the second American party system. A generalized anti-bank response to the Panic,
especially among Democrats, also assured the impossibility of a return to a national bank prior to Civil War. In
consequence, "free" banking (see chapter 2, the Note, above), especially in the West, emerged as the dominant form
providing currency for circulation and entrepreneurial undertakings.
308Rezneck, Ibid, 77-78; 75, 78-80; 89-90, 91; 77, 96, 93-95.

out but one primarily in the sphere of circulation (especially among merchants and retailers),
overlaid and underpinned by a crisis of overproduction of finished cotton goods centered on
Britain but within the European and transAtlantic economy as a whole. The slump dragged on
through 1843.
[British Supremacy and American Dependency]
Generation upon generation of American historians (who declare for, and methodologically
proceed on the basis of, internally generated causation as a principle of explanation) and
American politicians (in their celebrations of national exceptionalism) have so occluded the
determinant structure of Anglo-American relations that a thick encrustation of mystifications
covered what passes for a historical understanding of those relations. Only in periods of
national crisis does that structure, transAtlantic in character, emerge with clarity.
Prior to the American Civil War, formal national independence was, as it emerged in these
crises, subordinate to British mastery - through advanced, industrial productive forms and
capacity as expressed in the balance of trade, through centralized banking institutions that
concentrated (what to start with was) greater wealth, and through the more developed and
powerful military projection of English ruling class strength (as the British navy stood behind
and in the end enforced, if necessary, British terms of trade). Its slavery-generated surpluses
extracted through mediation of eastern American merchants by British capital, a supplier of
agricultural produce to the English metropolis and dependent upon British money markets for
any internal developments, with a backwards slavery-based, plantation agriculture central to
its economy as a whole, the United States had, in contemporary terms, been largely
incorporated as a neo-colony of mighty England.
This was as true at the close of the period of formal American independence (1865) as it was
at its beginnings (1787). It is merely hard to glimpse. 309 Like that beginning and end, the
309One can, for example, examine the months preceding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in summer

1787. Take Madison's letters (The Papers of James Madison, V. 9) wherein we shall uncover a laundry list of the
problems of the Confederation. The list included lack of a gold or silver reserve, the printing of paper money without
regard to its consequences, absence of adequate imposts to support domestic artisans, pressure from western
settlers concerning Indians and the lack of an organized, American military presence to dispossess them, fears of
dismemberment by Spain and England, etc.
But we must turn to a literary treatment to arrive at an assessment of the crux of the problem. (We have in mind
William Degenhard's The Regulators dealing with Shay's Rebellion). On this basis we can ascertain a flood of British
imports controlled by New York- and Boston-situated, merchant groups undercut domestic artisans and crowded them
out of the market. These eastern traders and merchants, concentrating the young nation's financial strength and at
the same time controlling the middle Atlantic and New England state governments, exported English-based coin,
specie or gold, to pay for their imports. (In Virginia, Maryland, etc., tobacco and rice production based upon slavery
rendered the South a mere agricultural adjunct of Britain.) These aristocratic gentlemen, Tories demanding deference
from the rural, farming inferiors, squeezed the country farmers hard: They extracted revenue to run their governments
while imprisoning them - of whom many were patriots who had fought in the war of Independence - as debtors who
could not meet steep tax obligations. To meet those obligations, they auctioned off their farms and personal holdings.
All the time, the British, relying on the Navigation Acts originally crafted in the fifties and sixties of the last century,
enforced mercantilist terms of trade, i.e., of British accumulation of surpluses generated in the Americas, through the
English Navy. And it was for relief from this otherwise irremediable situation that had brought the majority of the
delegates, especially Federalists who were nationalists, to Philadelphia, and that had in an objective, historical sense,
propelled the Convention forward.
Other crises afford us glimpses of American neo-colonial dependency: In the aftermath of the war of 1812, from 1815
to 1819, British manufactured goods, embargoed and stockpiled during the war and thusly priced artificially cheap,
were set lose in a flood of imports that forced down domestic prices. Pent up demand was enhanced by low prices,
and borrowing skyrocketed. Banks furnished credit on easy terms, land sales booms, until finally a new management
of the Second Bank of the United States balked, drew in the reins and set off a panic. (See "The Financial Panic of
1819" in chapter 1, above.)
Or, again, in late summer and early autumn 1862, Lincoln was compelled to weigh the consequences of possible
British intervention on behalf of the southern Confederation, a possibility ultimately driven by fear of loss of lucrative

financial panic of 1837 too exhibited these relations. When the consequences of the Panic
had run their course and, in 1844, an economic upturn finally began to take hold, it would no
longer be driven by cotton exchange.310
Population Movements, Settlement and the Class Geography of Rural Areas
By 1830, relatively dense settlements existed up and down the Mississippi Valley from
Memphis in the South to the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers in the
North. In fact, these population groupings were so long established that Kentucky, Tennessee
and the old Northwest, excepting northwestern Illinois and present-day southwestern
Wisconsin, had not see a major conflict with any Indian nation since 1819:311 Indians had been
"cleared" and established communities dotted the entire landscapes of Tennessee and
Kentucky in the South. From 1800 until 1830, in-migration to the old Northwest had been one
and a half million people. By 1840, the population of the old West (which here also includes
the Iowa Territory established in 1838 and consisted in present day Iowa and Minnesota)
neo-colonial terms of trade with the United States. (See "Diplomatic Pressures on Presidential Policy" in chapter 9,
below.)
Thus, Mike Davis (Prisoners of the American Dream, 12) pretty much hits the mark in stating it "is possible to see the
Revolution of 1776 ... as very much a civil war against Loyalist comprador strata, and the Civil War as a continuing
revolution against an informal British imperialism that had incorporated the cotton export economy of the South in an
alliance of neocolonial dependency." The Civil War unleashed the North's enormous, latent industrial productive
capacity, based upon the railroad infrastructure build up in the previous decade [see Catton's remarks (A Stillness at
Appomattox, 321, on City Point - Grant's headquarters during the siege of Petersburg: "Behind Grant's army was
visible the enormous power of the North. City Point. ... the sleepiest of riverside hamlets ... had become one of the
world's great seaports ..."). The war allowed youthful industrial manufacturers to accumulate massive profits and with
those profits dissolve their relations of financial dependence upon large, eastern banking interests; and, in
permanently settling the issue of the course of American development (down the industrial capitalist road), it freed the
United States from its neo-colonial status vis--vis Great Britain.
310Such was only one outcome of the depression of 1839-1843 (see "Railroads, Regional Integration, and
Specifically Capitalist Development," below). In capitalist terms, the depression had been exacerbated by the
Democratic program, among which was Martin Van Buren's call for, rooted in internal factional strife of the New York
Democracy (Hammond, Ibid, 493-499), an "Independent Treasury." First proposed to Congress in autumn 1937 and
enacted in June 1840, this "treasury" took the national government out of banking altogether: It kept its funds in its
own vault located in Washington and other major cities, and "made no use of bank credit whether in the form of bank
notes or bank deposits" (Ibid, 496). The full Democratic anti-bank program after 1837 (i.e., with abandonment of pet
bank scheme) centered on efforts to annihilate banks.*
Where (almost everywhere) this was impossible, Democrats strove to make all charters (corporate, banking)
revocable, to legislate reductions in bank capital and introduce checks upon paper money, to increase ratios of specie
to paper and attach stricter penalties to banks that suspended specie payment, to eliminate small bills, and to enact
unlimited (or at least fuller) liability for bank directors and stockholders in the case of bank failures (John Ashworth,
'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 234). Such were dimensions of the hard money politics of Van Buren Democrats as
Jacksonians. The consequences of such politics were twofold, first, to render impossible a federal effort to prop up
demand during the long depression, and, second, to reinforce a climate in which outside the East, especially in the
old West, "free" banking would triumph up until the middle of the Civil War. For further consequences related to the
overall tempo of capitalist development in America, see "Conditions and Forms of Planter Hegemony in the United
States Antebellum Era (I). Decentralized, Free' Banking and State Rights" in our Conclusion, below.
311Dating from the Ordinance of 1787, the old Northwest referred to U.S. territory north of the Ohio river that includes
present-day Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. The Ordinance promulgated by the old Confederation
(1781-1789) specified a minimum of three states and a maximum of five for the territory, laid out the means of settling
up territories and establishing statehood, and banned forever slaves and slaveholders from the territory. States of the
Northwest Territory were admitted to the Union in the following years: Ohio in 1803, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818,
Michigan in 1836 and Wisconsin in 1848. For settler-Indian battles, Historical Atlas of the United States, 46 (maps),
96.
_____
*Congressional Whigs repealed the Independent Treasury in 1841. Democrats unsuccessfully introduced legislation
to re- institute it in House in 1844, and again, this time successfully, in House and Senate in 1846.

reached five million, and by 1860 eleven million.312 After 1830, this population explosion was
largely fueled by, first "natural" population growth, i.e., by huge families of early in-migrants;
second, by emigrates from the mid-Atlantic states and from western New England - often
farmers who left the upcountry hills for the old West (as well as for eastern cities) in the face of
declining agricultural productivity; and, third, after 1848 by European immigrations. English,
German and Irish immigrants passed through the ports of New York, Philadelphia and Boston,
some settling in these eastern cities and others migrating westward. By 1860, foreign born
immigrants made up one-third the populations of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a full half
of the populations of the western cities of Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and
Cleveland.313
Mostly southern populations from Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee had settled,
largely between 1800 and 1830, central and southern Ohio (a state since 1803), and the
southern halves of Indiana (a state since 1816) and Illinois (a state since 1818). Until the mid1840s, men of southern heritage, in fact, controlled the state legislatures in Ohio, Indiana and
Illinois. These settled populations came to constitute historically poorer farming communities
known derisively as "Butternut" belts314 (see Map 2).
These areas constituted a moment in the class geography of the rural West, product of the
uneven development that is an essential characteristic of all rapid capitalist growth. "Butternut"
belts formed a pole of underdevelopment, those areas that were left behind by economic
development. Located, then, primarily in southern Indiana, central Ohio and the southern and
central Illinois counties of the mid-nineteenth century West, they were concentrated along
rivers, especially the Mississippi and the Ohio and their tributaries, the Wabash and Embarras
in Illinois, the White, Little Pigeon and the Blue in Indiana, and the Miami, Scioto and Duck to
name only the largest in Ohio. Apace with the growth of a farming population went the
development of a steamboat-based transportation system that carried agricultural surpluses
south and, after 1830, more and more east, while farmers in turn purchased with the extra
cash earned from sale of their small surpluses implements, clothing and home "luxuries" by
way of returning steamships. By 1830, this interrelation created, as it were, a retrospectively
"primitive" but historically advanced form of market integration that was after 1840,
nonetheless, left behind by newer economic developments.
312For population figures reflecting the presence of Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee, George Rogers

Taylor, "The National Economy Before and After the Civil War," 7. Taylor's classificatory scheme is otherwise
unacceptable: Kansas belongs to the era of the Civil War as the first state of the plains. Missouri, Kentucky and
Tennessee, though the former two were border states during the same war, historically belong to the South: Missouri
and Tennessee were slave states until Emancipation; Kentucky remained a slave state until late 1865 when
emancipation was made real on the point of Union army bayonets.
313The basis of the explosive "natural" growth of the settler-American population lay in labor-dependent, labor-hungry
huge yeoman families in which "almost yearly childbirths" was the norm. See William Freehling, Road to Disunion, 42,
and, particularly, John M. Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, 45.
For population densities, Historical Atlas of the United States, maps on 42 (1830), 48 (1850); for the sources of
immigration to the old Northwest, Theodore Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest, 2-3, 20, 39, 48,
58; for immigration from the East, Taylor, "Ibid," 4-6; for the major European immigrant groups prior to 1870, Historical
Atlas of the United States, "Sources of Immigration" (graph), 52; and, for foreign born large western city populations,
Taylor, "Ibid," 16. These large households were non-nuclear and patriarchal in character. They had as many as 8-10
children, including the oldest childrens very young children, and several dependent relatives. This character of the
household insured only the oldest son (or sometimes the youngest if he stayed with the family long enough and his
older siblings married and left) would inherit the family land.
Accordingly, large families tended to drive westward migration, since the family could not provide land for all sons.
Charles Sellers, the Market Revolution, 12, 16.
314For "Butternut" belts, Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 76. The term "butternut," a pejorative employed to
characterize poor farmers, especially, poor white southerners, etymologically refers the dye derived from the bark of a
species of walnut tree used to color homespun clothing.

All appearing within a few years of each other, and within a half a dozen years of their
appearance, the railroad, telegraph and ocean-going steamship became the dominant modes
of transportation and fully reoriented the economic life of the West to eastern urban
markets.315 This reorientation was precisely what created the "Butternut" belts as such, as
depressed areas of little economic growth and increasing detachment from newer more
dynamic and more integrated areas of production and markets. Increasingly, farmers in these
areas engaged in subsistence farming or tenant agriculture. With their cruder implements,
small farms with limited livestock and vegetable gardens, "Butternut" belt farmers grew some
wheat and corn. They both sold and sent their small surpluses south via the Mississippi as
supplements to the produce generated by plantation agriculture. In this respect, they were
similar to the upcountry southern yeomanry.316
Population Movements,
Technological Change, Class Recomposition and Sectional Alliance
Developments, such as those of rail discussed below, rested on, and in some cases
anticipated, the movement of populations. Occupying poorer lands than those settled earlier
and facing stiff competition in the sale of their tiny surpluses from the more fertile hinterland
closer to large urban and commercial centers, yeomen from the western counties of seaboard
states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, eastern New York and Pennsylvania, and the
Mid-Atlantic states, migrated in a more or less straight geographical line westward: Seeking
more fertile lands or greater opportunity (or both), these early, mostly subsistence farmers
settled in the rural areas of upstate northwestern New York, the entire northern girth of
Pennsylvania, the northeastern quarter of Ohio known as the Western Reserve (and the
counties around Cincinnati), a thin strip of northern Indiana (and three extreme east central
counties), northeast Illinois, southern Michigan and southeastern Wisconsin, and eastern and
southeastern Iowa. Thus, after 1840, the origins of immigration to the old Northwest began to
shift.317 These in-migrants engaged in commercial agriculture and their activity formed the
other pole of western development, rapid economic growth. This was a movement of Yankee
yeomen, overwhelmingly Protestant, individualistic and industrious, who, largely responsible
for the developing dynamic of inter-regional growth unfolding after 1844, recreated themselves
on the basis of the practice of capitalist farming. Thus, extending from western New England
along those shores of Lake Erie into the Old Northwest, home to a tiny stratum of prosperous
farmers engaged in larger-scale commercial agriculture - as much businessmen and
entrepreneurs as farmers, this belt of settlement from east to west formed what,
retrospectively, we might designate as a "Yankee corridor."318
This westward migration, and the demand for foodstuffs as a result of the population growth of
eastern seaboard cities, pulled, as it were, technological innovation in its wake: In 1828, there
315Alfred Chandler, Jr., "The Organization of Manufacturing and Transportation," 137-138; and his The Visible Hand,

189.
316For crude implements, John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, 96.
317In this chapter we refer both to the "old Northwest" and the "old West." The terms are intended to be

interchangeable.
318For the origins of migrating populations, George Rogers Taylor, "The National Economy Before and After the Civil
War," 5-6; for the areas of the New England migration, Historical Atlas of the United States, map on 48 (1850); Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, 63, 106-107; Montgomery, Ibid, 76; Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties, 2. The term
"Yankee corridor" is Alexander Saxton's. See his The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 133. The other side of this
movement westward was a eastward movement into towns and cities: The limited economic opportunities of farmers
in the hilly and rocky soil of the New England "upcountry," particularly in western Massachusetts, had already led to
the abandonment of farms in the region by 1840, and, accordingly, to a large pool of mostly youthful female "surplus
labor" "soaked" up by the textile industry. For the abandonment of farms, Taylor, "Ibid," 3-7.

were just three miles of railways in the United States. By the 1850s, railroad construction in
the Ohio, Indiana and Illinois increased more than fifteen times the total for all previous years
combined (the total coming to 7,289 miles of track). In the two other states of the old West and
Iowa, nearly four times as much rail as in the past, 1,849 miles of track, was added in the
same decade. The bulk of this new track was laid between 1856 and 1859. The total for these
six states represented nearly 42% of the entire total miles of rail laid in the entire United
States in the 1850s. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, 1,183 miles of a total 3,516 miles,
or better than a 1/3, of the track laid these two states in the 1850s was, moreover, in wheat
(and corn) producing counties; and this included all the track laid in the great emerging
metropolis of Chicago (as well as that of Milwaukee). More significantly, 88% of all rail laid in
Illinois in 1850 and 1851, and 81% rail laid in Wisconsin from 1851 through 1856 was in wheat
(and corn) counties.319
A pattern emerges here: Rail construction was first undertaken in those rural areas where
capitalist farming generated marketable surpluses and then connected these areas to the
major urban centers (e.g., Chicago) for redistribution regionally, further east and abroad. (The
invention of refrigerated rail cars in the 1850s made this possible.) In all, with only 600 miles of
line in 1849, the old West had by 1860 a system of some 11,000 miles of track.
The other great area of rail construction in the North was upstate New York and central and
western Pennsylvania where additional rail during this decade more than quadrupled existing
lines. This rail system, along with the newly introduced ocean-going steamship, recreated the
port cities of Chicago, and Buffalo and Cleveland as well as centrally located inland cities such
as Indianapolis and Cincinnati as a booming metropolises.320 Railroads were crucial: They
reduced travel time from New York to Chicago, for example, from three weeks to three days.
Unlike canals and turnpikes constructed from the end of the War of 1812 (in 1815) until 1849,
railroads as well as (lake and) ocean-going steamships were, moreover, dependable and
predictable: They were not subject to season-based closures (due to ice and snow), and they
ran, comparatively speaking, on rigorously followed schedules. The two forms of
transportation together with the telegraph, which literally developed side by side with railroads,
made movement of goods and people "faster, cheaper and more certain." Running regularly
and reliably, rails and steamships allowed the Post Office to begin the use of stamps in 1847
and drop rates by a factor of seventeen four years later. All these advances qualitatively
stimulated the growth of market transactions by qualitatively increasing the volume and speed
of those transactions.321
The foodstuffs raised by western farmers, consisting largely in wheat and corn, milk and
cheese, and pork and beef, were shipped to urban centers to feed the growing urban
populations. For example, prior to 1840 exports of grain from Chicago to the East totaled
under 10,000 bushels. But by 1860 this total had reached 31,000,000 bushels and in 1862,
just two years later, 56,000,000 bushels of grain were shipped east. In return, the east-west
rails continued to bring immigrants and native born emigrants to the West, as well as the
products of native and import European manufacturers. Among the latter, the rails brought
319For rail lines in 1828, Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 211; for rails thereafter, Albert Fishlow, American

Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy, 172-173 (tables); calculations of additional rail
construction for New York and Pennsylvania based on inspection of map in Alfred Chandler, Jr., "The Organization of
Manufacturing and Transportation," (insert between) 138-139.
320For the large cities of the "old West" economy, Saxton, Ibid; and Roy Nichols, The Disruption of American
Democracy, 14 (for the example of Cincinnati).
321Chandler, "Ibid," 139-140. According to Chandler, "the [historical moment of the] simultaneous widespread
adoption of the railroad, the telegraph, and the ocean-going steamship" constituted "the really critical ... [period] in
American economic history" before the Civil War. After 1846, these methods became, "almost overnight, standard
vehicles of transportation and communication." "Ibid," 137-138.

implements to western farmers. Farmers' purchases not only included mechanical implements
(plows, threshers, reapers, etc.) and of course, hand tools, but also embraced building
materials and clothing, boots, shoes and luxuries from eastern manufacturers.322
By 1860, this double movement created a North-West sectional axis, an economically fully
integrated urban, industrializing Northeast and agricultural West similarly dotted with
industrialized towns and cities; that is, it recreated, now in a qualitatively more developed
form, a tighter network of capitalist productive relations as the market integration of
metropolises with hinterlands formed an inter-regional relation and generated a self-sustaining
dynamic of capitalist development.
Railroads, Regional Integration, and Specifically Capitalist Development
The construction of railroads in the 1840s was the central element in production nationally that
permitted the revival of economic activity. Following the Panic of 1837, the specie
suspensions of that year and again in 1839, the ensuing collapse of the speculative bubble
(particularly in land sales and bank lending), and the consequent bankruptcies and
depression, rail production after 1843 led once again to a general increase in the tempo of
business activity.
Railroads were not only crucial to regional integration in the North but rapidly hastened
specifically capitalist development in its American form. In the latter respect, they were, as
Chandler has demonstrated, the first truly modern (i.e., industrial) American firm, and its
exemplary model to boot.
Between 1851 and 1854, the major intersectional trunk lines (the Erie, Baltimore & Ohio, the
Pennsylvania, and New York Central) were completed. In total, the more than 21,000 miles of
track laid in the fifties formed the basic infrastructure of the entire North east of the Mississippi
River. This infrastructure, together with the telegraph (and steamship), integrated East and
West because, first, it permitted a symbiotic development of the basic regional products of
industry (East) and agriculture (West); second, the creation of this infrastructure itself
constituted the introduction of new orders of volume, a qualitative transformation that rendered
high volume (nascent mass) production (of iron rails, locomotives, passage and freight cars as
well as rail lines) possible which, carrying those products that fed and supplied rapidly
expanding populations, created in turn a system of high volume (or mass) distribution. 323 This
much has been said in the previous discussion; third, the regularity and dependability of allweather rail transportation, the material premise of mass production and distribution,
effectively broke through natural limitations marking the first, truly revolutionary ingression by
capital into, thereby restructuring, the tempo and rhythms of the productive activity of daily life;
and, fourth, incipient mass production and distribution, in turn, required of the rails' owners a
revolutionary reorganization of the firm, itself taking shape in a distinctively American form,
and with it the constitution of social strata existentially dependent upon capitalist production
who thus appeared as such for the first time in history.
Prior to the 1840s, the rationalization of merchants activity characteristic of a highly
developed commercial society (commercial "capitalism") assumed the form of a detailed
division of labor within the merchant community as a whole. Based upon the boom in cotton
production in America after 1815, new groups of merchants appeared: Merchant bankers,
jobbers, insurers, shippers, freight forwarders and the firms associated with their activities all
came into being, but the internal structure of the firm itself remained unchanged.324 Unlike the
322For shipments east, Taylor, "Ibid," 10, and Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982), 318-

319, whose underscores the dynamics of capitalist development with his clear grasp of East-West trade.
323Chandler, The Visible Hand, 79, 83.
324Ibid, 48-49.

merchant community as a whole, within which specialization grew, the merchant firm
remained largely undifferentiated. The bigger merchant's office, the counting house, continued
to employ a couple copiers, a cashier and a clerk who handled the firm's business when the
owners were not present. Ownership invariably took the form of a partnership, with one
partner, for example, handling purchases and shipping, another financial affairs. The
organization of office was delegated verbally in daily conversations.325 Similarly, record
keeping with regards to finances, inventories and transactions, reproduced a tradition of
commercial accounting activity (double entry bookkeeping) that dated back to the Florentine
merchants of the fourteenth century.326
If we temporarily exclude discussion of the patriarchal extended family farm with its primitive
non-mechanical tools (plough, hoes), natural power (horses, oxen), seasonal work, and
production for self-sufficiency with small surpluses for sale on the market which in agriculture
was tradition itself, also traditional in the American context was the form of the firm engaged in
the production of goods. Urban craft production reproduced the European pattern (less the
guild structure for self defense of craft knowledge and objective standing in production) of a
small number of masters and journeymen or apprentices that created the instruments of
production and consumer goods in use throughout the economy. The emergence of large
firms, particularly in textile production, to meet increased demand that resulted from
demographical growth, constituted the first insinuation of formally capitalist methods into
production: Waged labor, that of the "surplus" female labor from the countryside, began to
appear for the first time on a permanent basis; and, existing machine technology in spinning
and weaving processes were integrated in a single structure or building in a single locale and
thereby generated qualitatively greater output in each process. Yet while the resultant isolation
of workers from the elements constituted a break with the seasonally adjustments traditionally
made in agricultural and craft labor, the limited supervision of waged workers entailed in early
textile production, the partnership structure of the firm, and employment of traditional double
entry forms of bookkeeping, and, above all, the integration of production processes as
opposed to their rationalization (fragmentation or subdivision) did not give rise to the constant
transformation of production and its organization that is essentially characteristic of industrial,
mass production methods.327 In our terms (those of Marx), merchant control over urban
manufactures, characterized as the formal subsumption of labor under capital had not yet
given rise to the distinctively capitalist, real subsumption of labor under capital characterized
by the constant revolutionizing of production itself based on the intervention and organization
of the form labor takes in the workplace, the transformation of means of production by bringing
to bear on it novel technological inputs (machinery).328 The coming of the railroads changed
all this, and in so doing transformed the key sectors of the entire American economy.
First, the processes of production on the basis of which were generated the technological
innovations necessary to the mass production of locomotives and rail cars (e.g., the "cams,
sandbox, driver wheels, swivel or bogie truck and equalizing beams," and the manufacture of
passenger cars, boxcars, cattle, lumber and other cars)329 proletarianized masses of men:
They created a dual structured working class (constituted by a thin layer of the "native" skilled
and a mass of unskilled workers with its huge immigrant labor component) that characterized
325Ibid, 37.
326Ibid, 37, 41; and, generally, see the author's The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, part I, section 2.
327Chandler, Ibid, 67-68.
328Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Production Process," 1021-1037; and, the third critique in our Community

and Capital.
329 Chandler, Ibid, 82-83.

the American proletariat (paradigmatically in metalworking central to rail production) down into
the twentieth century. proletarianization on this order together with a detailed division of labor
within production were the preconditions for the ongoing introduction of novel technical inputs
and the transformation of labor processes associated with these inputs.330
Second, the coordination and control over many different kinds of activity and the men
involved in those activities (component production, railroad construction, maintenance,
operation and administration) compelled rail owners to revolutionize an internal business
organization whose novel size had been previously unknown.331 In fact, it was the
coordination of just one of those activities, rail operation with its hitherto unimagined volume of
traffic with so many different and differing types of products, that forced this revolution.
Now the old form of partnership could not of itself generate funds for initial capitalization and
was no longer adequate to the management of huge firms whose various geographically
contiguous divisions and activities were beyond the supervisory capacities of any one, two,
three or even four or five men. Instead, railroad companies were incorporated with ownership
embodied in a board of directors and day to day management in a presidency immediately
under whom were divisional or departmental vice-presidents.
This internal organizational revolution entailed, secondly, creation of a full-timed, salaried
administrative hierarchy of managers, foremen, supervisors and superintendents in
production, accountants, auditors, comptroller and treasurer in finance, engineers and
superintendents in operation, etc., functioning under, what today we would call specifically
corporate personnel, the vice-presidents and president all below the board of directors.332 This
administrative hierarchy thereby entailed, for the first time, the separation of management and
ownership, and with the introduction into history of a specific stratum, a middle strata of
managers professional in outlook, completely dependent for their livelihood on large-scale
capitalist production.333
Detailed data collection and statistical innovations introduced by a group of top railroad
managers in the fifties, third, transformed traditional bookkeeping into modern accounting.
Developments of methods of construction or capital accounting, operating accounting, and
costs accounting allowed the railroads to generated criteria to evaluate internal organizational
performance, specifically that of the various managers engaged in different divisions of rail
330Predating that in rails, a limited proletarianization had already taken place. It was a condition of the constitution of

a rails-based proletariat (inasmuch as high volume coal production made the use of steam, as in the steam-driven
locomotive, economical). This occurred in the anthracite coalfields of Northeastern Pennsylvania. See Grace
Palladino, Another Civil War. Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania. Also Chandler,
Ibid, 83.
331This detailed division of labor within the railroad industry was the other side of the internal business reorganization
(note the text immediately above, and below). Within the machine shops boilermakers, blacksmiths, machinists,
carpenters and painters (all more or less skilled workers) could be found. In and associated with the roundhouses and
station houses, switchmen, helpers, dispatchers, baggagemen, pumpers and signalmen were employed. They formed
a mixture of skilled and unskilled workers. On the trains themselves, workers included the skilled elite of conductors
and engineers, and the unskilled, qualitatively more numerous brakemen and firemen. For this enumeration, Robert
Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, 43-44.
332Chandler, Ibid, 87, 94-109.
333The presence of a middle stratum in production and social life is a decisive fact in later nineteenth century

American history. Uniquely, the American middle strata have been crucial to capital's efforts, particularly vigilante
efforts, to repress workers' struggles. See Addendum I in our Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte) and the
chapter entitled "The Middle Strata" in our Whither America?
Among these managers were two men, mentioned by Chandler (Ibid, 95), whose engineering backgrounds were
militarily based. Those two men were George McClellan and Hermann Haupt. They played important roles in the
Union armies during the Civil War, respectively, as Lincoln's first general of the armies and as the War Department's
railroad and logistic organizer. McClellan was absolutely crucial to the history of the Union armies in the East. See
chapter 4, below.

firms' activities. At the same time, these methods also permitted determinations of per unit
costs that allowed for bureaucratic insight that improved operational efficiency.334 In respect to
size of the enterprises, high volume production and the internal creation of economies of
scale, the development of accounting, as well as the constitution of a middle stratum of
managers - professionally motivated with ideal interests in improving corporate efficiency, the
railroads were exemplary models that were copied and emulated: Railroad companies were
consciously analyzed with the resulting ideal reproductions of their structure promulgated as
models among America's business community.335
Construction of the major trunk lines led, fourth, to creation of a national capital market in New
York City. On the one hand, previously smaller lines, constructed as late as the mid-1840s
largely in New England and initially central to renewed economic activity in that decade, had
been based on partnerships of local wealthy farmers and merchants who contracted for
building a section of the line in the environs of their locale. On the other hand, historically even
the largest firms in the United States had been vastly less capitalized. As late as the 1850s,
only the largest textile manufacturers and metalworking concerns were capitalized at amounts
over $1,000,000. By way of comparison, the four great East-West trunk lines had start up
costs ranging from $17,000,000 to $35,000,000, while the initial costs of the primary roads in
the old West (the Illinois Central, Michigan Central and Michigan Southern) extended from
$10,000,000 to $17,000,000. Thus, the simultaneous construction of several major railroads in
the fifties demanded financial resources that could only found in New York City. From here,
capitalization could draw on the greatest concentration of financial resources in the United
States, and beyond there in Europe. Following the 1848 turmoil and revolutionary assaults in
France and against the old regimes of central Europe, wealthy Europeans were eager to find
a socially and politically more stable climate for their investments. With the rapid, rising
demand for funds, very quickly a stratum of New York merchants, particularly those engaged
in the purchase and sale of foreign exchange, took up and concentrated on the marketing of
railroad securities. These merchants took a commission on sales, and soon came to act as
financial advisors to rail ownerships. The centralization and institution of money markets in
New York City, and with these developments the elaboration of the techniques and
instruments of modern securities marketing (mortgages, income and debenture bonds, stock
conversions and preferred stocks, etc.), also immediately followed.336
The magnitude of its operations and the extent of its markets allowed, fifth, the railroad as an
industry to transform the old division of labor within America. Once all the productive activities
necessary to sustain a community could be found within it, or, in the case of larger urban
areas, within the relation to their immediate agricultural hinterlands. The development of the
railroad changed all that. By 1860, the East-West axis was already nascently undergoing
supercession. Instead, though retaining an internal division of socially necessary tasks, whole
urban metropolises with their adjacent hinterlands were functionally beginning to assume a
singular role within a national division of labor: "Chicago turned hog butcher to the nation,
Minneapolis became the nation's miller, Lynn its cobbler, Patterson spun its silk, St. Louis
brewed its beer." Though not yet fully developed, railroads symbolized the tacit presence of
this future.337
334Chandler, Ibid, 109-120.
335Ibid, 104-105.
336Ibid, 83, 91-93.
337Bruce, Ibid, 30-31. Cleveland, for example, was a center of iron and steel production as components of means of

production, turning out "sheet metal, iron and steel goods, railroad cars, iron bridges, sewing machines, [and] ships."
Ibid, 204.
The complex of relations described here was, of course, only fully developed after 1872.

Introducing infrastructural industrialization, massive proletarianization structured along its

latter nineteenth form, the modern corporation with its accounting forms and its internal
reorganization and expansion that centered on creation of a new middle stratum of managers,
and a novel, if not fully formed, model of the division of societal labor, the emergence of large
railroad firms begun a transformation of American society that would within a decade of the
Civil War's end render the old "free labor" milieu so transitorily characteristic of western
America at mid-century unrecognizable. ("Free labor" was, at any rate, the western
counterpart to what during the era of capitalist transition in the East were with, relatively
speaking, its more rigid class structure characteristically plebeian strata, i.e., urban artisans
and small producers resting on a myriad of journeymen, laborers and farmers cut loose from
their rural moorings). Changing the face of American society, these transformations rested on
the movement of populations,338 and, in particular, the demographical density of masses of
men engaged in various forms of capitalist farming in the West.

338See the section, "Population Movements, Technological Change, Class Recomposition and Sectional Alliance,"

above.

Part II
The Historically Novel, Social Class Configuration Underlying Anti-Slavery
Capitalist and Class Development in the Old West
The appearance of capitalist farming in the old West did not mean the historical emergence of
a mass of property owning capitalist farmers. Nor did it mean large, prosperous capitalist and
poor "Butternut" farmers represented the extent of western rural stratification. These strata
merely formed the poles of the property owning classes within the seemingly fluid and clearly
dynamic, regionalized and polarized class geography of the old West.
Capitalist development in the West began with land speculation.339 Two speculative-based,
boom periods in which land sales in the pre-Civil War West soared are distinguishable. The
first began in the mid-1830s and ended with the Panic of 1837, the second coincided with
most of the decade of the fifties. 340 Both booms had their presupposition in the easy credit
Andrew Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank of the United States had made possible. 341
The first boom (1834-1837), in fact, began in the immediate aftermath of Jackson's veto of the
Congressional effort to renew the charter of the federal Bank in July 1832. Those speculative
elements, who were housed largely in New York (Wall Street) and the state banks (especially
in the East) and who pressured and militated for Jackson's action, went immediately to work:
Purchase of large land tracts in the Indiana and Illinois prairie counties skyrocketed. While this
activity was more or less continuous until 1858, broken only by the Panic of 1837, it peaked
early (i.e., in 1837) and was not expansively renewed until after 1849.
Characteristically, early land speculators did not reside on the land they purchased (many, if
not most, purchases were multiple and non-contiguous). Wishing to remain in the East, the
locus of their financial activities, they as a whole made few improvements (breaking soil,
planting, fencing, building construction), hoping for land values to rise while they waited upon
farmers to settle these lands. More often than not purchased by land companies (e.g., the
American Land Company of New York, the Boston and Indiana Land Company) operating on
the spot through land agents, collectively housing a number of investors, and established
explicitly for the purpose of the speculative purchase and profitable sale of land, over time
these purchase spread north into the unsettled timber lands of southern Michigan and
Wisconsin, the prairie counties of central Illinois, the Military Tract of Illinois (in the rough
geographic region formed by the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers), and eventually into eastern
and southern Iowa, and southern Minnesota.342
339Speculation in the land, it should be noted, is and was not coextensive with capitalist development. Land

speculation does, of course, presuppose commercialization, i.e., a certain historically achieved level of market
exchanges including alienability of the soil. But it is not at all identifiable with specifically and distinctively capitalist
activity as should be clear from the text.
340Paul Wallace Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier, 54, 56, 63, 111, 145, 204, 243.
The first speculative boom in 19th century American history, also land based, ran from the end of the War of 1812 to
the Panic of 1819 (1815-1819). See "The Financial Panic of 1819," Chapter 1, above. For petty commodity producing,
commercial societies, booms have invariably been brought to a close by financial panics. Characterized by wild
investor expectations of profit bonanzas, they rest on various degrees of the inflationary overextension of credit, an
overextension which becomes increasingly untenable for bankers and lenders as the mass of extended credit grows.
In contrast, the classical capitalist cycle of (rapid) expansion (followed by severe contraction) is brought to a close in
an industrial crisis of overproduction. (Productive capacity exceeds the ability of markets to absorb the mass of
commodities produced.) The collapse (depression) beginning in 1873 in the United States, if only the first in American
history, was characteristically an industrial collapse.
341Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, 405-441.
342Gates, Ibid, 112-113,144-156. Military tracts existed in a several western states (e.g., the Connecticut Western

Reserve, U.S. Military Tract and Virginia Military District all in Ohio). They were areas of federal and state set asides
for veterans of the United States wars (Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Indian Wars, and Mexican War). Veterans (or
their families) were compensated for fighting through the purchase of extremely cheap land in what had hitherto been
the "public domain" (viz., expropriated native lands). While land was available as low a $.60 per acre, in the West

At the same time largely speculative land buying dominated land purchases in the old West, a
small number of land buyers made a commitment to the creation of large farming estates on a
capitalist basis. After recovery from the Panic of 1837 and the ensuring depression (which
crushed a large number of speculators whose lands devolved on the banks holding notes on
the properties or on the state governments who auctioned them off for delinquency in tax
payments), this resident capitalist element slowly became dominant. These men first settled
the central, northwestern counties of Indiana (Newton, Jasper, Benton, Warren just south of
present day Hammond and Gary) and those just west of here in eastern Illinois. There,
especially in Indiana, they made improvements, draining the marshy lowlands, and, exploiting
waged labor, raised in the fifties and later large herds of beef cattle and accompanied this
activity with crop production (corn, wheat and small grains). 343 In constructing major EastWest trunk lines, it was their surpluses that railroad owners were first reaching out for.
As these capitalist farmers brought and settled large tracts of the central Illinois prairie
(especially Tazewell, Logan and Sangamon counties), productive activity more and more gave
way to crop (particularly corn) accompanied by livestock production on the basis of landlord
tenancy. (Indiana cattle capitalists, who before 1860, came to integrate corn and grain
production for fed with cattle ranching, had gone over by 1865 to subdividing large portions of
their land into small farms and renting them out to tenants.)344 Averaging from 5,000 to 45,000
acres, none of the landlord holdings were small by standards set anywhere in the then
contemporary world.345 Though hardly the exclusive form of agricultural activity, before the
Civil War tenancy eventually spread into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and especially Iowa and the
Kansas Territory as well.
Though statistics on tenancy were not officially compiled until the 1880 census, some idea of
the extent of this "alien" and "unAmerican" institution can be gathered by briefly reviewing this
statistical information. By 1880, 31% of the agricultural population in Illinois was productively
engaged as tenants, in Indiana and Iowa tenancy had reached 24%, in the core central Illinois
counties the rates soared to 45-50%, while across the prairie region as a whole (extending
from western Indiana across Illinois and Iowa into Kansas), tenancy had by this time achieved
rates of 30%-45%.346 This reality was already fully outlined in the developments of the 1850s.
Thus, for example, even in the regions of the old West where Yankee yeomen had most
heavily settled, tenant-landlord relations played a significant role. Gates cites the example of
the southern half of Wisconsin in the fifties, an area where tenancy was slow to develop. From
east to west (Janesville, Baraboo, Eau Claire), even here he found notices in local papers of
farms for rent.347 It would be safe, if not a conservative understatement, to suggest that by
1860, tenancy in the old West occupied anywhere from 10% to 20% of the agricultural
population. Though capitalist farming does not presuppose that all farmers so engaged be
property owners, and while tenant farmers in the old West were nominally capitalist farmers,
these lands were often so far from "civilized" life, and so isolated, that veterans preferred to sell their bounties. Often
160 acre tracts, these were gobbled up by speculators. Ibid, 141, 243.
343Ibid, 170-195. Ambitious and driven, optimistic, and possessing large visions, Gates calls these men "agricultural
Napoleons." Ibid, 175, 249.
344Ibid, 206.
345Ibid, 249. By way of contrast property owning small farmers most often purchased 640, 480, or 320 acre tracts

working that part of them they could effectively work, renting the remainder, and intending to bequest portions to their
children. Ibid, 51, 167.
346Gates, Ibid, 166-167.
Evidence of its [tenancy extent is to be found in immigrant guidebooks, in the advertising literature of the West, in
leases recorded at the county seats, in increasing allusions to tenant problems n the newspapers and rural journals,
and in the frequent advertisements announcing land or farms for rent. Ibid, 96.
347Ibid, 306-307, 307 n.5.

the conditions of tenancy should be carefully examined for what they actually disclose about
capitalist development in the West.
First, note that the mass of European immigrants (English, Irish and German) during the
1850s who did not settle in East coast cities and moved on westward were in no position to
purchase land. (Much of this also holds true for the Yankee yeoman migrating west from the
urban hinterlands in the East.) Government lands (the "public domain" whether in legal
possession of the federal government or, on the basis of land grants, the states) were
preferentially sold in huge tracts.348 It was the land companies, wealthy individual speculators
and large farmers who made these purchases. Military land grants and railroad grants, the two
other major source of alienated land, were in most cases in the hands of the same men.
Among them, including those held by farmers with acreage they were willing to sell (as
opposed to lands they actually preferred to rent), huge purchases were made at $1.25 per
acre, sometimes less (as in the case of the Military District of Illinois), sometimes more. 349 But
the average price to the prospective small farmer during this period for unimproved ("wild")
land was more like $3.00 per acre, while the average cost of improved lands came to $7.0010.00 per acre.350 In Iowa, the most popular immigrant destination in the fifties, the 1860
census showed that 15 million acres, just less than one-half of the privately owned land, was
held by non-residents (i.e., by absentee landlords). This was unimproved land that went at an
average of $3.00 per acre.351 Land ownership required, then, a large initial outlay or, in
bourgeois terms, capital. But the initial purchase was just that, namely, the beginning. In the
case of grain or corn production, the cheaper, unimproved land had to be improved, i.e.,
cleared, fenced, and the hard prairie ground broken. Materials (wire and posts for fencing),
implements, seed, and livestock had to be purchased in advance of any return.352
Contemporary cost estimates ran from $1,000 for a 40 acre plot to $5,000 for a section. 353
Thus, a vast number of in-migrants to the old West, and almost all European immigrants, were
financially in no position to purchase land.
Contemporaries, especially those privately holding land for speculative resale, were well
aware of this fact. Literature advertising land for purchase suggested the (im)migrant could
find waged employment in the rapidly growing western towns and cities (e.g., Cincinnati,
Chicago, St. Louis),354 or become a tenant and thereby earn that initial outlay while leasing a
farm from another man. Alternatively, in-migrants borrowed money from frontier loan sharks at
usurious interests. Because of the length of time between start-up and initial returns, they
most often failed to make payments and lost their farms. 355 For these men and their families,
this was another, more circuitous route to tenancy.
The conditions of tenancy, moreover, belied the optimistically advertised appraisal of the
tenant farmer's chances for property ownership. The landlord set down the conditions upon
which his renter leased the farm from him. First, the tenant was required to protect and
348Clarence Danhof, "Farm Making Costs and the 'Safety Valve', 1850-1860," Journal of Political Economy, 329;

Gates, The Farmers Age, 82-83, 95-96.

The federal government dispersed fifty million acres between 1850 and 1860, but only 24% of this was actually sold.
The balance went to the states as land grants (41%) and to veterans of former United States wars (who in turn largely
sold it to speculators, see above) as sections in the various Military Districts (34%). Danhof, "Ibid," 330-331.
349Gates, Landlords and Tenants, 56, 120, 122-123, 136, 246.
350Danhof, "Ibid," 334, 336; Gates, Ibid, 247.
351Danhof, "Ibid," 333, 334.
352"Ibid," 319.
353Gates, Ibid, 246, Danhof, "Ibid," 325.
354"Ibid," 321-322, 323-324.
355Gates, Ibid, 58-59, 61, 78-79,101,144-145, 146.

maintain existing improvements (e.g., fencing) and make new ones (erect his own home, drain
all wetlands, regularly weed the land put to crop). Second, he was in most cases required to
pay his rent in kind, usually 1/3 or a 1/2 of the harvest in a crop that the landlord specified.
The landlord in most cases purchased the amount over his rent in kind. (In other words, the
tenant was effectively a sharecropper.) Third, he was also required, again in most cases, to
pay state taxes on the land. In some cases, he was required to make payments to the landlord
on a per acre basis (say, $1.00 an acre a month during the life of the lease) in order to secure
his eventual ownership.356 Having faithfully and consistently fulfilled these conditions, after a
five to seven year period (the length of the lease), the title of property would legally pass to the
tenant. But in the event where the tenant failed to comply with the terms of his lease, he was
evicted and the farm reverted to legal possession of the landlord. The tenant meanwhile lost
his equity and whatever else he had put into it. 357 Meeting the terms of the lease required
good harvests, and 1855, 1856 and 1856 were indeed good years. Yet many, perhaps most,
tenants could not meet these conditions over the course of the lease.358 For the mass of
tenants, the alternatives were lengthy seasonal agricultural waged work, waged labor in
western towns or cities, or migration further west.
Consider, now, the status of the tenant. He had to produce far in excess of self-sufficiency (a)
in order to pay his rent in kind and to sell a surplus in order (b) to generate the cash to met tax
obligations and (c) to finance the cost of improvements. Those improvements, should the
tenant farmer make them (in order to fulfill the terms of his lease, and raise the productivity of
his soil), meant that his taxes increased since improved land was taxed at higher rates than
unimproved land (and the greater the improvements the higher the rate). Improvements also
meant he, the tenant, contributed directly to rising land values. In other words, in the vast
majority of cases where he failed to meet the terms of his lease, his efforts nonetheless locked
him out of the future purchase of land. Tenancy was a trap from which the only escape was
waged labor in western urban areas (or, more likely, the attempt based on migration further
west to start over on much the same terms). Tenancy contributed to the rising number of
proletarians in the towns and cities and on the land. Because tenant production was
moreover, merely transferred from the tenant to landlord (and the State), because above that
transfer the tenant merely sold his surpluses to the landlord (without being able to test the
market), accordingly, because he lacked independence as a farmer (since he produced his
crop, specified by the landlord, for the landlord and not with a view to the market and what
would most profitably serve his interests), because he was trapped in tenancy (his only real
option being exploitation as waged labor, though, since his aspirations propelled him to
migrate, he was only peripherally aware of this fate), the produce which he kept for selfsufficiency amounted to, had the structure of, a concealed wage below its value in the market.
Thus, he was effectively a disguised proletarian on the land.
At this point concealed proletarianization rejoined actual, open waged labor in agriculture. The
1860 census demonstrates that rural waged labor was already a significant development in
the old West. In Iowa, the location most favored by immigrants in the 1850s, waged worker
composed a full 23% of the agricultural population. In the states of the West as a whole (Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, what we have referred to here as the old West),
rural waged laborers made up from 20% - 28% of the population engaged in agriculture.359
356Ibid, 264, 270.
357Ibid, 158-159, 205-206, 208, 240 (on a specific case of tenancy that exemplifies how it was born on the frontier),

262-263, 317, 319.

358Ibid, 133, 160, 206, 236, 264-265.
359Ibid, 304. John Ashworth ('Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 102), concurring with Orestes Brownson, who writing in 1840

[!], is cited as his source, indicates that in the rural American North "the employment of hired hands [was] becoming

Moving historically east to west, and beginning with canal construction in upstate New York
and western Pennsylvania (and moving west with the railroads), engaged here in rural
agricultural labor, these largely immigrant, nomadic and seasonal waged labor populations
constituted a historical moment of a continually forming and reforming, permanent strata of the
American proletariat which to this day (as in migratory, Central American farm workers) is still
a major, objective component in the life of the American working class .
To stress the overwhelming reality of effective proletarianization on the land, let us assume the
tiny stratum of prosperous, property-owning capitalist farmers (those eastern migrants who
began with wealth and sought to establish themselves as "cattle kings" or magnates of corn
production, the smaller men who were able to purchase land and prospered, and the few men
who began as tenants, completed the terms of their tenancy, won land for themselves and
also prospered) never exceeded 5% of the active agricultural population. If actual tenancy
occupied roughly 15% of the agricultural population in 1860 (again, a most conservative
estimate), then small property owning capitalist farmers never made up half of that agricultural
population at this time. This, of course, assumes that these farmers included the poor, more or
less self-sufficient farmers of the "Butternut belts." But they did not. (Thus, always in danger of
falling into tenancy or worse, small property owning capitalist farmers actually formed, as
should be clear by now, far less than half the agricultural population.)
Even though the farms of individual "Butternut" belt farmers were separated by distances
large enough to make them isolated from one another, when viewed from the perspective of
the performance of daily tasks, farming communities were a reality: Not only over time had a
detailed, socially integrating division of labor developed (that helped create these communities
as such, and) that included, for example, within a single community a blacksmith, wheelwright,
carpenter, potter, several millers, tanners, and a physician;360 but whole families customarily
acted "neighborly" (e.g., plowing fields, harvesting crop, chopping or gathering wood, mending
clothes, milking cows or goats, etc.) with those within the communities who for some reason
or another were incapacitated or merely need extra labor (such as at harvest time). While
experiencing limited market integration, this made it possible for "Butternut" belt communities
and the individual farming families within them to maintain their independence on the basis of
their self-sufficiency.
At the same time, however, these farming communities underwent another evolution. Among
the original southern families were those who, in class terms, split off from rest of community
by concentrating, over two generations, accumulated productive property (e.g., a mill) and
land, and leased the latter out to smaller farmers who otherwise had an increasingly difficult
time farming. By 1848, a polarized community had developed. On one end of stratified
communities a tiny stratum of well-to-do farmers came into being. Pursuing Whiggish politics,
they joined hands with Yankee capitalist farmers in pursuit of commercial profits. At the other
end of the community a mass of largely proletarianized tenant farmers and wage laborers,
often struggling or unable to meet state taxes on land with only minor improvements, had
come into being.361
Thus, while their politics were counterposed (self-sufficient, "Butternut" belt farmers were
enthusiastic supporters of the northern Democracy, resettled capitalist farmers of eastern
origin, "Yankees," were Free Soilers and later Republicans), tenancy and concealed
proletarianization was crushing both groups. Though the 1860 census figures included rural
waged-labor in its count and statistically expressed this reality as it was lived in the "Butternut"
belts, the point is that when the class of more or less sufficient farmers are taken into account
increasingly common."
360Faragher, Sugar Creek, 134, Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 13.
361Faragher, Ibid, 149-150, 181, especially 184-192.

in the fifties property owning capitalist farmers as a whole (well-to-do and struggling) could
have at best never exceeded, at the high end, roughly 1/4 to a 1/3 of the agricultural
population in the old West. When this property owning capitalist farming population is more
broadly contextualized, that is, inserted as a "component" into the population of the old West
as a whole, its size was correspondingly diminished while the proletarian "component"
(including both waged-labor and disguised proletarians) was greatly increased.
proletarianization in the old West was magnified by the simple fact that agricultural waged
labor was, as already noted, seasonal, i.e., beyond the core laborers of the great farms in the
prairie counties of the old West, the mass of laborers (upwards 200-300 men per farm on the
large farms) worked from April through January at which time they were cut loose. The
problem was magnified because these men were migratory, and could at any time be hired
from the vast pool of men who worked for wages in the cities, had just lost their tenancy, or
were amongst new in-migrants, a "floating population," searching for land. 362 And
proletarianization was doubly hidden, not just by tenancy (as a form of disguised
proletarianization), but by the exploitation of wage labor by small property owning farmers who
not only had his wife and children work along side him but consistently employed, again
seasonally (planting, harvesting), a man or two.363
This proletarianized population can be properly characterized at once as partially hidden and
partially open, and as problematic. In what sense was it a problem? Let us recapitulate the
situation in the 1850s on the ground, and tentatively and anticipatorily formulate a set of
theses that will at once be operative in and demonstrated by the balance of this work.
In the old West (and beyond this in Iowa and Minnesota), the public domain closed between
1846 and 1856.364 In most cases, the only land available was from big and wealthy men who,
because it was in the long term much more profitable, preferred to lease it. The response of
the tenants was to push westward, looking for cheap land. But unless a man and his family
truly got out on the frontier, cheap land could not be found. If it was found, the isolation, i.e.,
lack of an urban market for whatever surplus could be generated, lack of the means of
transportation (railroads) to forward to it such markets, and, most importantly, lack of a
community of similar farmers to support the singular farming family at the level of selfsufficiency (as in the "Butternut" belts), not to mention a real or imagined danger from natives
(Indians), created a risky situation in which the very survival of a farming family was daily at
stake. This was the obvious, first, most minimal sense of "problematic."
The second sense should also be clear enough: The dynamic of capitalist development in the
old West (pursuit of profit through open and concealed exploitation, constitution of an
objective logic governing social relations) was undermining the petty commodity producing
and self-sufficient "free labor" economy by creating a polarized class stratified society.365
Third, lacking an alternative form of productive activity as an outlet to diffuse its impact,
tenancy led straightaway to, albeit hidden but subjectively lived and real, proletarianization. It
led to a mass of men demanding, screaming and militating for, cheap land. After all, the
constitution on American soil of "European" social relations, in particular, perpetual tenancy
and rural wage labor, immediately led to closure of the avenues for advance, impoverishment,
and the daily burdens of petty humiliations and degradations. The latent recognition and
attendant fears of these objective and subjective outcomes underlay the demand for cheap
land.
362Gates, Ibid, 202, 203-204, 236, 250, 253.
363Ibid, 313-314.
364Ibid, 63, 128, 152, 204-205, 243.
365For the sense of "free labor" see, "Western Farmers and the Free Soil Party," below.

Fourth, slavery, or its establishment in the territories, not only threatened the prospects as
such for independent, property-owning farming, it endangered the whole edifice of farmingbased western society: It threatened the mobility of settler-farmers (by fixing them in
"European" conditions) and risked freezing the "fluid" social structure that underlay the society
of the West, thereby intensifying polarization and class antagonism which, allegedly, were the
hallmarks of European societies. Slavery, as a social system institutionally sanctioned by the
national political system, accomplished this by permanently fastening a land-consuming
expansionist economy onto territories at statehood. It forced out small farmers who could not
economically compete, so it was argued, with slave labor and who could not exercise the
same political power as the slave master (whose power, it should be remembered, was
enshrined in the nation's fundamental law through the 3/5 clause in the Constitution).
Slavery led to the impoverishment of free men and left them with the worst lands. (Both were
ably demonstrated by the fate of poor southern, property owning farmers. 366) Slavery
effectively disenfranchised free men in the political sense, rendered them, so the argument
went, socially inferior to a class of masters with aristocratic pretensions, economically
deprived them of the material prerequisites of pursuit of a full life, and personally robbed them
of ambition reducing them to dullards without futures.
Fifth, in the capitalist North it was the dynamically developing West, not the East, and
underlying everything the tensions created by the presence of masses of tenants and farm
workers, men with altogether abysmal prospects, which came into inevitable and
irreconcilable conflict with the slave South. It was this same presence that, fearful of the
possibility of rising internal conflict and the manner in which the entire social order was
imperiled, propelled western well-to-do elements (politicians, lawyers, bankers, rail executives,
merchants and big farmers) to organize the Republican party. In its overriding commitment to
keep slavery out of the territories, the Republican party was the party of hope. It was
effectively, if not consciously, the combat organization for the self-defense of western society
(and the East precisely because that unfolding capitalist dynamic inextricably linked their
fates), which harnessed the masses of tenants and rural waged workers, overwhelming young
men, to its banner and its cause to, if necessary, fight to the death in a struggle to defend the
Union as the overarching, transcendent political condition of the full existence of free men in a
free society.367
Town, Country and Politics in the mid-Nineteenth Century American West
This intersectional and national relation of West to East masked an internal regional
development within the West. That is, while farmers were socially dominant and numerically
preponderate in the West, interrelated class and geographical differentiations were already
advanced. There was a "frontier economy" characteristically dependent on in-migration for
marketing slim agricultural surpluses and for (individually small but aggregately significant)
cash infusions; and, there was the old West economy based on commercial agriculture,
growing urban markets, river (or lake) commerce and rapidly evolving manufactures.
Alongside and dependent upon the class geography of rural areas developed a similar, class
geography of western urban areas. Thus, the largest urban areas of this old West economy,
such as Chicago, Cincinnati and Cleveland, reproduced in essence the same classes as the
eastern metropolises, yet, to be, sure, with considerably more fluidity or social mobility. (In
366See the Prologue to chapter 10, below.
367That it was the West, and the not the East that was locked in a death struggle with the slave South will be come

apparent in our discussion of the Union armies in the East and West, chapters, 4 and 7, below.
In the sense described here, the Civil War had its prehistory, or more forcefully, actually began, in the Kansas Territory
in 1854.

point of fact, the mid-nineteenth century term for this mobility, "free labor," referred back to a
reality that was always more urban and entrepreneurial than rural and agricultural as the
careers of "free labor's" most articulate spokesmen attest. 368) These classes and strata
included laborers in the building trades and on the docks; entrepreneurs, industrial workers
and artisans in manufacturing; merchant strata that included jobbers, wholesale merchants
and dry goods dealers who distributed both their local and largely eastern-purchased
merchandise to the western interior while selling agricultural surpluses to their counterparts in
the East; and bankers. The growth of farming in the West led, then, not merely to farming
communities but to hierarchy of cities and towns according to size and productive function.
Agricultural surpluses were market-distributed largely by rail but also by river, in the process
creating and supporting small town retailers, middlemen and wholesalers. In the West, these
groups and classes relied upon capitalist farmers for their livelihoods and shared their politics.
Their heyday in the United States was the late 1840s and 1850s: At this time for the first time,
the class and geographically intra-regionally differentiated western economy became by and
large dependent upon their activity and production.369
In the 1830s and early 1840s, those migrating from outside New England had aligned
themselves with Jackson and later Van Buren. They nurtured themselves on the AngloAmerican adaptation of classical Republicanism, that is, they were classically Jacksonian (i.e.,
settler colonialist, racist, viz., whites only frontier egalitarian, and anti-monopolistic).
Considering themselves frugal, simple, honest farmers, living embodiments of civic virtue,
they were democrats opposed to the luxury and corruption of all forms of "old world"
aristocracy - the monied interests, banks and monopolies with their unchecked power based
on special privileges such as tax exemptions and allegedly discriminatory federal taxes that
increased their wealth and penalized the farmer. Like his southern poor dirt farming
counterpart, the "Butternut" farmer feared and hated the black slave: Indistinguishable with a
view to home, diet, clothing, etc., and actually owning very little, the poor farmer nonetheless
prided himself on his property-based independence and exhibited an air of assumed natural
superiority. Fervently nationalist, "Butternut" areas were centers of power of the antebellum
northern Democracy, and formed the largest class component of the northern wing of the
Democracy.370
But the later, post-1844, basically New England migration into the old West give rise to
capitalist farming strata (and to the great Western cities and urban strata dependent on
capitalist farming) who formed the social base of the Republican party. Existentially and
culturally-ideally contiguous with the central, if mystifying, class perspective of the preceding
368Consider the spokespersons cited by Foner (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, passim), to wit, Lincoln, Henry

Wilson, Nathaniel Banks, Hannibal Hamlin, Thaddeus Stevens, Samuel Blair, etc. Though not all westerners, all were
lawyers and politicians.
369For the large cities of the "old West" economy, Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 133;
Roy Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy, 14 (for the example of Cincinnati); for class strata in this
economy, Unger, The Greenback Era, 46; for middlemen, Chandler, "Ibid," 141.
370Nationalism was an overriding feature of this farmer's consciousness. During the Civil War, it split the "Butternut"
belts into those who sympathized with the Confederacy and refused to fight for the North (or, especially during
autumn 1862 and winter 1862-1863, deserted Union army ranks), and those who enlisted and fought with Union
forces.
Among the most economically "backward" areas of the old West, the immobile character of "Butternut" farming, (i.e.,
planting and harvesting without real improvements, while the balance of activity consisted in socializing or hunting)
was, within the generalized patriarchal context of "subsistence strategies" based on the labor of large families
(Sellers, Ibid, 12, 16), the result of choice made by males, a reflective awareness of a handed-down, "inherited"
tradition consciously taken up because of the advantages of power over women and children, leisure and conviviality
it provided male householders with. This is our reading of John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois
Prairie, 115-135.

era, that of the independent yeomanry, these strata and especially property owning capitalist
farmers, having politically assimilated much that was "Jacksonian," were compelled, perhaps
unknowingly at first, by their conditions of life to bestow a new sense on familiar issues and
test the limits of once taken-for-granted assumptions, attitudes and practices. With much more
fertile and in some areas rich soils, apparently captive urban markets in the East and a
developing rail and ocean-going steamship system, these farmers, especially the large
property owning ones, generated surpluses that played a big role in sustaining the growth that
developed after 1845. The cash earned from those surpluses allowed them to increase
existing landholdings (alternatively, to move further west should more fertile lands appear
accessible); while qualitatively greater movement westward also occurred as tenant or waged
labor relations became untenable or intolerable. While the yeoman pattern of moving on
(should the land being farmed be unproductive) remained, western farmers were shedding
their self-sufficient trappings.
A tiny stratum of great property owning farmers set the tone, i.e., provided a social model to
which small property owners, tenants and agricultural waged laborers all aspired. No longer
holding a tiny forty-acre parcel of land, much more rather than far less integrated into the
market because dependent upon cash income for fertilizers, mechanical implements and
expansion of farm size, these farmers had become commodity producers, the value of their
surpluses determined by their saleability in markets captive only because of the advanced
technological base and productive soils on which they operated.371 Still self-consciously
wealth-producing cultivators and models of civil virtue, their virtues had become more and
more bourgeois; having become unalterably committed to the market as a transcendent
context of open opportunity, these farmers had become more concerned with accumulation
than with equality rooted in opposition to monopoly-based wealth and privilege; for them, their
increasing prosperity was visibly connected to national government subsidies of railroads,
harbor construction as well the national government practice of the cheap sale of western
lands based on the mass murder and expropriation of Indians, thereby demonstrating the
efficacy of federal aid to internal improvements and the ideological coherency of a "civilizing"
mission; in fact, their nationalism was becoming "federalized," that is, the "general"
government increasingly came to be viewed as the potential guarantor of open opportunity, a
free market and economic growth, and its presupposition, an expanding national land base.
Mediated by their Protestant (in some cases, radically Presbyterian) conscience, slavery in the
territories in particular, but also state rights and planter opposition to a homestead credit all
stood in the way of opportunity and market-based economic development. Western farmers
as a whole wanted "free soil," i.e., they wanted the "public" domain (i.e., expropriated Indian
lands "property" of the federal government) thrown open and made available at cheap prices
to "free labor," that is, to independent, property-holding, petty producers who were free to
pursue their chances for "opportunity" in an expanding market economy. Classical
republicanism, having become ideological because it could no longer actively mediate the
practices of capitalist farmers, could also no longer bind western farmers to southern
planters.372
371Of course, those tenants, experiencing objective, if hidden proletarianization, were drawn by their very aspirations

to becoming property owning capitalist farmers.

372Capitalist farmers including tenants, and rural waged laborers were more or less opposed to slavery, but on the
grounds not merely that it degraded "free," "white" labor not merely because it lowered the value of a product to a
level where "free labor" could not compete, but also fear that unmanly, humiliating dependence of a slavish nature
would "corrupt" "white" farmers and free institutions. There was little or no sympathy for the slave, no concern for her
degradation and humanity. The French word conscience is utilized here since, without context, its dual meaning of
"consciousness" and "conscience" cannot be distinguished: It was only for the most pious western capitalist farmers
of Protestant, New England heritage that an ideal interest in ridding the nation of slavery, based as it was on an

Part III
Political Representation of Social Classes in Western Anti-Slavery
Western Farmers and the Free Soil Party
With the southern planter-engineered defeat of the popular favorite, Martin Van Buren, and the
1844 Democratic nomination of James Polk on the basis of the former's opposition to and the
latter's support for the immediate annexation of Texas as a slave state, the social base of the
Democracy was sundered as a class issue became intertwined with a sectional one. 373
Thereafter, a growing but not yet politically decisive population of western farmers began the
movement away from the Democracy. The first visible moment in this new direction was their
support for the Van Buren-Adams Free Soil ticket in the 1848 national elections, a party
whose appearance anticipated the birth of the Republican party.
What was politically novel and distinct in the different strata engaged in western farming first
came to fruition in the Free Soil party. "Free soil" was the slogan - of the farmers and of those
politicians who based themselves on these farmers, and, in particular, the tenants and rural
waged laborers - that summarized the capitalist farmers' argument aimed at keeping slavery
out of the territories, land cheap and the nation based on "free labor." While Free Soilers
encompassed those who were morally opposed to slavery and not just politically opposed to
its extension, in the extreme, that is, as this argument was developed among the expansionist
bulk of supporters of the Free Soil party after 1848, Free Soilers opposed both slavery and
Indian presences solely from the twin perspective that the "peculiar" institution degraded white
labor and that either or both slavery and Indians would lock "free men" out of the territories.
Slavery especially, so the argument went, lowered the value of "free labor" in the market place
(below subsistence levels). With its unmanly and humiliating dependence, slavery was a living
refutation of the centrality won through labor - of economic independence to the good life,
and, accordingly it denied to labor its substance as virtue-forming activity. Just below the
surface was a fear, in slavery, of a return to European social conditions, that is, to the fixed
class stratification characteristic of societies from which so many unpropertied whites or their
ancestors had emigrated and which, by the fifties, had begun to loom on the horizon as an
American institution. In either case, blacks or Indians undermined the status of white
producers.
The pressure generated by these new farming classes with their distinctive concerns was
visible in the political shift in northern parties after 1850, first, as we have suggested, in the
formation of the Free Soil party founded in 1848. The party synthesized several political
currents. One of its moral-religious, anti-slavery components went back to the Liberty party
founded in 1840. The Liberty party had itself developed out of a split in the northern,
abolitionist American Anti-Slavery Society, formed in December 1833, between its
respectability-seeking political wing and its smaller wing of religiously unorthodox, often antiConstitutional - anti-party radicals around William Lloyd Garrison. The political wing,
committed to electoral activity as a means of building a consensus against slavery, desired to
demonstrate to "public opinion" in the North that on the very terms of that opinion its religious,
political and economic interests were threatened by southern slavery and planter domination
of the State at the national level. Led by James G. Birney, who ran as the party Presidential
candidate, the Liberty party did poorly in the 1840 and 1844 national elections, largely,
because the party engaged in agitation and protest indistinguishable from the anti-slavery
activity of its past and, because on the standard view, it was a single issue organization that
abhorrence of its humanly degrading character, was inseparable from their materially grounded opposition to slavery
extension into the territories.
373A "section" is a universal that is at once real and mystification: At bottom, it signifies a hegemonic social class
whose dominance creates the appearance of regional, territorial and productive (economic) unity.

failed to attract voters who themselves were not intensely committed to abolitionism. In 1847,
the Liberty party split over the question of whether to broaden its appeal. The party "purists"
were to again split in 1848 and enter the Free Soil party then forming.374
Another moral component of anti-slavery minority that entered the Free Soil party as its
foundations were anti-slavery Whigs in Massachusetts. That party's majority, "Cotton Whigs"
led by men like Daniel Webster, though opposed to slavery, put party loyalty and fear of
national disunity above opposition to slavery. Known as "Conscience Whigs," committed antislavery politicians in Massachusetts had in 1846 formed a faction within the party over
opposition to President Polk's conduct of affairs with Texas. Polk's continuation of Tyler's
policy, which was unmistakably pro-slavery (Calhoun, as Tyler's Secretary of State, had
publicly announced that annexation was necessary for the defense of slavery), resulted in a
war with Mexico for territorial expansion. While morally opposed to slavery, the motives of
northern Whigs, it should be noted, were intertwined with and inseparable from the fear that
Mexican territories, should they be annexed or ceded, would enter the Union as slave states
thereby decisively shifting the balance of national power south. This form of opposition was
codified in the Wilmot Proviso.
David Wilmot, a Democrat from northern Pennsylvania, proposed that slavery be excluded in
any and all territorial acquisitions from Mexico. The Proviso brought together anti-slavery
Whigs and anti-slavery, anti-black Free Soil politicians. First floated in Congress in August
1846, the proposal was acrimoniously debated as southern Democrats in particular attempted
to make its defeat a litmus test for party loyalty. Blocked in the Senate in 1847 and again in
1848, the Proviso polarized the institutional political leadership of the country along sectional
lines.375
The Wilmot Proviso had the advantage of clarifying and crystallizing rising free soil sentiment.
It received strong support from men like Salmon Chase, a leading figure in the Liberty party
from Ohio, and Joshua Giddings, a political abolitionist since the 1830s and a Whig who
Congressionally represented the Western Reserve, the abolitionist and free soil stronghold in
Ohio. These radical Ohio politicians formed the third moral component of anti-slavery that
created the Free Soil party and, at the time the party was organized, they were the only moral
anti-slavery element that could be counted on to carry a mass base with them into the party.376
At its origins, the Free Soil party was also constituted by a previously pro-slavery Democratic
party machine element, the New York state "Barnburners." The Barnburners, as professional
party men, were Van Buren loyalists whose power derived not merely from control of the party
machine but who also had a social base among independent farmers in several upstate,
northwestern New York counties. They had split with the Polk Administration-supporting
"Hunker" balance of the New York Democracy, based largely on white laborers in New York
City, in late 1847 over the question of slavery extension provoked by the Wilmot Proviso and
over Hunker control of the patronage. Bitter over the southern planter-state rights ascendancy
in the national Democratic party as well as over the Democratic nominations of Polk over Van
Buren in 1844 and a southern sycophantic in 1848 - Michigan's Lewis Cass, Barnburners, as
the largest component within the new party, were able to put their man, Martin Van Buren, up
as Free Soil's Presidential candidate. In typical northern Jacksonian fashion, they also
374On the Liberty party, Aileen Kraditor, "The Liberty and Free Soil Parties," 741-743, 745-746, 748-750.
375For the split within Massachusetts Whiggery, especially Kraditor, "Ibid," 752, also Foner, Ibid, 82-83, 104, 113,

188-189 and Glyndon Van Deusen, "The Whig Party," 354-356; on the Wilmot Proviso, Van Deusen, "Ibid," 355, 357,
and Michael Holt, "The Democratic Party, 1828-1860," 520-521.
376For Ohio radicals and their support, Foner, Ibid, 108, Kraditor, "Ibid," 752. The Western Reserve in northeastern
Ohio was a territory claimed by the state of Connecticut as a military reserve in the period of the Confederation. It was
ceded to the United States in 1802.

restricted the Free Soil party platform by excluding mention of the fugitive slave and threefifths clauses in the Constitution, criticisms of which were staples of the old Liberty party. Still
ex-Democrats and Barnburners particularly brought organizational skill to the Free Soil party,
while the New York party men provided it with the only proven mass social base outside
Ohio.377
The Free Soil party was dead before 1856. However, that it was (and it was) organizationally
ineffective after 1852 was not because it had had no impact; rather, it was because in the
North, the West and parts of the border states all parties laid claim to the banner of free soil.
The Free Soil party had been founded by men who were by and large abolitionist. By the midfifties, however, free soil had become the cry of all those opposed to slavery extension in the
territories, who, in other words, were anti-slavery and racist (i.e., opposed to the presence of
black labor in the North and in the territories).
In the West, Whigs and Democrats adopted anti-slavery planks in and after 1848, the latter
often for opportunistic motives. While free soil was not inconsistent with the Whig anti-slavery
position, this volte-face by "old line" Democrats (supporters of the pre-Free Soil Polk and postFree Soil Pierce presidencies, Administration men who during both President's terms opposed
the Wilmot Proviso) was suspicious: Clearly, though, both parties sought to stem their
mounting losses to the new political formation.
The Free Soil party began to undergo collapse, firstly, because it was largely formed by a
coming together of politicians, largely officer-holders, who were uninterested in the lengthy,
arduous task of party-building and who instead as a matter of personal practice preferred the
quick route to change through public representation, and who accordingly, were ready to
dissolve the distinctive Free Soil party identity in a "coalition"; secondly, because the sense of
a possible party national political re-alignment along anti-slavery lines was, however
mistakenly, in the air as early as late 1848; and thirdly, because by late 1849 a looming
national crisis over slavery, one (temporarily) resolved in the great Compromise of 1850,
found leading national politicians of both parties (Clay and Webster for the Whigs, Cass for
the Democrats) leaning on their state counterparts to compromise, to, in other words, weigh
their free soil commitments to non-extension against the safety of the Union. Thus, in 1849,
ex-Democratic Free Soilers in Vermont, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin all more or less
returned to the Democracy. Barnburners also returned to the New York Democracy in 1849 (in
order to stem a Whig challenge, in-state and nationally, mounted on the basis of the
successful Presidential candidacy of Zachary Taylor), and the Conscience faction reunited
with the old line Whiggery in Massachusetts in the same year. Eventually, though, the antislavery New York Democracy with the sole exception of the oldest Barnburners such as John
Dix and Van Buren himself would enter the Republican party. In fact, after the Democracy
began to irreparably sunder over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Democratic free soil
politicians would enter the newly forming Republican party in the mid-1850s as perhaps its
largest politically organized component.378
377For the Barnburners, Holt, "Ibid," 522-523, Kraditor, "Ibid," 753-754, 755-756, and Foner, Ibid, 60-61, 152-

153.Three other small groups who entered the Free Soil party can also be identified, New York-based "Land
Reformers" and Workingmen's party, as well as an apparently sizeable group who sought reform of excessively high
postal rates, see George Julian, Political Recollections, 56-57.It should also be noted that the northeastern counties
of Illinois and, contiguous with them, the southeast ones of Wisconsin brought a mass "Free Democratic" element,
though on qualitatively smaller population bases, to the Free Soil party. See Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties,
154 (n. 2), 156, 328 (map).
378Smith, Ibid, 179-187 (Ohio), 187-193 (Indiana), 195-197 (Illinois) traces out in some detail this 1849 movement
from Free Soil back into the long established parties, by and large the Democracy. In Ohio, the role of Solomon
Chase, author of the Liberty and Free Soil platforms and later Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, was particularly
important; in Michigan, the state Democratic party never adopted free soil principles, and the return of a minority of
ex-Democratic Free Soilers to the party was under compulsion achieved through wielding the patronage, pressure in

Jacksonian Democrats in the Era of Free Soil

After 1852, Jacksonian Democrats in the North outside New York almost to a man claimed to
be Free Soilers. Urban-based northern Jacksonians were to found in New York City and
Philadelphia, but at mid-century the real strength of northern Jacksonianism stay lay among
those Yankee farmers who had migrated westward and who, as Free Soilers, would
eventually go over to the Republican party. Even with party's poor farming components North
(among "Butternut" belt farmers in the southern half of the southern tier of states making up
the old Northwest and in the border states) and South (among the white, anti-black and antiplanter yeomanry of the upland and mountainous country), Jacksonians who had not left the
Democratic party between 1844 and 1850 were subject to free soil pressures. These
pressures were exerted by a still very small stratum of prosperous and increasingly, politically
weighty capitalist farmers, the growing mass of tenants that tailed them, and the small towns
dependent upon capitalist farming, a type of farming that made the Yankee corridor distinct
and bestowed on it its social and economic unity.
If Jacksonian Democrats had represented the historically dominant wing of the old
Democracy, the ascendancy of the southern, planter wing of the party over the entire
Democracy, signified by the successful nomination of James Polk as Democratic party
Presidential candidate in 1844, had left them increasingly dissatisfied with the party. The years
following the national election in 1852 until the secession crisis of the winter 1860-1861
formed a cumulative series of crises which estranged northern Jacksonians from their
historical party and in the end forced even some of the most hardcore party loyalists to
abandon the Democracy.
In 1850, a compromise over the Wilmot Proviso appeared to have stopped the internal
hemorrhaging in the Democratic party, as well as to greatly diminish popular support for antislavery agitation. Crafted by Henry Clay, the great Kentucky Whig Senator, the Compromise
of 1850 consisted of a series of measures that included a stoppage to the slave trade in the
District of Columbia and the admission of California as a free state - a gracious southern
concession considering that the northern gold miners who rapidly populated the territory
demanded a free (labor) state. Northerners, particularly free soil northern Democrats, on the
other hand, not only relented in their efforts to enact the Wilmot Proviso - accepting as an
alternative a decision on slavery by territorial legislatures in the Utah and New Mexico, but
also conceded the greater enforcement and draconian measures that made up the central
provisions of the newly legislated Fugitive Slave Law.379
The nomination of state rights supporting and southern-leaning, but pro-Compromise Franklin
Pierce of New Hampshire (on the forty-ninth ballot) at the 1852 Democratic convention unified
the splintering tendencies in the party. Pierce was elected to the Presidency, largely because
of his stand on the Compromise of 1850, but also because his main opponent (Whig nominee
Winfield Scott) was detested even by Whiggish slaveholders, and because the support of
German and Irish immigrants assiduously courted by big city party machines (such as that of
the reunified New York Democracy in the City) weighed heavily in the balance in populous
northern states. Pierce, though, had trouble with party factions from the beginning: Neither
southern states' righters nor northern Free Soilers were satisfied with patronage
the Democratic press and maneuverings by "Boss" Lewis Cass and his bureaucratic operatives. Most Free Soilers
here, however, were absorbed back into the Whig party through earlier county-based coalitions aimed at destroying
Cass' machine-party preeminence. (Ibid, 198-207). Our account of the broader collapse of the Free Soil party
generally has been based on and closely followed Smith, see Ibid, 220-222.
379On the Compromise of 1850, Holt, "The Democratic Party," 524, 526 and, for a more detailed discussion,
Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 497-510; for popular attitudes opposing anti-slavery agitation after the Compromise
of 1850, Smith, Ibid, 226-227.

appointments, and Barnburners in particular were upset by Pierce's Cabinet and diplomatic
appointments. These internal divisions worsened into a full-blown sectional dispute that
recreated the issues and divisions of 1847-1848 over the Wilmot Proviso only this time on a
much greater scale.380
In late 1853, the status of Nebraska - a part of the Louisiana Purchase from which slavery had
been banned after 1820 - again came before Stephen Douglas' Senate Committee on the
Territories in the form of a bill for organization of Nebraska as a territory. Douglas, a powerful,
free soil Democrat representing Illinois, had attempted to get the Nebraska territory organized
for ten years and failed as southerners in Congress, preferring an Indian territory to the
construction of a railroad and especially to the presence of non-slaveholding white farmers
who would guarantee a free state, had blocked his efforts. A future Presidential hopeful
anxious to insure southern planter support, Douglas had succumbed to southern Democratic
pressure in a manner which might have convolutedly realized his free soil principles but
definitely turned the bill into a loyalty test for northern party members. The bill, reported out of
committee with its leading cheerleader in a President also in need of southern support to
confirm Senate appointments and to pursue an expansionist foreign policy, called for the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Such a repeal meant, first, ending the ban on
slavery above the 36 30' line once settlers entered the territory; and, second, it meant the
institution of "popular sovereignty" in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Through use of
the patronage and threat of its withdrawal, and by seating northern party conventions with
Administration functionaries and party hacks, Pierce brought reluctant Democrats into line.
Leading national and local party officeholders, core Administration supporters, did likewise
pressuring local Democrats to accept the act. In his home state of Illinois, Douglas proceeded
along similar lines, threatening and cajoling party members in an important state to get the
support needed to pass the bill in the Senate (and, through his supporters, in the House).381
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, signed into law by Pierce May 30, 1854, was hailed by Douglas
and his supporters as a North-South compromise over the issue of slavery in the territories. In
fact, it was nothing of the sort: For planters, it was qualitative advance over the terms of past
compromises, viz., a massive part (north of 36 30') of the Louisiana Purchase that had been
off-limits to slavery since 1820 was conceded to slaveholders and the only "compromise" was
over the condition of slaveholder entry into the territory ("popular sovereignty" in lieu of federal
guarantee of protection in the territories). Since the free states of the North lost the exclusion
of slavery from this territory and gained nothing, there was no compromise. As Rawley relates,
it was precisely because "the measure was not a compromise that the North erupted against
it." It was the Congressional debate over the proposed act that made it the focus of northern
attention. In culturally mediated, available categories, this debate raised to the level of
consciousness in the North the expansionary dynamic of the planter economy and the
slaveholders' compulsion to seize and hold control over the national political system.382
380On Pierce's nomination, Holt, "Ibid," 525; for patronage problems of the Pierce Administration, "Ibid," 525-526 and

Foner, Ibid, 55.

381In February-March 1820, three bills originally authored by Illinois Senator Jesse Thomas passed the Congress
(and were later signed by President James Monroe into law). The bills became the core of a sectional controversy
spanning two years which has come down to us as the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Those bills (i) admitted Maine
to the Union as a free state, (ii) admitted Missouri as a slave state, and (iii) prohibited slavery in the Louisiana
Purchase Territory above a line 36 30', a line co-extensive with the southern boundary of Missouri. (That slavery
actually existed along the Missouri River in this state was studiously ignored for 35 years. See James Rawley, Race
and Politics, 12).
For the internal party and Congressional struggles over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Holt, "Ibid," 526-527, Foner, Ibid,
156-159, Rawley, Ibid, 27-28, 32-35, and especially, Freehling, Ibid, 550-565.

The socially significant outcome of the act was not merely to resurrect anti-slavery sentiment
suppressed since the Compromise of 1850, but to unify free soil and abolitionist opinion in the
North through formation of a broadly-based inter-class alliance against not only slavery
extension but also the "Slavepower" itself. The free soil opposition of the different western
strata engaged in capitalist farming was revived and multiplied as not only middle strata
circles that supported reformers but even the merchant community explicitly and actively
opposed further extension. Newspaper, politicians' and popular anger over Kansas, in fact,
made straightforward abolitionist opinion itself respectable in the North. The outrage
expressed in public meetings, in newspapers and merely on the street compelled previously
wavering or uncertain northern Jacksonian Democrats to abandon the party, de facto dividing
the Democracy into a northern and southern party.383
Against the backdrop of all these events stood still further divisive internal party issues that
alienated the free soil farmers who Jacksonians relied on for support: Pierce had failed to
push for land grants in Congress because southern Democrats and southern Whigs alike had
opposed the grants to assist rail construction in the states of the old West and Iowa. In 1854,
he vetoed two bills, a harbor and river improvements bill and perhaps, most importantly, a
homestead bill designed to provide impetus to settlement in these states. With the KansasNebraska Act center stage, these Democratic vetoes were supported, beyond hardcore party
regulars, only by those emotionally and doctrinally committed to the northern Democracy.384
Radicals in the Era of Free Soil
The perspective of a committed opposition to slavery as slavery, as we have suggested, only
came from the radicals. Radicals were to found among all the party formations of the 1840s
and 1850s, especially among the third party organizations (Liberty, Free Soil and Free
Democratic parties) but in numbers within the northern Democratic party also. Tentatively,
"radicals" may be defined as organized party men motivated by a moral abhorrence of slavery
and uncompromisingly committed to politically undoing the work of slavery, that is, to the nonextension of slavery and its eventual demise before the Civil War, and to emancipation and
black civil and political rights during the war and Reconstruction. They should be clearly
distinguished from the abolitionists whose religious faith underpinned and provided arguments
for their opposition to slavery, who appear to have been largely politically amorphous
(although the Liberty party was a peculiarly organized faction of political abolitionists who
understood the shortcoming of being unorganized), and on the whole were much more willing
with qualitatively greater frequency to openly oppose legally constituted authority in efforts to
secure, e.g., runaway, slaves' liberty.385
382"Popular sovereignty" was the term commonly used to describe the right of a territorial legislature to decide the

question of whether the territory would become a free or slave state. The term does not refer to a popular referendum.
For Rawley's discussion of the non-compromise character of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Ibid, 43-44 (citation appearing
on 44); for Congressional debate on the act, Ibid, 46-55.
383For a glimpse at the broader social class context of and background to the Kansas-Nebraska. Freehling, Ibid, 536549.
384On Democratic party failures to provide the type of legislature needed to hold its social base (though not
formulated in class terms), Holt, "Ibid," 527, Foner, Ibid, 155, and Rawley, Ibid, 73-74.
385For our understanding of radicals, see "Jacobins in Capitalist Garb?" in chapter 10, below.
In distinguishing radicals from abolitionists, it should be noted that the one political argument which abolitionists often
made entailed an anti-Constitutional perspective. William Lloyd Garrison was fond of decrying the Constitution as that
"covenant with death" (Phillip Paludan, A Covenant With Death, 1, 2); the radicals, on the other hand, as a rule (at
least up to 1865) rigorously adhered to the Constitution. Samuel Chase, in fact, developed at great length the theory
that the "founders" thought slavery merely a local institution, intended to end slavery early on, and that the Fifth
Amendment was crafted as a prohibition of slavery in any area subject to the jurisdiction of the national government.
Foner, Ibid, 75-77, 83-84.

Radicals in a sense benefited from the Compromise of 1850. By legislatively burying the
Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise forced a social clarification: Only those individuals and
groups unswervingly opposed to slavery, to the Fugitive Slave Law and the concomitant
prostitution of free men to southern appetites, and not just to its extension into the territories,
could in principle stand opposed to the Compromise. After 1850, local, statewide and
nationally Whig organizations by and large, and Democratic ones without exception, retreated
behind their 1848-1849 Free Soil party positions and declared anti-slavery agitation dead.
Radicals regrouped at the state levels in the "Free Democratic" parties along lines similar to
the older political anti-slavery of the Liberty party mediated and enriched by the 1848-1849
Free Soil party experience.
The 1852 Presidential election of the Democrat Franklin Pierce, perhaps the most decisive
victory by any party hitherto in the nineteenth century, unambiguously announced the
imminent collapse of Whiggery as a national party. At the same time, the old line Democracy
rode the wave of popular pro-Compromise sentiment to power. The election left both Free
Democrats and those northern Whigs with a moral center seriously entertaining the idea of a
new party based squarely on political anti-slavery principles, a party that could absorb both
the northern Whig party, which even in its moment of rapid decline remained a mass party,
and the much smaller Free Democracy. By summer 1853, fusion movements of Whigs and
Free Democrats - occurring at the local level and over the heads of more cautious leaders combined a short-lived middle strata reformer-based enthusiasm for temperance with antislavery politics and swept the old West, particularly Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. At the
local levels, many of these organizations already took on the name "Republican." After
January 1854, that is, after the introduction into the Congress of that series of measures
known the Kansas-Nebraska Act, radical weight in the newly forming Republican party
increased.386
This act generated enormous abolitionist-led opposition on the ground: In New England,
Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to organize over 3,050 clergymen who signed a petition
presented to Congress against it. The presence of clergymen, especially preachers, was
significant because, with years of anti-slavery agitation that had already sectionally split the
large Protestant denominational churches (Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists),
revivalists, in northern cities taken together with the new mass circulation, religious press,
were able to draw out massive public indignation over the act. The secular mass circulation
newspapers, led by the great three consisting in Bryant's New York Evening Post, Bowles'
Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican and particularly Greeley's New York Tribune, led the
onslaught. These mass circulation weeklies publicized and dramatized the small number of
instances of fierce resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, the most famous being the case of
Anthony Burns, a runaway slave whom it took twenty-two companies of Massachusetts militia
(and "a phalanx of policemen, a United States infantry company and a detachment of
artillery") to return to a slaveholder in Virginia as fifty thousand Bostonians opposed to the
return milled around and looked on.387
Clearly, the organization of the basically conservative merchant community against the repeal
of the non-extension of slavery in territories embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act should
386On the political history of anti-slavery in the old Northwest from 1850-1853, Smith, Ibid, 226-284, esp. 246-247

(conventional political attitude toward the death of anti-slavery agitation), 257-259 (shift of center of anti-slavery
politics), 261ff (sense of expanded possibilities for Free Democracy after 1852 election), 271-273 (temperance), 270273, 276, 281-295 (fusion).
387For the national impact of Kansas-Nebraska Act generally, Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade, 84-85, 8687; for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the role of preachers and that of the religious as well as secular presses, Rawley, Ibid,
59-61; for the emergence of the mass circulation newspapers in the United States (between 1830 and 1850), Saxton,
Ibid, 95-108; on Anthony Burns, Rawley, Ibid, 62-63, and Freehling, Ibid, 537 (citation).

have indicated to Democratic politicians just how serious the developing multi-class opposition
to the this act was. (And, for us, that organization also clearly signified the formation of a
production-grounded, North-West axis was an accomplished fact.) In New York City, the
largest, most powerful concentration of merchants in America held protest meetings, drew up
anti-Nebraska resolutions, established correspondences with merchants in other cities and
financially backed free soil migrants bound for Kansas. Radicals, identified by an increasingly
sympathetic "public" with political representation of the mounting abolitionist-organized
opposition in the streets to the act, instantly became more politically weighty and influential.
Utilizing this socially-grounded political muscle, between 1854 and 1856 radicals were central
to the fight to establish the Republican party at the state level.388
The dissension and fragmentation in response to passage of this same act, and to the events
on the ground in Kansas which followed passage, finally destroyed the Democratic party as a
national organization, a process that had began in 1844 with the nomination of Polk. Popular
opprobrium had stiffened the spines of those party men who in the past had weighed their
commitment to non-extension against southern Democratic threats of disunion and found it
wanting. No longer cowered by the southern planter controlled national party organization,
party regulars in the North and West participated in the organization of both state level "antiNebraska fusion movements" and joint tickets with radicals in the by-year elections of 1854
(and the national election of 1856). In the course of 1854, northern Democrats split roughly in
half: The Democrats lost Connecticut and Rhode Island, anti-Nebraska fusion slates defeated
the old line Democracy in Vermont and Maine, in Pennsylvania, and in Ohio and Indiana. In
the historically Democratic stronghold of New York, anti-Nebraska fusionists put an ex-Whig in
the governor's office, and, extraordinarily, sweep twenty-nine of a total of the state's thirty-one
Congressional seats. (In the House, Democrats lost their majority with only seven of the fortyplus pro-Nebraska voters returned to office.) Fusion movements and joint tickets were quickly
taking shape as the basis of state Republican party organizations in the North.389
Prehistory and Class Base of Whiggery. Its Movement into the Early Republican Party
After 1856, the struggle for the heart and soul of the newly forming Republican party was
waged between so-called "moderates" and "conservatives," on the one side, and radicals
(including ex-Democrats) on the other. The moderate and conservative elements made up the

388For the merchant community, Rawley, Ibid, 61-62; and for new found abolitionist respectability, Ibid, xiii.
389It would only be fair to northern House Democrats to indicate that exactly half were in advance of the popular

upheaval in that they voted against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Forty-three free state Democrats voted for and the
same number voted against the bill. See Foner, Ibid, 158. (According to Rawley, forty-two House Democrats voted
against the bill. Ibid, 78.) For the centrality of radicals to the state struggles for a Republican party, Foner, Ibid, 128129; for the extend of the Democratic revolt against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Ibid, 157-162, and Rawley, Ibid, 75, 77
(from whom the list of specific states lost to the Democrats in 1854 is taken), and Holt, "The Democratic Party," 527530.
From the slaveholding side, events on the ground were organized largely by U.S. Senator David Rice Atchison (DMO) who agitated for, brought together and led slaveholders and their supporters, known pejoratively by
contemporaries as border ruffians, from Missouri into Kansas to insure by means of vigilante-styled intimidation and
terror a "proper" outcome at polling places in the 1855 election of a territorial legislature (see Rawley, Ibid, chapter 5).
It is far too facile to read Atchison's pronouncements in stump speeches, letters, on the Senate floor, etc., as a typical
element in a fabric of misunderstandings of intent on both sides of the issue of slavery in the territories (the now long
reigning interpretative orthodoxy, as the publication dates of two authors who hold this view, Rawley (1969) to
Freehling (1990), suggests). What is typical about Atchison can be found among almost all southern politicians and
the great planters, namely, his assimilation and internalization - in the form of a well-developed understanding - of the
systems imperatives of southern society, and, accordingly, of what was a stake in any struggle where "free men" and
slaveholders directly confronted one another.

final, ex-Whig component that entered the newly formed national Republican party between
1856 and the outbreak of war.390
Historically, Whiggery along with the old line Democracy belonged to the second American
party system (1828-1854), the full emergence we date from the Presidential ascendancy of
Andrew Jackson, i.e., from the visible constitution of the Democracy as the first mass political
party in American history. The Whig party emerged and was consolidated between 1832 and
1834. It was originally constituted out of opposition to Jackson and his Presidency, an
opposition which in part had its ground in fears of a military man who due to his enormous
popularity would be unchecked and difficult to restrain, one who, demagogue, populist and
adventurer, presented the ever present danger of overturning Constitutionally-created and
sanctioned (especially legislative) authority. In fact, Whiggery as a party formation was
inseparable from this opposition, particularly to the Hero's banking policy. Oppositionists
consisted in an amalgam of groups, including nationalists who both supported and opposed
Henry Clay (perhaps the leading nationalist in the country), a largely eastern anti-Mason
tendency that up to 1831 had been developed by Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed in New
York state, supporters and opponents of the Second Bank of the United States who shared a
common dislike of Jackson's Bank policy, and the eastern, urban and liberal, reformistoriented intelligentsia. This opposition predated the organized Whig party, that is, it was not
organized from above.
In class terms these groups had real coherency: Broadly speaking, they had their social bases
in merchants, middling traders and prosperous farmers in the West (viz., west of the
Alleghenies), men who believed that the Democrats hindered trade and economic
development because of their opposition to internal improvements (that is, State-supported
infrastructure for market expansion). The Whig party was, then, originally formed as a mass
party of the "business" classes, especially their smaller layers. Characteristically, it exhibited,
especially in its conservative wing and unlike the Democracy, a commitment to anti-immigrant
nativism, evangelical Protestantism and moral reform (of the laboring classes out of fear of
this "licentiousness," "dissolution," "repudiation of external authority," etc.) periodically on
display in temperance campaigns.391 Like the Democracy, Whiggery characteristically spoke
the language or republicanism. Whigs, in contradistinction to Jacksonians (who extolled the
virtues of the rural producer, whose "leveling," anti-eastern - anti-commercial criticism of
banking and monopoly had a distinctively democratic appeal, and who led opponents to fear
they were anti-capitalist and opposed to economic development), as their very name
indicates, consciously adopted the stand of the late 17th-early 18th century English "Country"
opposition to monarchical power. They accused Jackson, and later his Democratic
successors, of "executive tyranny" and "corruption" (in his creation and then abuse of the
patronage).
After 1835, banking and large commercially-based ruling class social groups of the Northeast
came to fully identify with Whiggery. Thereafter, Whiggery constituted itself as the political
expression of hegemonic northern merchant-commercial, financial, (later) northern industrial
interests, and peculiarly (and contradictorily) a small layer of southern planter interests. It was
self-consciously the heir to the Federalist traditions of Hamilton - that is, to the State
centralizing tendencies of the political representatives of large property and, anticipatorily and
390For conservatives and moderates inside northern Whiggery, Foner, Ibid, 187, 205-206; 189; 139.
391John Ashworth, 'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 193-205.

The fifties saw the greatest outburst of nativism in American history up to this time, with short-lived, essentially single
issue, nativist political parties (e.g., Americans and Know-Nothings) actually coming into being. Whig nativism was
rooted in the Henry Clay's close loss of the 1844 Presidential election to James Polk. Whigs felt the Democracy's
slight margin had been the result of the Irish immigrant vote.

actually, large capitalist interests within America as a "commercial society." By the mid-1840s,
a fully formed Whig party had developed: Outside the border states and the South (i.e.,
forgoing that anomaly, oxymoronically expressed, of nationalist, non-state rightist planters,
those who to boot understood the priority of class over race), it found its leading elements
largely among the old established wealthy social classes of the East, particularly the great
textile magnates in Massachusetts, the great merchants and great bankers in New York City,
Boston and Philadelphia. Whiggery found its broader social support among the commercial
classes, businessmen generally, but specifically great, and also middling and small merchants
and traders. Because their productive activity gave rise to an immediate intuition of the
market-based relations among North, South and West, and among nations, these strata and
groups grasped the possibilities for and developed an expansive vision of national economic
growth. Outside those limited areas (especially southern Michigan, the Western Reserve of
Ohio and counties surrounding and making up Cincinnati) where the wealthiest of evangelical
Protestant, well-to-do New England farmers had resettled, Whiggery generally did not appeal
to rural farming communities. In the Northwest, Whiggery, largely a factious, politically abstract
and sectarian phenomenon, committed to and identifiable in terms of Henry Clay's "American
system," found its only other social base of support in the towns supported by prosperous
farmers, in particular among tiny professional groups (lawyers, doctors), merchants and
bankers.392
Whigs, as nationalists, were committed to an expanded government role that included a
program of Congressionally-controlled (as opposed to Executively-controlled) "internal
improvements" such as the construction of canal systems and (later) railroads, and the
clearing of harbors and rivers, to a national bank, and to a protective tariff for fledgling U.S.
industries.393 In the old West, Whigs were also committed to cheap homesteads for settlers.
After 1840, these commitments led northern, especially moderate, Whigs more and more into
opposition to slavery, that is, to slavery-driven planter expansionism that stood in the way of
continental development and consolidation of a national market.
At the risk of great simplification, we can follow Foner in distinguishing two type of (northern)
Whigs active at the outset of the 1850s. Conservative Whigs were concentrated, but hardly
found exclusively, among the leading elements in the great eastern metropolises. The further
west one went, the more likely a Whig was a moderate. The difference between the two can
be clearly seen when contrasted with radicals on the issue of slavery. Conservative Whigs
regarded slavery as a issue of "political economy" and not a moral issue, and as such slavery
was an issue that conservative Whigs, unlike the radicals - whom they assimilated to the
abolitionists (both of whom they intensely disliked), to be discussed in a detached, reflective
manner or, better yet, not at all. In this sense, they, like Van Buren Democrats and
characteristic of the entire second American party system, preferred to suppress discussion of
slavery in order to avoid sectional conflict with their southern counterparts or, in their terms, in
the interests of the preservation of the Union. Moderate Whigs, like Lincoln (whose political
career was made in the western state of Illinois), also disliked the slavery controversy, though,
in contrast to their conservative brethren, they as once regarded it as evil and recognized that
the question of slavery had to be confronted.394
392This account of the social basis of Whiggery has been elaborated from the passages in Van Deusen, "Ibid," 347,

348, 350, and his two biographies, William Henry Seward, 21-25 and Thurlow Weed, 42, 68-69, also Smith, The
Liberty and Free Soil Parties, 16, 128, and Trefousse, Ibid, 41. A very small third group of political abolitionist Whigs,
men such as Ben Wade, and Joshua Giddings and George Julian (who joined the Free Soil party in 1848), had been
assimilated to the radicals. They are discussed under the heading, "Jacobins in Capitalist Garb?," in chapter 10,
below.
393Ashworth, Ibid, 75, 77-78, 78-79, 80-82.

In 1848, the Whig party nominated Illinois residing Zachary Taylor, a Mexican war hero and
large slaveholder who had refused to support the Wilmot Proviso. While Whig party men
dared not offend the organization's southern component, and wanted the Presidency and the
patronage, morally scrupulous (i.e., anti-slavery) Whigs were disgusted with the party
managers who, repeating the strategy of the 1840 Harrison campaign, adopted a "miserable
policy of expediency" in drafting a man who refused to make explicit his views but whose
leanings were clear. Anti-slavery Whigs, especially those in Ohio, bolted the party and either
voted Free Soil or did not vote at all in the national election. (In this respect, George Julian's
judgment, that by 1850 there were two parties both controlled by the political elements of the
southern planter class, is surely correct.)395
The watershed year for the Whig party was, however, the national election year, 1852. The
party experienced the disastrous defeat of its nativist candidate, Winfield Scott. The defeat
was in the same year preceded by and coupled with death of the two greatest Whig
spokesmen, Henry Clay of Kentucky (who sponsored the Compromise of 1850) and Daniel
Webster of Massachusetts, whose political careers spanned the entire period of the second
American party system and more. The party, having already lost it moral center, was
undergoing collapse. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 ushered in its final crisis:
Southern Whigs in Congress were united in supporting an act that their northern conservative
counterparts had pleaded with them to oppose in order to insure survival of Whiggery as a
national party.396
By the end of 1855, southern Whigs began to move into the Democracy, a tendency
dramatized by electoral events in North Carolina and Georgia. The conservative northern wing
of Whiggery fought a rearguard action from 1854 to 1856 in order to reconstitute itself as a
party. Having a history (going back to the close loss of Clay to Polk in 1844) of blaming their
defeats in national elections on immigrants who supported the Democracy, by 1854 they
controlled the nativist Know-Nothings which disappeared in defeat in the election of 1856;
between 1854 and 1856, they battled to prevent the development of anti-Nebraska fusion
movements; and, after 1856, they fought to dilute the radical's anti-slavery stand inside the
Republican party they were now becoming attracted to. Compelled by the force of events (i.e.,
the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and James Buchanan's
Democratic Administration's attempt to force slavery on Kansas in 1858), moderate Whigs,
holding the balance of power in the new party, were at the same time moving toward
radicals.397
By the time of the secession crisis in the winter of 1860-1861, while nearly all Republican
hesitated, conservatives were the only compromisers to be found inside the Republican party:
The moderates like Lincoln temporized, but ex-Democrats and Free Soilers were committed to
preservation of the Union even at the risk of arms, while radical Republicans at the same risk
sought the destruction of the institution of slavery.

394The conservative Whig attitude toward slavery is succinctly summarized in the views of Weed, Van Deusen, Ibid,

90-91.
395For Ohio Whigs in 1848, Smith, Ibid, 128, and Trefousse, Ibid, 57-58; for an excellent discussion of the 1848
election by an ex-Whig contemporary, Julian, Ibid, 52-56 (the citation and his assessment appear in Ibid, 52, 64,
respectively).
396For the collapse of the northern Whig party, Van Deusen, "Ibid," 358-362, and Foner, Ibid, 194; 194-195, 196, 201204; and 206, 209.
397For the southern Whig party, Rawley, Ibid, 108.

Class and Whiggery

Whiggery, and the Democracy, were class parties, or political parties built on class coalitions.
Whigs, unlike Jacksonians who represented (at least among their ideationally hard agrarian
elements) a leveling tendency, were committed to open or "equal" opportunity and mobility.
But in both cases, organizing a class party in which one group hegemonized all other
represented strata would have been a development that could not be openly pursued. Whigs
like Thurlow Weed, sought to avoid party polarization along class lines, since such would
isolate and then sound the death-knoll of Whiggery. Weed's party newspaper, the Albany
Evening Journal, was carefully crafted to make a populist appeal (as exemplified, for example,
in its editorials during the 1834 gubernatorial campaign). Weed, as editor, constantly
harangued on the "aristocratic" nature of the Regency. Both Weed and Seward opposed debt
imprisonment and favored public monies for education, and Seward as governor undertook to
publicly assist Irish Catholic immigrants during his governorship. Against the nativism of New
York City Whiggery, these were efforts of liberal party reformers to broader the social base of
the party.398 These efforts were not limited to the politically more alert element of American
Whiggery. Whig politicians of the forties, regularly engaged in demagogical efforts to deny the
reality of class in America,399 may have been the originators of the superficial, historically
transitory, empirically fetishized sociological concept of a "middle class," geared then and now
as it is to the obfuscation of profound social differences in basic living conditions and socioeconomic determined life trajectories, thereby masking the class-based relations of power
which shape social life and the ruling class social groups that wield that power. Clearly, the
concept of "free labor" and its projected role in a fluid economy society sprang from this
intellectual milieu.
The very success of Jackson's ideologically agrarian, yet effectively pro-entrepreneurial
politics (i.e., the attack on the Bank) conjoined to his fiercely Unionist stand against South
Carolina in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 and the identification of the older, eastern
commercial elites with Whiggery after 1835 (out of fear of the masses of artisan and farmers
that adopted Jackson and the Democracy as their own), allowed his vice-President and
immediate successor, Martin Van Buren, to ride a wave of popular approval to the Presidency.
If not for the Panic of 1837, the suspension of specie payment of that year and again in 1839,
the consequent economic contraction and depression that lasted well into 1843, and the mass
dissatisfaction with Van Buren and the Democracy that followed, Whiggery might have quickly
disappeared as a mass political formation. As it was, Whig candidates institutionally
established their party by crushing their Democratic opponents in the 1837 off-year elections
for state houses and in state legislations throughout the country.
Summary
Free Soil and the Republican Party
Founded on an inter-class alliance of, first and foremost, western farmers and the small towns
dependent upon them; of the middle strata (particularly small manufacturers who had yet to
distinctively separate themselves out of the "free labor" mlange) of the developing western
metropolises (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee); of northern
merchants East and West; and, of the nouveau riche financial, especially banking, community
398For the class-obfuscatory populist appeal of the Evening Journal, and Weed's efforts to stem class-based, party

polarization, and opposition to nativism, Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, 88, 49; for efforts to broaden party appeal, Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, 67-69. Also see Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 78-84 on the
Evening Journal, and John Ashworth, 'Agrarians' & 'Aristocrats', 189-190, on nativism.
399Van Deusen, Ibid., 65-69, 83-84.

of the great eastern cities, the Republican party was the first truly capitalist political party in
American history.
As a nascent political formation, the party was made up of professional politicians. These men
formed groups that based themselves on various class and strata enumerated in the previous
paragraph, groups that included anti-extension Jacksonian Democrats throughout the North
and in the border states, Free Soilers in western upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania
and the old West (including Iowa), and radicals of the middle strata-reformer milieu. All these
organized groups came together locally and at the state level in 1854 to form state Republican
parties. Joined by former northern Whigs, they founded a national party at the Pittsburgh
Convention in February 1856. At its origins, however, the Republican party was hardly in any
sense the "party of Lincoln."
It should be recalled well after slavery had been abolished by Presidential decree in the
rebellious territories, that is, as late as late summer 1863, Lincoln was still maintaining that
Civil War was fought to preserve the Union. The Republican party at its origins, as we have
shown, was, however, very much a party founded on and committed to opposition to slavery,
slavery extension, particularly to slavery in the territories, and opposition to control over the
national government by the "Slavepower," that is, by southern slaveholders as a class
politically concentrated in the Democratic party.

A Note on Western Farmer Nationalism

Above,400 we described the moments of ideal-cultural continuity and discontinuity between
yeoman of the Jacksonian era and the capitalist farmers of the Free Soil era. While
suggesting the latter's virtues were increasingly bourgeois, continuity centered on the selfconsciousness of producers, a concept which, in orienting the social practice of men and
women, blinded its bearers to the reality of class. (This myopia had important social
consequences. For the southern yeoman, for example, it made it impossible for him to
explicitly grasp how his oppression was a necessary feature of the social relations of the
antebellum South; for the western farmer, it rendered him unable to grasp that both his decline
as well as transport monopolization were necessary features of the dynamics of capitalist
development in the postbellum North.)
As capitalist producers and as disguised proletarians (tenants), we further suggested the
concerns of the western farmers, no longer those of the Jacksonian yeoman but more and
more centered on accumulation and on free soil (i.e., cheap, readily available land), led them
to view the national government as the guarantor of their prosperity, visibly connected as it
was to national government subsidies of railroads, harbor construction as well the national
government practice of the cheap sale of western lands based on the mass murder and
expropriation of Indians. Ideal, cultural and political self-interpretations notwithstanding, the
nationalism of the men of the West, however, also had its foundations in altogether different
traditions of the role of the State. For most westerners born or raised in states such as
Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota (and even some who called Illinois and Indiana home),
the very experience of the role of the State at the national level politically defined what
constituted the horizons of those encompassing unities shaping daily life. For these men and
their families, the traditions through which they came to understand political activity, or their
earliest experiences of political activity itself, were shaped by the State as it operated
nationally (particularly as Congressionally mandated and controlled territorial legislatures), not
by a state government.401
In the South (and to a far lesser extent in the "Butternut" belts of the North), the political
horizons of self-sufficient farmers rarely went beyond locale, that is, beyond the dispersed
farming communities of which these men and their families were part. When and where
electorally mobilized, their political commitments could be expressed simply in the slogan
"state rights": That is, their commitment was to the state government as guarantor of their
"place" as "free," because "white" men (i.e., to the compensatory psychological-emotional
benefits of whites only egalitarianism) in a slave society in which they were otherwise barred
from standing, wealth and power. Precisely because this wealth and power, and the standing
the derived from them, accrued to planters, their ideal and political commitments were
identical. For the latter the reality of the state government, e.g., of South Carolina or Virginia,
preceded that of the "general government."
Both for the reasons formulated in the body of this chapter, and for the one we provide here,
this was not the case for capitalist farmers (including tenants) in the North, and their political
representatives. "As white, male, propertied Virginians, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry [all the
way down to Robert E. Lee] belonged to an ongoing [planters'] republic that had been
practicing self-government for 150 years before the Constitution came along. Thus the Virginia
House of Burgess was already older for them than the Fourteenth Amendment is for us today
[in 1998]. In a deep sense, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was for them prior to the federal
Bill of Rights. Chronologically and perhaps emotionally, Virginia came first, before the Union.
400See "Town, Country and Politics in the mid-Nineteenth Century American West," above.
401Michigan achieved statehood in 1837, Iowa in 1846, Wisconsin in 1848, and Minnesota in 1858. Illinois had been

a state since 1818, and Indiana since 1816.

But not for Bingham, or for the entire generation of Americans growing up in places like Ohio.
Before Ohio was even a state, it was a federal territory, governed by the federal Constitution
and the Union's Northwest Ordinance. For Bingham, these documents came first, framing the
state and constraining its lawful powers."402 In this respect, westerners' nationalism and
southerners' commitment to "state rights" pointed to qualitatively different, and in this respect,
incommensurate, historical traditions, and even worlds of experience. Similarly, a radical
discontinuity could in the same respect be said to characterize the traditions, and in some
cases the very worlds of experience, of yeoman of the Jacksonian era and the capitalist
farmers of the Free Soil era.

402Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights, 158. John Bingham, Congressional representative from the State of Ohio, a

westerner, was a member of the 39th Congress, a central figure among the group of men (the joint Congressional
Committee of Fifteen) who formulated the Fourteenth Amendment.
If Amar is suggesting that Bingham' political experience, as an Ohioan, was shaped by his relation to a territorial
legislature governed by the Constitution, he is mistaken. (Ohio had been a state since 1803. Bingham, on the other
hand, was not born until 1815.) Nor will it do to argue that Bingham, and men like him, owed their nationalism to
Congressional experience. Such a claim would not allow us to distinguish state righters from nationalists among
members of Congress. Bingham was a Republican moderate. With him, and especially amongst party radicals,
nationalism had a threefold root: It was grounded, first, on, as we have argued above, the lifeworld experience of the
towns or cities and the farming communities with which the former were integrated, experience for which the national
government came to be seen as the guarantor of cheap lands, open opportunity, and the infrastructural
presuppositions of capital accumulation (convictions which in the previous two decades would have put Republican
farmers in the Whig camp); in, second, a acute sense of justice (what above we called conscience) for which only the
national government could secure the rights of a newly freepeople; and, as argued in this section here, on, third,
political traditions, or experience (or both), for which the national government shaped understanding of political
activity. For Bingham, see the Dictionary of American Biography, I, 277-278.

Civil War

3.
Theories of the Constitution in Relation to the Course of the Civil War and
the Question of Slavery, 1861-1864
At its origins, the Republican party was hardly in any sense the party of Lincoln: Well after
slavery had been abolished by Presidential decree in the rebellious territories, i.e., as late as
late summer 1863, Lincoln was still maintaining that civil war was fought to preserve the
Union. The Republican party at its origins, as we have shown, was, however, very much a
party founded on and committed to opposition to slavery, slavery extension, in particular to
slavery in the territories, and opposition to control over the national government by the
Slavepower, that is, by southern slaveholders as a class politically concentrated in the
Democratic party. Lincolns commitment to preservation of the Union (and other motives this
commitment tacitly assumed), in contradiction to, say, a free labor opposition to slavery, is
most accessible through a discussion of his Constitutional position.
Lincoln's Constitutional Perspective
As, first as the secession crisis and then the war unfolded, Unionists tendencies were
compelled to develop a Constitutional perspective on the "Rebellion," both to, broadly
speaking, justify their antecedent prescriptions for reintegrating the South and to provide a
direction for future policy and conduct of the war effort. In this context, only two really coherent
views of the relations of the rebellious "states" to the Constitution emerged and, subsequently,
were elaborated.
The first view, articulated by Lincoln, emerged nearly fully formed and was out of touch with
events from the beginning. Lincoln and conservatives (who, on occasion, we shall refer to as
the informal party of property) were most reluctantly responsive to ongoing events because
the significance of these events weighed heavily against their basic assumptions about the
character of the Union and the status of the states. Because the conservative bloc could not,
without endangering property, allow fundamental modification of its perspective, that
perspective was constantly tinkered with around the edges. (Yet, unacknowledged, these
changes went right to the heart of the conservative view.) Thus, it was seemingly as close to
theoretically rigid as political relevancy permitted. Though rigid, the perspective of the
conservative bloc in Congress, however, was not monolithic: Since it included the Republican
party right and particularly its center as well as border state Unionists and war Democrats, it
included elements who wrested with the dilemma of attempting to block social and institutional
reform (i.e., who refused to break up southern property in slaves) while carrying on a war
against the South.
The other perspective, formulated by the extreme radicals, was never fully formed and
evolved during the course of the war. Originally possessed of a single, driving anti-slavery
motive, the view of the radicals was elaborated largely in opposition to Lincoln, whose
perspective, often compromised by battlefield outcomes, presented opportunities for criticism
since it had to be regularly rationalized to meet military exigencies. Yet the practical opposition
of radicals to conservatives implied in this difference in perspectives was infrequently
thoroughgoing, precisely because all but the extreme radicals were limited by their
commitment to Lincoln as leader of the Republican party. For his part Lincoln, demonstrating
why he was leader of the politically organized, conservative forces, clearly formulated what we
shall characterize as the "soft" view of the "Rebellion." (The other, "hard" perspective was,
with variations, specific to and developed by radicals.)
The Constitution itself had absolutely nothing to say about secession. Why should it have, or
better, should the gentries and merchants, men of '87 - self-confident in the success of their

efforts to "form a more perfect union," have made provisions for their State's dissolution? Or,
in Lincoln's more general terms, why would any "government proper ... ever ... [have] a
provision in its organic law for its own termination"? Because the Constitution was silent on
secession, because dispositions and previously articulated views were so much in conflict,
because the contours of a postwar reconstruction (on the early unchallenged assumption of a
quick Union victory) hung in the balance, conservatives and (over the course of time) radicals
were forced to make a return to fundamentals to ground their policy perspectives and
prescriptions.403
Lincoln presented the soft perspective on rebellion in his first Inaugural Address (4 March
1861) and in his Message to the Special Session of Congress he called (4 July 1861) to seek
ex post facto authorization for his use of military (war) powers. His argument had a peculiar
structure, peculiar not just retrospectively but by the standards of his contemporaries.
Because the Constitution was silent on the possible reality of the secession, and because the
actual historical event of the latter rendered this document largely irrelevant and useless in the
crisis that had ensued, he asserted the primacy of concepts, of logic and legality over and
against a critical encounter with the unfolding course of historical events, and then employed
an historical account of origins to buttress this position. Taking the Constitution and its efficacy
as his point of departure, Lincoln took as given precisely what had been challenged by
secession, by the formation of the Confederacy as an independent, sovereign power, and by
the southern "nation's" belligerency. Baldly asserting an evidentially contradicted, legal
doctrine, namely, the Constitutionally-implied perpetuity of the Union, he inferred that
secession was not lawful insomuch as it rendered the Constitution "less perfect than before."
The event of secession thereby defied and offended the intended sense of its framers (to
"form a more perfect Union"). Since no state could legally leave the Union, the ordinances of
secession were void, and "all acts of violence" in support of secession were "insurrectionary"
or "revolutionary" (hence, presumably to be suppressed by the legally constituted authority).
"Descending" from these first "principles" - precisely what was in dispute, Lincoln
interpretatively recounted the historical origins of the Union.404
On this account, the Union initially took shape as the former colonies throw off their British
dependency. It was first formed in 1774 through the Acts of Association, "matured" and
confirmed by the Declaration of Independence in 1776, further developed and the commitment
to its perpetuity affirmed in the Articles of Confederation in 1778, and took its present form in
the establishment of the Constitution in 1787. According to Lincoln, this historical development
demonstrated that the Union preceded formation of the states inasmuch as it was created
before actual independence from British colonial dependency had been achieved. A review of
that development also affirmed, on Lincoln's view, that all new states, original colonies or
territories (with the exception of Texas), came into the Union as prior dependencies, and only
once in the Union did they achieve their status as states. In no case (including Texas) had any
state ever been a state prior to and outside the Union. Accordingly states, as legally conjoined
"free and independent" political communities, acquired their status as such only upon entry
into the Union.
If this historical account could stand careful scrutiny, logically, the status of the states would
have been co-extension with the Union, have depended upon being in the Union, and would
have been without meaning and existence apart from or outside the Union. Since Lincoln
concluded to a perspective for which individuals had rebelled and committed acts of treason,
403Citation is from Roy Basler (ed), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4:264 (first Inaugural Address).
404For Lincoln's use of war powers for non-Executive, viz., legislative and judicial, functions, James Randell,

Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 36-41; for the anti-historical, legal argument, Basler (ed), Collected Works,
4:264-265.

since he asserted that states would be in full possession of all rights, privileges and
immunities (including slavery) when they re-entered the Union, his argument contained an
unstated, but implied assertion of the indestructibility of states as states. On Lincolns
analysis, indestructibility of the states as states in the Union was, in principle, the other side of
that Unions perpetuity.405
Taken together, Lincolns notions of states and the Union constituted a dialectic of concepts,
inseparable moments of a purely ideal relation which allowed him to describe the outbreak of
war in terms of an obfuscatory-ideological, actuality-detached dispute between elements
within the federal system. Nonetheless, if this convoluted, reality-denying presentation and
argument was to have meaning, at some level there had to be a relation between ideality and
reality. That level was situated in the relation of citizens to states, or, more properly, in their
institutionally-reductive identity: Individuals had rebelled and reconstituted themselves as
citizens of the non-state, non-acknowledged Confederate States of America, loyal citizens
were the (Unionist) states. The prescription was obvious: Since loyal citizens were the state,
they too were the designated agency to (re)organize rebellious, untransformed and
antebellum-based, Union-recognized state governments. Lincoln, in historically and logically
"proving" the unreality and non-existence of states apart from the Union, unequivocally
demonstrated on loyalist assumptions the incoherency of the states' rights position to the
extent that the latter asserted the sovereign nature of statehood certified the legal foundations
and moral rectitude of secession. If the "revolutionary" if not "illegal" character of secession
retrospectively appears obvious to us (and leaves us unmoved), the effect of the argument on
Lincoln's contemporaries, especially border state Unionists and war Democrats (who after
decades of southern domination of the national-State machinery had imbibed states' rights
pap like milk at a mother's breast), must have caught their attention. Still, and we shall return
to this crucial point, the decision as to whether states were originally "in" or "out" of the Union,
was practical, and would be made real and effective only on the battlefield, and only by the
ruling class social group faction who because of battlefield success at the end of the day held
power.406
Motives Underlying Lincoln's Position
As an individual, and as party and conservative bloc leader, the motives that underlay
Lincolns argument (particularly its tortured form) was inseparably political, moral and
theoretical, and social. Politically, Lincoln wanted to insure the continued commitment of
planter opinion-sensitive, border state Unionists to the North. More broadly, he sought to
reassure all Unionists, to attest that their faith and aspirations were justified. Morally, he
sought to formulate a defense of the northern-Unionist position (constitutionally-legally
consistent with a "free government" which had failed to abolish slavery) that would find echoes
in the councils of Europe. Theoretically, he was intent upon providing a political-constitutional
framework for pursuit of conservative policy.
405For the historical account of Union origins and the account of the states' status, Ibid, 256 (Address), 433-435

(Message). Herman Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 8-10, is particularly good in a straightforward sense on Lincolns
legal argument.
406While the refusal to recognize the Confederacy was diplomatically correct posture, Lincoln did not, it appears,
consistently grasp that non-recognition entailed constructing an alternative, delegitimizing linguistic description of the
Confederacy. At the outset of his 4 July 1861 account of the historical origins of the Union, his Message to the Special
Session of Congress, he distinguished the legally sanctioning term "secession" from the preferred, legally discrediting
term "rebellion"; but, later at several junctures in the same draft text (as revealed by the editors' critical apparatus to
this edition) written slips appear. These slips would have upon articulation and publication re-legitimized the
Confederacy: They were corrected by Seward (in the proofs he read) and adopted by Lincoln. See the "Message" in
Collected Works, 4:421-441, notes 9, 12, 18, (39,) 40.

The attention to Europe, viz., to the governing councils of Britain and France, should not be
underrated. Lincoln's great fear, and it alone was visible in his Message, was that foreign
powers would recognize the Confederacy. Such an event would bring his entire obfuscatorily
legal edifice tumbling down, would crushingly subordinate it to the unfolding movement of
history, since recognition abroad... in fact... would be our national destruction
consummated.407
Socially, he desired to allay the great fear of the bloc of class forces he represented, that is,
he signaled that private property in the means of production including chattel slavery would
not be attacked, and he wished the core of the forces representationally concentrated in the
Republican party to understand his complete commitment to the Whig aspects of the party
program.
This bloc of class forces, simultaneously organized against planter-secessionists and radicals
and designated by the term "conservative," consisted most importantly in northern commercial
and financial capitalists as well as border state planters. During the secession crisis, these
social groups had put a great deal of pressure on Lincoln's government to make concessions
to the South in order to avert open conflict (i.e., crudely but accurately, to avoid the disruption
of the routine and regularity of daily productive activity and commercial transactions). Lincoln's
affirmed their concerns by indicating he sought a quick restoration of the status quo
antebellum. That meant southern and, particularly, border state slavery would remain intact,
and that relatively uninterrupted economic development would resume immediately upon the
cession of hostilities.408
This guarantee was of real import to Lincoln in marshaling his forces for the struggle ahead,
since there was a conciliatory line of old line Whig thought, embodied by and identified with
and articulated by Seward, that held now that (with Republican party ascendancy) the
"Slavepower" had been dislodged from the national political system, the path was cleared for
the industrialization project of the advanced forces concentrated in the Republican party, that,
accordingly, war was hardly necessary. A variation on this position also had appeal among a
tiny stratum of the most conservative, prosperous western farmers and those politically
Jacksonian urban workers who thought all means short of war should be exhausted to
achieve constitutionally mandated non-extension so that, once achieved, "we" could get on
with settling vast "unpopulated" western lands.
Morally-theoretically, Lincoln, first, sought to locate an ideal-conceptual point from which
defense of property against a potential attack by over zealous radicals in his own party could
be achieved; and second, his Whiggish-Unionist conscience insisted on the elaborate,
torturous legal argument - Union perpetuity, states' indestructibility and the illegality of
secession - in order to deny that "free government" had failed. The rhetorical excesses that
followed from the latter motive neatly dovetailed with his effort to reassure loyal Unionists,
407Collected Works, 4:424 (citation).
408For the pressure of the business classes on the new Lincoln Administration for compromise, William Hesseltine,

Lincoln and the War Governors, 97-98, (esp.) 106, 205; for a quick restoration of the status quo antebellum, Collected
Works, 4:266 (Address), 439-440 (Message).
In the Address (Ibid, 266), Lincoln exhibited a real sensitivity to his wayward rebel brethren stating that, "where
hostility to the United States, in any interior locality, shall be so great and so universal ... there will be no attempt to
force obnoxious strangers among the people [to obtain the] objects [of] ... hold[ing], occupy[ing], and ... possess[ing]
the [national authority's] property." Contrast this to his Message's ideological-rhetorical denouncement in which he
proclaimed "this is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world,
that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men - to lift artificial
weights from all shoulders - to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all - to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair
chance, in the race of life" (Emphasis added, Ibid, 438). "People," of course, was an euphemism for the bloc of
popular classes upon the Republican party rested, while "whites' only" racism is manifest in the denial of humanity to
blacks and Indians who are neither "men" nor part of the human "all."

North and South. These excesses were excesses precisely because they demonstrated the
very real limits of an ideologized effort to put conservative policy on broadly-based foundation,
that is, they demonstrated this policy's essentially "whites' only" egalitarian moral meanness.
Territorialization (I)
The first radical challenge to conservative position came in the Special Session of Congress
called by Lincoln (11 July 1861) to justify and confirm his use of military (war) powers as
President. In the Senate, Edward Baker (R-OR) first formulated the concept of territorialization
which, in its implications, went right to the heart of conservative assertion of the necessity of a
restoration of the institutional antebellum status quo. Baker argued for a bold and decisive
conduct of the war, since he expected a longer, much more difficult struggle than prevailing
opinion in the Congress (and in the country at large) held out for. In this context, in
contradistinction to an early, easy Union re-entry for the seceded states, Baker suggested that
it might be necessary to reduce the rebel states to the legally pre-state status of territories and
further suggested (perhaps with exaggerated sarcasm, perhaps seriously) that northern
governors might be sent south to "control" these territories. Scandalized, border state
Democrats, especially those from Kentucky, were quick to respond. (It should be noted that
Kentucky carried the weight of border state reaction in both Houses. Elected by slaveholders
voting as a bloc three-fifths of the entire black population of the state, lacking a Henry Winter
Davis or Joseph McClurg, representing Maryland and Missouri respectively in the House, or a
B. Gratz Brown, representing Missouri in the Senate, Kentucky members were almost to a
man not only not radicals but Democrats, some even uncertain Unionists.) Lazarus Powell (DKY) accused Baker of auguring the destruction of the Union by advocating a "conquered
provinces" treatment. John Breckinridge (D-KY) feared "ravag[ing] by armies, [as well as a
change of] state form." Explicit here, of course, was the conceptual sanctuary provided by
Lincoln's concept of indestructible states that had remained in the Union. Otherwise, horror of
horrors, "we [would] have the power to make war on them ... and conquer them and do as we
please with them" (Breckinridge). The central issue was the institution of slavery, and the right
of the states, seceded or loyal, not to have it interfered with. The debate went on for several
days. Administration spokesmen made efforts to defuse the issue by offering reassurances
that no one was pursuing conquest and the abolition of slavery, but in doing so reminded
secessionists (who, no doubt, were apprised of the debates) that an unintended outcome of
lengthy resistance might be the end of slavery. Conservative representatives in both Houses
were unsatisfied (a similar debate had transpired in the House) and put forth amendments to
military bills declaring against conquest and the abolition of slavery. The flavor of these
amendments was neatly captured in one put forth by that arch-reactionary, Clement
Vallandigham, Democratic member of the House from Ohio: "No part of the money hereby
appropriated [for military conduct of the war] shall be employed in subjugating, or holding as a
conquered province, any sovereign State now or lately one of the United States, nor in
abolishing or interfering with African slavery in any of the States." Because conservative
Republicans did not want to tie the hands of Lincoln's Administration in the conduct of the war,
they voted with radicals. Accordingly, these amendments as well as similar resolutions were
consistently voted down - until 21 July.
On 21 July 1861, the first major battle of the war took place some twenty miles from
Washington at Bull Run Creek near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Early on, the battle went in
the favor of Union forces. But, as Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson's Confederate lines alone held,
as large rebel reinforcements arrived, and as Union soldiers - marching and then fighting
fourteen hours in the brutal summer heat without food or water and without reinforcements became demoralized, late in the day Union forces were pushed back and lines broke. Green

soldiers, lacking training, discipline and combat experience, fled in panic; and they fled over
and past Washington spectators, distinguished personages - ladies and government officials
who, sharing the soldiery's ungrounded optimism in a quick war, had come down for the day in
their carriages and barouches - who in turn panicked and fled. Among Unionists, the entire
aftermath was, no doubt, embarrassing, not the least because the road back to the Capitol
was strewn with the apparel of the well-to-do onlookers. The events of Bull Run left the
majoritarian opposition (in both Houses) to resolutions embodying restrictive war aims
disturbed and fearful. (Certainly a popular question at the time must have been, "What would
have happened had the traitors pursued our boys to the seat of the general government?")
Conservatives and most radicals retreated and fell back on Lincoln's policy of accommodating
border states representatives in order to insure their allegiance. In votes taken on 22 July,
John Crittenden's resolution in the House and a nearly identical one put forth by Andrew
Johnson in the Senate passed with overwhelming majorities. Thus, the Special Session ended
(6 August 1861) with Congressional conservatives in control of Union war policy.409
Radicals and the Early Course of the War
When, in early December 1861, the first session of the new (37th) Congress met, members
confronted a series of war related military and political developments that had made for a
decided strengthening of radical, and especially anti-slavery sentiment. In the previous
August, half of Missouri fell into the hand of Confederate, largely guerrilla forces. In a
response to this event, Gen. John Frmont, Union military commander for Missouri,
proclaimed any guerrilla captured behind Union lines would be executed, and he declared free
all slaves owned by secessionist Missouri planters. Lincoln, of course, rescinded the order as
part of his policy of appeasing border states planters. In September, withdraw of exposed
Confederate troops a few miles southwest of Washington revealed wood timbers painted
black (dubbed by the press as "Quaker guns") on bluff overlooking a site Gen. McClellan had
previously refused to advance on. Then, on 21 October the disastrous defeat at Ball's Bluff,
Virginia took place. The revelation of "Quaker guns" and the defeat occurred against the
background of the overarching failure of the McClellan led, 110,000 man strong Army of the
Potomac to move against a much smaller rebel force massed in northern Virginia. Motivating,
or so it seemed, George B. McClellans refusal to advance was misinformation concerning the
allegedly massive Confederate forces opposite him. As members of Congress pondered these
events, their vanguard began to dimly perceive a pattern the contours of which would become
unmistakable in the next eighteen months. On the one hand, the North's leading military men
either engaged in ill-advised, dangerous actions or were too cautious, hesitant and unwilling to
engage the enemy at all. On the other hand, a large portion of the Union armies were
commanded by men who, if not outright incompetents, had suspect loyalties or, at best,
pursued a military strategy that fell far short of even the restricted war aims that Congress had
approved the previous summer.
409For the Congressional debate and citations, Belz, Ibid, 19-24, who we have followed closely. Four months later (21

October), Edward Baker, original Senate formulator of the concept of territoriialization and now a Union colonel, would
die in a probe of Confederate forces at Ball's Bluff, Virginia. The action had been ordered by a patriotic yet southern
sympathizing Democratic in the Union army, Gen. Charles Stone. It was, like so many thousands Union deaths in the
war, a senseless sacrifice resulting from an imprudent, ill-considered action, an advance across the Potomac in which
Baker and his troops were shot to pieces. (Stone's political inclinations, and his behavior at Ball's Bluff that opened
him to charges of treason, made his order not only appear unacceptable but also possibly criminal.)
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days in America, 38-40, presents a brief, fascinating study of a bewildered soldiery and
stunned Washington in the aftermath of the defeat at Bull Run. ("Meantime, in Washington, among the great persons
and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying
disappointment." Ibid, 39.)

The misinformation provided to McClellan (both at this time and later), not only historically
significant because so many of this commander's grave strategic errors rested on it, led to the
core of the problem: Given that he was by formation cautious, and that, moreover, McClellan,
Lincolns general-in-chief," utterly lacked what we might today call intuitive "sociological"
insight, something other and more had to brought to bear on the analysis of northern
generalship.410
With few exceptions, Union military commands lacked imagination and were far too literal
(and, thus, could not invent a tactic on the ground to finesse a dangerous situation, and
instead simply followed orders by the book regardless of the disastrous consequences.
Moreover, these same Union commanders demonstrated little vigor in prosecuting the war
when tactically the advantage shifted to their forces, and they exhibited no grasp of the
manner in which weaponry advances had rendered operative Union military theory of the
offensive obsolete, counterproductive and potentially disastrous. These familiar features of
Union military leadership in the first two years of the war (especially in the East) flowed
logically and practically from the limited objectives - in a phrase, a peace without victors - with
which they understood the war. In all the major battles prior to November 1863, this limitation
invariably lead to a battle conclusion in which Union armies were routed or won merely an
incomplete victory. Already by autumn 1861, the apparent inaction of the Lincoln
Administration in the face of the well-publicized problems of over cautiousness, lack of vigor,
etc., had fueled the growth of radicalism in the Congress. The Administration appeared to be
drifting without a coherent, particularly an aggressive and determined, policy for military
conduct of the war. If it had a policy at all, it appeared that it was dictated and driven by border
states' concerns.411
Radicals and, more generally, Republicans responded to Administration drifting and military
inaction by demanding more vigorous prosecution of the war. To bring pressure to bear on
Lincoln's government the 37th Congress, meeting for the first time in December 1861,
established a new committee, the Joint Committee on Conduct of the War, formally assigned
to deal with specifically war related issues and actually intended to prod Lincoln. But questions
of prosecuting the war were inextricably bound up with other questions, those emerging from
the actual course of events, that involved longer term goals in relation to a defeated South.
Thus, for example, Fortress Monroe and the surrounding territory on the southeastern Virginia
peninsula north of Norfolk that had been held since May 1861 and the capture, in November,
410Historically, infamous information placing Confederate forces in Virginia in spring-summer 1862 at some 200,000

men was supplied by the elaborate spy network of none other than the equally infamous strike-breaker, Allan
Pinkerton. See Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army, 73-75, 124. This information would form the presupposition of strategies
devised for all the major battles McClellan commanded, especially the Seven Days and Antietam.
McClellans lack of insight had two important moments. First, he could not grasp that the character of the men who as
soldiers actually fought for the Lees army: As many as a quarter of them were southern patriots who would only fight
defensively to protect the Virginia perimeters of the South. (Roughly this many men in Lees army, the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia, refused to cross into Unionist Maryland in early September 1862 at the outset of the
Antietam Campaign. Instead, they simply returned home to their farms. See chapter 4, "Problems of Army Leadership
(I)," n. 22, below.) Second, McClellan, a pre-war railroad executive in the worlds cutting-edge industry, failed to
understand the significance of the low level of technological productivity of the overwhelming agrarian South. (E.g.,
the poor quality and simple lack of shoes and other important military accouterments often, following a long indecisive
battle, only made the condition of a raged, exhausted southern soldiery worse and left it in no position to fight fresh
troops.)
411The notion of a "peace without victors" that guided McClellan and his staff cannot be dodged: McClellan himself
hated both abolitionists and the extreme secessionist element, blaming both for the war. As Catton suggests (Ibid,
91), this was a strange position for the commander of the northern army: The problem here was that abolitionists
unreservedly supported the Union, while secessionists, to which the whole of the South had largely swung around to
and gotten behind, was the mortal enemy of the Union. In time even the most "conservative," pro-slavery yet Unionist
northerners would come to realize there was no middle ground.

of the Sea Islands off coast South Carolina (and Georgia) - geographically peripheral areas of
the Confederacy, posed as a problem (one that in the first half of the next year would become
pressing) the governance of Confederate territory that had fallen to Union military forces.
Lincoln (in his message to the opening of the 37th Congress) had suggested that, conjoined to
the formation of a loyalist government in Virginia out of a rump convention of the western,
loyalist and anti-planter section of the state, the seating of a representative of Virginia could
provide a model for dealing with this problem in others districts as they came under Union
control. In elections held to select a representative in North Carolina and additional
representatives in Virginia, the handful of votes for a Unionist candidate was tiny, virtually nonexistent. Without a numerically adequate basis of representation as specified in law and
lacking a defined Congressional district, the Committee on Elections in the House refused to
seat these Unionists. The great fear was that without majorities, or at least significant
minorities, republican institutions would become a transparent facade, states would become
metaphysical abstractions, bad because obvious fictions, created as a result of an overall war
policy designed to pander to slaveholders in the Upper South.412
Territorialization (II)
At the outset of the 37th Congress, Lincoln's border states policy gave the appearance that
the Administration was pursuing unprincipled cooperation with, cozying up to, slaveholders,
because, as one House delegate expressed it, the whole re-organized machinery of
government of Virginia (later to become West Virginia) was designed for this purpose. The
refusal to seat representatives from these secessionist border states de facto constituted an
abandonment of the conservative view that loyal citizens formed the state (and, hence, were
entitled to representation). Logically and legally, rejection should also have led to repudiation
of the proposition underpinning the view, namely, that the states were indestructible.
Moreover, since the states were comprehended as elements of the federal system in which
each and all moments (states and general government) were necessary structural
components and for which none of the components in isolation had meaning or reality, it
should also have lead to repudiation of the fundamental assumption of the conservative view,
namely, the notion that the Union is perpetual. Radicals were finding their way to this first
conclusion. As to the latter (breaking with the view of the Union's perpetuity), they had yet to
discover solid ground on which they could both articulate criticism of Lincoln and maintain
unrelenting opposition to planter-secessionists. At any rate, the rejection of the credentials of
representatives from secessionist border states buried the method of restoration that Lincoln
and conservatives had pushed for. But, linked to demands for more vigorous prosecution of
the war effort, the problem of governance of captured districts remained. The concept of
territorialization, elaboration of which expressed the growth of Congressional radicalism,
pointed a way to a practical solution to this problem.
In the Congress, five members put forth resolutions on territorialization. Four of these men
were westerns. While it is not the point of the discussion here, driving Congressional struggles
at this moment were the demands of free soil constituencies for more vigorous prosecution of
the war. The five were James Ashley, John Gurley, John Hutchins all of Ohio in the House,
and James Harlan of Iowa and Ira Harris of New York in the Senate. Gurley's bill was
restricted to Florida; the bill of Harlan, Hutchins, Ashley and Harris, though differing widely in
details, were all broader measures aimed at states or portions thereof recaptured from the
412For Lincoln's remarks in his message to Congress, Belz, Ibid, 45-46; for the elections in North Carolina (where

Charles H. Foster received 224 votes) and Virginia (where Joseph Segar received 25 votes), Ibid, 46-47; for the
action of the House Committee on Elections Ibid., 46-48. The charge about pandering to slaveholders was voiced by
Martin Conway, a Kansas Republican, Ibid, 42.

Confederacy. Gurley's bill called for military occupation and rule through martial law of
recaptured areas, and provided for representation to Congress and for formation of state
governments (i.e., provide for readmission to the Union) on conditions of (numerical)
sufficiency of loyal citizenry and abolition of slavery. The other four bills shared, significantly, a
grant of authorization to the President to institute temporary civil governments having full
legislative power over seceded states. "Full legislative power" entailed the wherewithal to
abolish slavery and to modify or revoke any other existing local laws. Though widely different
in detail, these four bills were all modeled on the pattern of territorial government that had
developed up to 1860. Radical content was visible in, first, the reduction of former states to
territories; second, in the demand for or legislative empowerment to abolish slavery; and third,
in measures (with the exception of Harris, an easterner) for confiscation of rebel lands.
Gurley's bill exhibited elements of the older conservative Whig-Jacksonian Free Soil attitude
toward slavery in calling for "colonization" (viz., segregated resettlement of blacks aboard). In
the last respect, Ashley's bill was the most radical. Following confiscation, it called for leasing
not more than 160 acres "to actual occupants, who are loyal," i.e., blacks, prescription of
common schools for ex-slaves, and regulation of the number of hours in a day's work for rural
wage-earners. Fearful of the consequences of not distinguishing the projected territorial
populace according to loyalty, all bills departed from territorial model in that none provided for
popular election of provisional legislatures. In this regard Ashley's was again most radical
since it disenfranchised certain groups (primarily former Union officials and military officers
who supported the Confederacy).413
In December 1861, January 1862 and into February, the concept of territorialization gained
ground in and outside Congress, as, for example, both the New York Times and the New York
Post indicated support for the idea. Lacking public prodding from Lincoln or his Cabinet,
McClellan's procrastination and slow preparations intensified the sense that the Administration
was drifting. In this context, combined with the Committee on Conduct of the War driven
demands for the ouster of McClellan, radical concepts of territorializing the areas recaptured
from seceded states formed a pole of attraction around which dissatisfaction with Lincoln
coalesced. Thus, support went way beyond the bounds of radicalism. However, at the first
signs of (successful) military activity accompanied by Administration initiative, this support
would shrink dramatically.414
On 6 February 1862, Fort Henry fell to Gen. Ulysses Grant's forces. Much more importantly,
on 16 February the same force took Fort Donelson. The Union Army in the West had baled
Lincoln out. But at the same time, these two military victories posed point blank the question
of governance in all of mid-Tennessee. Grant's successes, fortuitous events from the
standpoint of Administration policy, must have appeared as a godsend to Lincoln. On 5 March,
he appointed Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson military governor of the state and
requested Congressional approval. While the appointment was outwardly or constitutionally
"revolutionary" - since it entailed a massive expansion of the powers of the federal power into
the domain of state government for which there was no historical precedence, the entire thrust
of Lincoln's project was aimed precisely at preserving states' customs, laws and institutions,
especially slavery. (Lincoln's other appointee, Edward Stanley - military governor of North
Carolina assigned to this position without Senate approval, immediately upon taking up his
post closed down a recently opened school for black children under reason of enforcing "laws
of the State," viz., the old Black Code of North Carolina.) Like Stanley's, the appointment of
Johnson, author of July 1861 Senate legislation restricting war aims, assured policy in this
413For Congressional territorialization bills, Belz, Ibid, 58-64 (citation appears on 63).
414For the New York newspapers, Ibid, 55, 73.

form would be realized. With a Union army seemingly on the move, the appointment was an
effort to co-opt the emerging radical plan for territorializing recaptured districts.415
On 6 March, Lincoln sent a message to Congress requesting a joint resolution adopting a
proposal to "co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual emancipation of slavery." This
proposal, avoiding "sudden" emancipation and offering compensation to any slave states that
voluntary gave up slavery, was "better for all." That is, it was non-coercive: It did not "interfere
with slavery within state limits, referring ... the absolute control of the subject ... to the state
and it's people." The Administration was no longer wavering and the restlessness and
uncomfortableness with its past drifting within and without Congress immediately ceased. The
forces representing property at once fell in behind Lincoln; newspapers which had applauded
the notion of territorialization now declared their support for his plan; and, the emerging
national consensus around the radical's notion rapidly dissipated. On 10 April, Lincoln's
proposal for a joint resolution calling for gradual, compensated emancipation was adopted in
the Congress. On 12 April, Ashley's plan was tabled in the House thereby effectively killing it.
Thus, Lincoln and those conservative Republicans, war Democrats and border state
Unionists, who taken together constituted the bloc of class representatives making up this
informal party of property, had survived the first concretely embodied radical challenge to their
hegemony inside the State.416
Theoretical Weaknesses of the Radical Position
The failure of this radical challenge was in part based on its very radicalism (forceful abolition
of slavery, confiscation, highly restricted redistribution) at a moment in which military setbacks
on the field of battle were not cumulatively great enough to compel popular demands for
action that, though motivated by a concern for Union integrity, would led to the abandonment
of slaveholders. But there were also at least two other reasons for this failure.
First, as long as Lincoln was willing (or pushed in)to coming part way on issues of moment
such as he did with his call for compensated emancipation, he would be able to co-opt the
radical periphery in Congress and isolate radicalism in the country at large. More broadly, as
long as the President followed a policy that was not discredited, and in following it did not
isolate himself, popular respect for Lincoln, buttressed by the same respect for the institution
of the Presidency, would be extremely difficult to overcome. Lincoln was a gifted politician and
he knew this well. (Andrew Johnson, on the other hand, never achieved this understanding.)
Second, even if the militarily generated crisis had been qualitatively greater (e.g., as in the
event of a Confederate march on Washington), radicals could not have pointed the way
forward and out of such a projected crisis, since they had yet to elaborate a theoretical
position around which they could rally opposition to slavery, recreating themselves as the real
leadership inside the Congress and the country.
On this, the latter count, the advocates of territorialization did not adequately distinguish
themselves from Lincoln: They held out for the perpetuity of the Union, decried the illegality of
secession, and proclaimed the ordinances of secession null and void. Their single, and
significant advance was in discarding the notion that states were indestructible. But practical
men as they were, as all Americans after the revolutionary generation have been, they did not
formalize this advance by theoretically elaborating it. Confronting the weight of events,
especially the Administrations inability to find enough loyal citizens outside western Virginia
and in North Carolina to seat just three representatives in the House, radicals merely argued
415For the conservative character of Lincoln's military governorships and the appointment of Johnson, Ibid, 66, 71-72.
416For Lincoln's proposal to Congress for an offer of gradual emancipation (as well as all quotations), Collected

Works, 5:144-146; for the revulsion against the radical plan among the membership of the informal party of property,
Belz, Ibid, 82.

that treason "operate[d] as an absolute forfeiture of all their power and rights as States" (John
Bingham). They pointed out that since civil magistrates had been discharged or had resigned
in the seceded states, no Constitutionally acceptable authorities existed, and that, accordingly,
relations to the Union had been forsaken. The rebel states had abandoned "their former
political condition" and with it they lost their rights, "their political condition as a State [had] ...
been extinguished" (Fernando Beaman).417
Charles Sumner raised this specific argument to its highest level in his "state suicide"
resolutions submitted 11 February on the floor of the Senate. Sumner took his stand squarely
on the Constitution stating that act of hostility to it, particularly secession, "when sustained by
force, becomes a practical abdication by the State of all rights under the Constitution, while
the treason it involves works instant forfeiture of all functions and powers essential to the
continued existence of the State as a body politic; so that from such time forward the territory
falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress." He argued further that this abdication of a
state under the Constitution "necessarily causes the termination of those peculiar local
institutions which, having no origin in the Constitution, or in natural right independent of the
Constitution, are upheld by the sole and exclusive authority of the State." He specified the
"peculiar local institution" to which he was referring, namely, slavery, indicating that once the
authority of the state as element of the federal system ceased, "legally and constitutionally"
that institution also collapsed. He further suggested that the assumption of Congressional
control in states-reduced-to-territories was a Constitutional duty, one that could not be
foregone. The final element of the argument was aimed directly at Lincoln and his supporters.
Sumner cogently drove home the point that thoroughgoing reconstruction had to be put on the
agenda: Recognition of slavery in any seceded state all or part of which was under federal
occupation was tantamount to sedition, a "practical recognition of the pretended
Governments," advocacy of forfeiture of Congressional jurisdiction, hence of Congressional
responsibility, and "is in the nature of aid and comfort to the Rebellion that has been
organized."418
Sumner's clarity made his argument a summation of the (extreme) radical position; but the
argument itself was severely limited, restricted to a series of theses, mere assertions of a
position without substantial evidence or reasoning to support them. Moreover, the theses still
moved within the restricted circle of Lincoln's thinking, that is, they still conceived the states
inextricably bound to and nonexistent apart from the Union. Abbreviated though the theses
were, the resolutions marked one of the highpoints of theorizations concerning territorialization
on assumptions not inconsistent with those of the informal party of property. The retrospective
coherency of this hard position contrasted sharply with what contemporaries recognized as
the patently contradictory character of Lincoln's soft position. His option for military
governorship had been undertaken in the face of radical pressure for territorialization. While
this commitment and its practice constituted a theoretical retreat, that is, admissions that loyal
citizens were not the state, and states were destructible, they had the singular virtue of
avoiding an attack on slavery specifically, and property generally. These de facto admissions
were not articulated; nor, of course, was there any effort to re-think the theoretical perspective
on the "rebellion" that Lincoln had laid out the previous year. Theory did not rise to the level of
practice, since the practice was, so to speak, shoved down conservative throats in the first
place. Such a re-theorization would have committed the conservatives in an altogether
417For Bingham's and Beaman's remarks, Belz, Ibid, 51-52.
418For Sumner's "State Rebellion, State Suicide; Emancipation and Reconstruction" resolutions, see his Works, 6:

301-305. Having been read, Sumner's resolutions, according to his editor, created a "flurry" on the Senate floor with
numerous efforts to suppress them. Sumner motioned that the resolutions be "laid on the table" in order that he could
call them up at a later date.

different direction. But because it was their intention to fall back to the practical implications of
their initial position (no matter what theoretical inconsistency, violation of constitutional norms,
etc. would be incurred in the interim), a theoretical reformulation of the relations between the
Union and the states, the meaning of secession for the Constitution, etc., was a task they
would never undertake.
For radicals to have taken a well worked-out, principled stand against the informal party of
property would have required a break with the assumptions first articulated by Lincoln. Works
like William Whiting's War Powers of the President and Sumner's 12 May 1862 Senate speech
("Rights of Sovereignty, Rights of War") fully established the legality of confiscations up to and
including the abolition of slavery. As long, however, as radicals sought only to abolish slavery
without securing the material premises of the freedom of slaves-become-free, they were in no
position to challenge Lincoln who, because of the fundamental character of his position on the
relations of secession to the Union, was able to link his war aims inextricably to rapid
restoration of seceded states. What radicals lacked was a theoretical statement on the
relations of secession to the Union and Constitution that would ground, not merely, the
abolition of slavery throughout the extent of the United States, but would justify reducing
secessionist states to territories in order that their re-admission to the Union could be on terms
that would destroy the social foundations of secession, the great planter estates and with
them the class power of planters. For such a perspective, the Union was not "perpetual," if in
the strong sense this meant "continuous without interruption," since secession was on the
face of it an interruption of massive proportions. Reading again and again loyal men's
assertions of the Union's perpetuity, the overwhelming sense is that what was being
proclaimed was their determination not to allow the South to destroy the Union by
permanently dismembering it. That sense is what radicals needed to incorporate into a retheorization of the relations of secession to the Union and Constitution. In this context,
foundations (justifying a war aimed at reducing the components of the Confederacy to a prestate territorial status) could have been sought in categories accessible to Civil War era
Americans.419
419William Whiting was Solicitor in the War Department. Considered Lincoln's resident Constitutional expert, in

regular contact with radicals, he was as himself an extreme radical who supported Presidentially-based military rule in
the recaptured districts of the Confederacy. His 135 page pamphlet (fully entitled The War Powers of the President,
and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason and Slavery), published in 1862, ambiguous
on the issue of the Union's perpetuity, developed radicalism about as far as possible within a strictly Constitutional
frame of reference.
Sumner's speech, appearing in his Works, 7:1-77, took an entirely different approach to the question of the
constitutionality of confiscation and the abolition of slavery. Sumner distinguished between rebellion and war and
argued that the Union was fighting both. Though inseparable, analytically suppression of rebellion was based on
"municipal" law, while war allowed treatment of rebels as enemies subject to the "law of nations." In the latter case,
that meant all means to achieve the end of subordination within or without municipal (here, Constitutional) law could
and should be brought to bear. Still this unique and insightful perspective achieves nothing in regard to the aftermath
of war, in the case at issue the question of securing the foundations for "peace and tranquility" by providing the
material premises of raising the slave to the status of free citizen with political rights. Sumner's perspective, though,
would greatly develop during the course of the war.
During the war, Lincoln, acting under Constitutionally mandated but undefined war powers, did in fact order numerous
extra-constitutional as well as clearly unconstitutional measures. These included the confiscation of Western Union
files (telegram seizures) in May 1861, and confiscation, opening and reading personal letters moving through postal
system; illegal appropriations without Congressional authorization and funding in May 1861 (Lincoln ordered Chase to
draw funds against the treasury to be handed over to unsecured, unknown parties for armaments to defend
Washington, DC, and for purposes of building a railroad from Knoxville to Lexington); the garrisoning of troops on
Baltimore without state authorization in April-May 1861; suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as well as arrests
and imprisonment with charges, without trial and without legal consultation in Baltimore in autumn 1861 (Lincoln
ordered the arrest of Maryland legislators who, in the case in which they would have voted an ordinance of secession,
might thereby have incited against the national peace); employment of a combination of means (refusing postal use,
arresting and imprisoning editors, seizing hostile presses) to shutdown inflammatory newspapers after 1861; the use

We might expect such a radical argument to look something like this: Predating the
Constitutional genesis of the Union, and predating the significant historical moments of its
ongoing formation - but largely formed in lockstep with its development and only raised to full
consciousness by that development, in advance of expanding boundaries, a people has been
formed and has politically constituted itself as a nation. The genius or distinctiveness of this
people is visible in their rational and universalist, practical commitment to self-rule and to the
institutions embodying that self-rule. Slavery is an accidentally formed cancer that has grown
up in the body of this nation, one that has given rise to a perverse parody of the nation and its
institutions. Its domination of the national political system, its extension into new territories and
its very existence in several states has interrupted the course of the free development of the
Union and threatens to once and for all obliterate this achievement. Since this achievement of
free institutions has been greatly retarded by slavery, yet recognizably embodies the concrete
progress of humanity, destruction of slavery, the large landed estates that secured slavery's
socio-political ascendancy, and the emerging national-State erected to defend it, are fully
justified.
Such a theoretical statement would have acknowledged that the Union, i.e., this nation, had
experienced other interruptions, such as that of 1787, which led to positive new development;
that, moreover, the defeat of the secessionist might itself be the grounds for a new start, one
that would destroy the foundations of slavery (by confiscation, redistribution and historically
lengthy, territorially-based re-formation of an enlightened, suffrage-broadened citizenry), one
that would, accordingly, operate within and preserve the best political traditions of the nation,
and one that would be consciously incorporated into the nation's fundamental law. Such a
perspective was not in principle inaccessible to radicals, and its early formulation might have
considerably thinned their ranks. For it to be achieved, it would have first been necessarily to
see beyond abolition to those social conditions that would materially anchor the slave-oncefreed in her freedom. Whether such insight might be achieved depended upon, among other
things, whether the pressure of military events in the coming months would continue to work
against the radicals, or might be expected to compel Lincoln to embrace them. Yet, like other
Americans of their and following generations, that is, as characteristically "practical" men, men
always on the make, whether military events worked for or against them the achievement of a
developed theory would be difficult.
The Pressure of Congressionally Mediated, Military Developments on Lincoln and his
Responses through Emancipation
In the West, Grant's army was severely mauled on 6 April near Shiloh on the Tennessee River
northwest of Florence, Alabama. Lacking any preparations (posted lookouts, scouts, etc.) and
with the leading general refusing to entrench, the Union forces were taken by surprise and
badly battered by Confederate forces under Joseph Johnston. Reinforced that night by 25,000
of armed violence (the army) at the polls to secure election outcomes, often through force or intimidation, in Delaware
where polls were "supervised" in November 1862, in Tennessee in which Republican electoral sweeps were secured
with troops at polling places in November 1862 (and by allowing troops in the field, Grant's armies, to vote in Fall
1863), through the arrest of democratic politicians and declarations of martial law in Kentucky where troops secured
elections in August 1864, and by the arrests of Democrats, where army units (under Ben Butler) were called out to
supercede the state national guard in New York in November 1864. (It should be noted that in 1862 the use of troops
preserved the narrow Congressional majorities of the Republicans, while in 1864 the use of troops secured the
reelection of Lincoln.)
In all this, the socially and politically based, ideal-theoretical limits of Lincolns position are evident: He simply could
not say, I intend to preserve the Union and the Constitution at all costs, even if in so doing I ignore the Constitution.
For discussion of constitutionally questionable Executive actions and their ramifications, Benedict, A Compromise of
Principle, 73-75; and Randell, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 36-41, 149-150, 175-176, 514-515; Hesseltine,
Lincoln and the War Governors, passim.

men under Don Carlos Buell, Union soldiers beat back and set to flight the Confederate army
the next day amid heavy casualties on both sides.
In the East, from late winter on McClellan had come under heavy pressure from an
increasingly impatient Lincoln (who himself was under pressure from the weight of radical
opinion not just confined to Congress) to open an "offensive" on Richmond. Beginning on 5
April, among the three week long spectacle of landing 121,500 men, 14,600 mules and
horses, 1,150 wagons and 44 artillery batteries on the Virginia Peninsula at the mouth of the
James River north of Norfolk, McClellan's Army of the Potomac moved up the peninsula and
laid siege to Yorktown. Because McClellan was convinced the defenses hide a massive
enemy army, and because he failed to use his cavalry in reconnoitering enemy positions, the
siege, aimed at a heavily fortified site controlled by a mere 11,000 Confederate troops under
John McGruder, lasted until 4 May. It is likely the only reason it did not last longer is that on
the night of 3 May the Confederates abandon their fortifications and slipped away.
Meanwhile, in Shenandoah Valley of Virginia Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson'
harassed and prevented much large Union forces under Frmont, Banks and McDowell from
reinforcing McClellan. During April and May, Confederates, outnumbered roughly 70,000 to
40,000 men, inflicted some 7,000 casualties and capture huge quantities of arms and
supplies. To the southeast, both Lee's and McClellan's armies maneuvered for position around
Richmond. The pace of events quickened. On 31 May, a two day battle engaged in at Fair
Oaks ended with both armies withdrawing. Heavily losses were incurred on both sides: Union
casualties were roughly 5,000 men, while Confederate losses were closer to 6,000. Still the
much smaller army under Lee, now reinforced and numbering some 70,000 men, consistently
positioned itself between the Union forces and Richmond, and kept the former from attacking
the latter. The positioning continued but McClellan's forces were in a real sense no closer to
Richmond than when the spring campaign got under way. Between 26 June and 1 July, five
major, bloody battles (Mechanicsville, Gaines Hill, Savage Station, Frayser's Farm and
Malvern Hill) know collectively as the "Seven Days" were fought. While by the numbers the
Union army won three of those five battles, McClellan, if not his soldiers, was demoralized.
(The defeat was acutely felt in Washington where its meaning revolved around the lost
opportunities to defeat Lee's army and to take Richmond.) From the time of the battle at Fair
Oaks, McClellan had led his army in a southeastly arc, a retreat, back down the peninsula to
the safety of Union gunboats at Harrison's landing. (See the map, The Seven Days,
following chapter 5.)
Even with Lincoln's victory over radical attempts to institute territorialization, pressure inside
the Congress did not abate. In March, Union military commanders had been forbidden to
return fugitive slaves to their masters under severe penalty. And, in the same month, slavery
was abolished (with compensation to slaveowners) in the District of Columbia. Since the
informal party of property bloc in Congress split over these issues, with most Republicans
favoring both, Lincoln signed on to both measures. But the events in the Shenandoah Valley,
at Fairs Oaks and then during the Seven Days gave rise to a fear among officials in
Washington that a Confederate march on Washington was imminent. Against the backdrop of
these military events and this rising fear, Congressional Republicans (and not merely radicals)
pressed for more vigorous prosecution of the war. In July, this resolve found Congress
passing a second Confiscation Act, the most important provision of which was the declaration
of freedom for slaves of all slaveholders who supported the Confederacy, and a law
authorizing Union commanders to enlist all persons of "African descent." While for the time
being the line was drawn against a broad attack on property (with the tabling of a watered-

down version of Harris' territorialization bill in July), Lincoln was facing mounting pressure
from his own party to link a limited version of emancipation directly to military policy.420
Lincoln's first, a military, response to the Seven Days was to degrade McClellan's command
by establishing a new army to operate at least initially in northern Virginia, the Army of Virginia
commanded by a westerner and Republican with abolitionist credentials, John Pope. On 13
July, Lincoln made a plea to border state Congressional members to accept a phased-in plan
for compensated emancipation that included provisions for colonization of blacks abroad.
Frightened by social change and the loss of power (and not just compensated "property") that
emancipation might unleash, they refused the offer. Nine days later, Lincoln apprised his
Cabinet - presenting them with a draft - of his plan for military emancipation. Seward advised
him to withhold announcement for a more auspicious occasion, that is, to forgo any public
announcement until after a Union military victory. On 29/30 August, Union forces under Pope
confronted the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the Second Bull Run (from the rebel
perspective, the Second Manassas). Numerically much smaller, combined rebel forces under
Lee, Jackson and Longstreet delivered at crushing defeat to the Union army. This defeat
found Lincoln dissolving Pope's command and reintegrating his force back into the Army of
the Potomac under McClellan. As one consequence of this defeat, Lincoln was additionally
pressed by the well-grounded fear the British Cabinet was now very seriously considering
diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. On 16 September, McClellan forces caught up with
the Confederate army under Lee at Antietam Creek (just inside Maryland). With over 10,300
Confederate casualties, Lee's forces were compelled to evacuate Maryland and abandon their
effort to win European diplomatic recognition through a victory on Union soil. (With over
12,300 Union losses, McClellan, of course, was not general enough to pursue an army that in
its retreat into Virginia was precarious positioned and could have been dealt a crushing
blow.)421
On 22 September, Lincoln preliminarily announced his emancipation policy. Hardly a
compelling victory, Antietam nonetheless allowed him to avoid being stigmatized as weak, his
new emancipatory policy as desperate. Considering the forces pushing at Lincoln (growing
dissatisfaction with conduct of the war in the country at large, the threat of British and French
recognition of the Confederacy, military officers pleading for guidance in dealing with massive
Negro presences in Union armies camps and in the wake of their movements, etc.), this
policy was minimalist at best. The essential feature of the policy was to abolish slavery only in
those states that had seceded and only in areas in those seceded states that were not under
Union control. Thus, the border states of Missouri, Kentucky Maryland and Delaware were all
exempted. The policy would not be enforced in these states. So far from being designed as a
policy of general emancipation, Lincoln viewed it as entirely unavoidable measure. In his own
words, emancipation ""was a military necessity, absolutely essential for the salvation of the
Union, [for] ... we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. We have about played our
last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game." The minimalist character of the
policy also reflected his view that emancipation was a carrot held out to rebellious
slaveholders to entice them back into the Union.422
420For fears of a rebel attack on Washington, Alan Nevins, The War for the Union, III, 124-125, 139-140, 158; for

remarks on the floors of Congress aimed at more vigorously pressing the war effort (radicals called for waging war on
rebel territory, war that destroyed rebel property and rebel supplies which was precisely what the Confederate raiders
were doing in the North), Ibid, 145; on the Second Confiscation Act, Ibid, 146.
421For Lincoln's overture to border state Congressional representatives, Nevins, Ibid, 147-149.
422For the citation from Lincoln, George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, 103. Milton also cities

the view of that arch-conservative Gideon Welles, Lincolns Secretary of Navy, who indicated in his diary that
emancipation would have "never been attempted but to preserve the national existence." Ibid, 104.

Driven to a policy against his own inclinations, Lincoln backtracked until the very last moment
(viz., its effective date) using the Congressional recess first to circumvent and then to dilute
his own proclamation. As late as 1 December, in his Annual Message to the Congress he
proposed no less than a Constitutional amendment enshrining gradual, compensated
emancipation and allowing slavery until the year 1900. (It was a proposal that was ignored.)
From late September until the end of the year, he prodded his military governors Edward
Stanley and Andrew Johnson to hold elections in the districts of the states of North Carolina
and Tennessee under their control on the hope that a large enough pro-Union turnout might
win Congressional approval for representation prior to the first of the new year and thereby
exempt them from his decree. He similarly pressed military commanders in recaptured
districts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Virginia. After elections were held, he, without
Congressional approval and against the specific terms of the decree, exempted all of
Tennessee, New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, Norfolk, meaning a large coastal area
of southeastern Virginia, and the entirety of what would shortly become West Virginia even
though there no elections had even been held.423
Lincoln's purpose in all this was, of course, to present Congress with a fait accompli in order
that the politics of the informal party of property, or he personifying those politics, might control
the contours of reconstruction. In this respect, the House, meeting at the beginning of the 37th
Congress in December, seated two representatives from Louisiana where adequate ballots
had been cast to constitutionally affirm a valid claim to representation in the national
legislature; in all other cases, the House refused to seat representatives. Lincoln accepted this
outcome because the Louisiana seating set a precedent and established an accepted model
for reorganized government in a recaptured district. But, as Belz correctly concludes (though
not in these terms), the significant development in this series of events was the emergence of
a new fault line, not between the President and Congress but one, that separated the radicals
and their periphery from the President and Congressional representatives of the informal party
of property. This new division arose from the question of who, the President or Congress,
would control reconstruction policy and what terms. The radicals were increasingly to come to
see the necessity of the abolition of slavery as the minimal bas`is of any and all
reconstruction; Lincoln, on the other hand, expressed on numerous occasions the doubt (one
he believed would be confirmed by the courts) that his decree, as a military measure
423For Lincoln's retreat on the emancipation decree and the question of seating of representatives, Belz, Ibid, 105-

108, 110-116; for Lincoln's proposal for gradually phasing out slavery by the year 1900, Works, 5: 529-530.
The pernicious effects of this patchwork emancipation policy could be seen in Kentucky were slaveholders were
exempted. After the policy went into effect, state officials arrested, imprisoned and resold back into slavery freepeople
from Tennessee and Alabama following in wake on the Union army as it crossed back into Kentucky. This grievous
injustice was not righted until December 1865, i.e., until the Kentucky legislature ratified the Thirteen Amendment eight months after the end of the war, nearly eleven months after the passage in Congress of the Thirteen
Amendment (abolishing slavery on all American soil), and nearly two years after promulgation of the emancipation
decree. See Barbara J. Fields, "Who Freed the Slaves?," 181.
But this was hardly the end: Lincoln's policy of military emancipation effectively allowed Kentucky slaveholders to
pursue the claims, after the de facto end of the war in April 1865, against Union officers (who provided blacks in and
about Union army camps with passes) for assisting slaves in escapes, a violation of Kentucky state fugitive slave law.
These officers, all the way up to Gen. John Palmer - Union commander at Louisville, were indicted and in some cases
imprisoned by use of grand juries and courts that were staffed by returning Confederates (among whom, in our view,
were southerners, not native to Kentucky, that found a southern sympathetic state more congenial than their
devastated "homelands") who swamped the state in the immediate aftermath of the war. Other legal claims were
made against Union officers who had appropriated horses and shot escaping Confederate prisoners. All these claims
were upheld by courts that defied with pompous state rights' justifications Congressional law and Federal authority.
(For documentation concerning Kentucky, Randell, Ibid, 193-197, 387-388.) By war's end, unreconstructed, because
Unionist, Kentucky bore the fruit of Lincoln's border state policy. It was not until well into 1866 that re-worked
Congressional legislation on the bayonets of Union troops began to rectify this situation. (That legislation was new
language added to the Indemnity Act of 1863.)

undertaken in time of war, would not have the force of law once normality (peace) was
restored. This obviously gave radicals something to ponder, since one of their own, Solicitor
Whiting, the War Department's legal advisor, also took the same view.424
Struggles within the State in Response to Military Developments after Emancipation
There was not much to brighten Administration prospects after Antietam. In the November
1862 elections, Democrats won the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio,
Indiana and Illinois, the governorship in New York, and made gains in the Congress. On 7
November, Lincoln relieved McClellan for the final time and put Ambrose Burnside in
command of the Army of the Potomac. On 13 December, with the 2nd session of the 37th
Congress opened for little more than a week, the once again numerically superior Union army
was defeated at Fredericksburg (Virginia) following a foolhardy attack on the impregnable
Marye's Heights. Union forces suffered casualties exceeding 12,600 men, while the losses of
Confederate forces (most of whom had gone home for Christmas) were put at roughly 5,000.
Amid mounting criticism of his war policy, in the state houses, the large city newspapers, and,
of course, in Congress, criticism that spilled over into doubts concerning the constitutionality of
his policy of military governorship for recaptured Confederate districts, Lincoln moved to quell
some of the dissent by quickly relieving Burnside. In late January, he replaced Burnside with
Joseph Hooker. But Lincoln still had not "found a general," and as a spring campaign got
under way, Confederate military leadership under Lee and Jackson again out-maneuvered a
larger, better equipped, better fed and clothed Union army at Chancellorsville (Virginia). After
several days of positioning, the decisive battle of 5 and 6 May found Hooker's forces suffering
approximately 17,000 casualties. Hooker was relieved and replaced by George Meade in midJune.
In the West, for over two months beginning at the end of January, an army under Grant had
unsuccessfully attempted to cut through the bayous north of Vicksburg in order to attack the
city. On 30 April, Grant, in a daring plan, marched his forces south on the west side of the
Mississippi River while Sherman feigned an attack from the north and a cavalry force moved
into the interior to tear up rail lines to the east of the city. Under cover of gunboats, Grants
Union force passed the city and crossed the river south of Vicksburg. Without a line of supply
and cut off from the outside world, his soldiers marched east, and then in a semi-circular arc
moved west against Vicksburg. The Union forces fought five battles in 18 days winning them
all and then completed a three sided encirclement of the city. After a direct assault on
Vicksburg failed, Grant's armies settled in for a siege.
Thus, while Vicksburg had been laid siege to, Lincoln had appointed his fourth commander of
the eastern Union army in less than eight months. Yet there were no palpable signs that the
war was drawing any nearer to a close, that, in fact, a northern victory was anything but
certain. These conditions subjected Lincoln and his Administration to intensifying criticism.
They made possible a growing public audience for radicals, who, even with differences among
them abounding, had since the middle of the previous year increasingly insisted that
emancipation be made the basis for reconstruction. Even the 4 July Union victory at
Gettysburg after three day battle that witnessed a combined 51,000 casualties, followed
shortly thereafter by news that Grant's siege had on the same day (4 July) finally compelled
31,000 starving Confederate soldiers and southern town folk to surrender at Vicksburg, did not
portend an near-term end to the war. As one consequence, across the North a political
polarization was taking place.
While Lincoln was subject to increasing criticism from his left," from his "right" Democratic
state legislatures in the old West passed resolutions demanding an armistice and repeal of his
424For Belz insight for the new fault lines, Ibid, 117; for Whiting, Ibid, 37.

Emancipation decree. With volunteering and re-enlistments flagging, Lincoln had inaugurated
a draft in the spring of the year. Democratic newspapers openly called for resistance.
Reactionary groups among the popular classes, with names like the Knights of the Golden
Circle and Sons of Liberty, were emerging, meeting secretly and discussing their
unwillingness to fight for "nigger freedom," their desire to put an immediate end to the war, up
to and including freeing rebel war prisoners and organizing military detachments to join up and
fight with Confederate forces. Firms were set up simply to establish physical or emotional
disability for potential draftees - complete with knowledgeable lawyers and doctors required to
provide the required affidavit testifying to the draftee's pretended condition. Democratic state
and county judges, presupposing state rights constitutionality, ruled the Conscription Act of
1863 unlawful. In a political climate in which Copperhead views were openly espoused and
accepted, federally-enforced terms of conscription were sure to meet with enormous popular,
especially urban, opposition. There was open, massed opposition to the draft in Indiana, Ohio
and Wisconsin. In the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, miners established a dual
power, enforcing opposition to the draft in their towns and communities by compelling all
classes in the communities to abide by this opposition at the threat of death (in cases actually
carried out). Not even troops dispatched from the army could impose the terms of the draft. In
mid-July, New York City exploded in a week long general strike and race riot, in which the
city's working classes, particularly dock laborers, opposed Republican party war policy
centered as it was, for them, on conscription. The draft riots embodied the single, definite
statement of the position of the working classes on the war - namely, resounding, violently
anti-black based opposition. As a general strike - probably the largest in nineteenth century
American history, this action achieved an albeit limited unity among the different classes of
labor - between an industrial proletariat in small artisan manufacturing shops and the
overwhelmingly Irish dock laborers. As a riot, the action entailed the murder, mutilation and
beating to death or lynching of over one hundred black working men and women.425
Thus, the events of the first seven months of 1863, particularly the resistance to the draft by
the white urban working classes, and the surge in volunteers among black freemen
(manifested in the creation of new, "colored regiments"), actually drew Lincoln closer to the
radicals by deepening his commitment to military emancipation. While this "left turn" produced
a split within the informal party of property between its basically border state, slaveophile (i.e.,
die-hard, pro-slavery) elements led by the Blairs (and numbering, among others, Andrew
Johnson in their ranks) and largely eastern conservative Republicans who were willing, under
pressure of the war, to see slavery abolished as long as it could safely be isolated (that is,
dealt with as change produced solely by the exigencies of war) and no other form of property
was assaulted, Lincoln could count on the same Republicans to follow him into a temporary
alliance with the radicals. Against the attacks from the peace Democrats, and the rightwing
fringe of the informal party of property closest to them, radicals attempted to stiffen Lincoln's
spine.426
425For popular resistance to Administration policy in the spring-summer 1863, The Civil War. An Illustrated History,

187-189, and Randell, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 82-83, 84, 86, 90, 249-251.
Draft riots occurred in Dodge County, Wisconsin in March; in Milwaukee in May; and in the towns of Mansfield,
Morrow, Crawford in Knox County, Ohio, in Rush and Sullivan Counties in Indiana, in Johnson, Fulton, Putnam,
Owen, Clay, Boone Counties in Illinois, in the towns of Elliott, McComb, Oakes, Randall, Westlake in Illinois and in
Chicago all in June 1863; and in South English, Keokuk County in Iowa in August. Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War,
137-138.
For secret societies engaged in open treason, Frank Klement, Dark Lanterns, passim, and Randell, Ibid, 175-176,
177-179, 180 (wherein the famous Milligan case is briefly discussed).
426For evidence of Lincoln's "left" turn during the period of July to December 1863, Belz, Ibid, 143-155. For our use of
the term (black) "freemen" (and freepeople) as opposed to "freedmen" (or freedpeople), see chapter 8, "An
Anonymous Popular Subject"; for this usage as opposed to (white) "free men," see chapter 7, "Real Community of

Sumner's Theorization
Whiting, in the above cited pamphlet published in late 1862 and in a widely circulated 1863
letter to the Union League of Philadelphia, had argued that the Union could treat rebels as
belligerents subject to the law of nations. The Constitution enabled the President to "exercise
the full and untrammeled powers of war against" rebels as belligerents under international law.
Whiting was anxious to insure the President, and his supporters in the country at large,
understood that legally there were no limitations to the military power he could exercise
against insurrectionary rebels. But Whiting broke no new ground with a view to the
Constitution, the Union and secession.427
For the radicals, their temporary alliance with Lincoln and the conservative Republican bloc
that tailed him was becoming costly. By autumn 1863, Lincoln had appointed further military
governors in Louisiana and South Carolina. For the most part, radicals had let these actions
go unchallenged. With the victory of Hooker's Union forces at Lookout Mountain and Thomas'
Army of the Cumberland on Missionary Ridge which gave the North Chattanooga, questions
of postwar reconstruction had by late November 1863 became more practical. The question of
who would direct reconstruction, Congress or the President, were now beginning to come to
the fore.
Charles Sumner was able to anticipate these questions in an unique manner. In the October
1863 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, he published a lengthy article developing, elaborating and
setting out the most advanced radical position on reconstruction of the war to date. In fact, it
was formulation that would not be surpassed until the end of the war. Sumner was extremely
well-educated, highly literate lawyer, a vain man who was notorious for his long speeches on
the floor of the Senate, speeches embellished with literary allusions and a florid style of
presentation that did not exclude careful argument and the marshaling of detailed evidence to
support his position, speeches which tended to either bore or irritate those colleagues who did
not share not only his position but its nuances as well. He was the closest to a theorist that
radicals, or for that matter Unionists with public profiles, could muster. In the context of the
prevailing Unionist attitude toward the war, the advantages of publication, wide distribution of
the entire argument and, set forth in writing, the absence of his style of presentation, all
insured Sumner would get a sympathetic hearing. The specific formulation of his argument - a
shrewd eschewal of formal theorization, his meticulous presentation of documentary evidence
and argument from that evidence, a thoroughgoing attempt to ground his argument in the
traditions of American jurisprudence, and his appeal to characteristically and distinctively
American features of governance - made it at once appealing and convincing.428
Sumner's argument was aimed at once directly at Lincoln and at the rightwing of the informal
party of property that Presidents original perspective sheltered. He began by systematically
opposing a legally sanctioned, Congressionally-formed provisional government to the
potentially despotic, Presidentially-appointed military rule that had now appeared in those
Free Labor - Free Men," below.
427For Whiting, Ibid, 44-46 (citation appears on 44), the letter is referred to by Belz, Ibid, 133.
428Implicit in Sumner's article is a distinction between rebels as subjects and as belligerents that had also been

anticipated in a speech ("Rights of Sovereignty and Rights of War," cited above) delivered in the Senate on 19 May
1862: "Assuming all the functions of an independent government, the Confederacy has undertaken to declare war
against the United States. In support of this declaration it has raised armies, organized a navy, issued letters of
marquee, borrowed money, imposed taxes, and otherwise done all it could in waging war." (Works, 7:14-15). Sumner
argued from the overwhelming evidence on the ground, while Whiting had collated and cited the vast legal
precedence for the distinction. Both sought to lay to rest the pretended Constitutional arguments current in the
Congress and Copperhead press for restricting the action of the Union regarding slavery and property in the conduct
of the war.

districts recaptured from rebel forces. Citing Jefferson, he affirmed "the supremacy of the civil
over the military authority" as an "essential principle" of American governance. This
supremacy is embodied in the Constitution, itself paramount, on which Sumner took his stand.
The presence of a military government in recaptured districts patently presupposed the
disappearance, "extinction" is Sumner's term, of the old state governments. Thus, if these
governments ceased to exist, new governments should be "established by laws rather than
according to the mere will of any functionary, to the end that our may be 'a government of
laws, and not of men.'" Pointing out that these were extraordinary times and circumstances,
Sumner noted the advantages of Congressionally-sponsored over military governments: First,
the former proceeded from civil rather than military power and, second, such government was
legally created.429
Having laid out his argument, Sumner undertook its elaboration and defense. He took as his
point of departure an historical account of the origins of the Union and the Constitution that
simultaneously functioned as a critique of state rights doctrine. Contrary to Lincoln's brief
overview of the same nationally formative period, Sumner cited documents, specifically the
Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, that, once contrasted to the
Constitution, clearly indicate that the Union between the states prior to 1787 was formed as a
"firm league of friendship," a compact between sovereign States, each of which as "'free and
independent'" retained their "'full powers to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances,
establish commerce and ... do all other ... things which independent States may of right do.'"
Under the Constitution, however, this league of friendship gave way to the "consolidation of
our Union," to the idea of a "'more perfect union,'" a government established by the people
and for themselves (and their posterity), and not by states nor for states, a government which
recognized only one supreme, national sovereignty to which the states are subordinate in
every essential aspect of rule. According to Sumner, the states were "absorbed" into that
"more perfect union," and they were left only with "that specific local control which is essential
to the convenience and business of life." Thus, for Sumner, the concept of states'
indestructibility was logically nonsense, a residue of the state rights argument, that, we add,
functioned merely to provide conceptual dressing for the protection of slavery. Indestructibility,
if characterizing anything, was an attribute of the Union, the "State" in the broad political
sense, of which states are merely subordinate elements, and within which the Constitution
assigns a central place to Congress. The states, as a highly restricted technical term for
political societies that are components of this Union, continued to exist as (aspects of) civil
society, as political communities, but not Constitutionally, not as states in this technical,
Constitutionally-sanctioned sense. Because these states as corporate bodies withdrew from
the Union, because as governmental forms they, as well as their people, had engaged in
rebellion, because rebellion had been undertaken by state governments as well as in states,
they, as well as their peoples, had perpetrated treason. Eschewing the formally theoretical
formulations, such as "suicide" and "forfeiture" and "abdication," that this treason had led
states to, as well as the legal question as to whether states remained de jure states in the
Union, Sumner suggested their status in relation to the Union should be described as
"vacated:" The states were absent as loyal governments, they could not "perform or partake"
of the functions in the Union, and they could not be recognized by the national government
since local functionaries bound by constitutional oaths had disappeared.
How, then, were loyal governments to be reorganized? Sumner responded that all
revolutionary proceeding should be dispensed with. Rather, states should be reorganized
"according to forms of law, so that the thread of legality should continue unbroken." That
429All citations are taken from Sumner's "Our Domestic Relations: Power of Congress over the Rebel States," Works,

7:493-546.

approach, he argued, is characteristically American, a principle dating from the time of the
Continental Congress. He maintained that "all must be done according to rules of constitution
and law previously ordained" so that "nothing can be left to illegal or informal action." Citing
Daniel Webster, in his speech against the Dorr Constitution in Rhode Island, Sumner
explicated: "'We are not to take the will of the people from public meetings, nor from
tumultuous assemblies, by which the timid are terrified, the prudent are alarmed, and by which
society is disturbed. These are not American modes of signifying the will of the people, and
they never were.'" In commitment to fundamentally republican principles, Webster insisted the
"'will of the people must prevail,'" yet "there must be some legal and authentic mode of
ascertaining that will,'" and that will should be established by "some regular rule of
proceeding, prescribed by previous law." The power of Congress has priority over the
President in reorganizing state governments since civil government is more in accord with
American institutions (and, moreover, required whenever possible) and since the Constitution
provides for derivation of this power. Deprived of all Constitutionally valid local government,
the rebellious region falls under the jurisdiction of Congress precisely as any other (pre-state)
territory would.
In concluding, Sumner noted that slavery provided the "motive" for rebellion. (Our
contemporaries may argue this is debatable, but for us and Sumner's contemporaries, North
and South, it was indisputable.) Yet the Constitution itself makes no reference to it.
Accordingly, it is, he stressed, strictly a local custom, a product of positive law. Thus, in
territories under the jurisdiction of Congress, subject solely to fundamental law, slavery has no
place.
Sumner's defense of the priority of Congressional reconstruction over Presidential restoration,
later to animate Congressional legislation, was to be shortly trumped by Lincoln. On 8
December 1863, the President delivered his annual message to the opening session of the
38th Congress and, accompanying it, he issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and
Reconstruction. Together they constituted a practical rejoinder to Sumner.
Lincoln's Riposte
Gettysburg had demonstrated that even eastern Union armies could best Confederate troops
in a major battle. The surrender of Vicksburg to Grant's army cut the South in half effectively
stopping the flow of men, matriel and food stuffs from the West to rebel forces in the East
and gave Union forces complete control over the Mississippi River. The capture of
Chattanooga put the North in command of all of Tennessee from where penetration of the
lower South, particularly an assault on Atlanta, could be undertaken. These military events of
the latter half of 1863 permitted Lincoln for the first time to formulate policy that was not
merely driven by events. With this breathing space, he was freer to maneuver between
factions, and to allow his own Presidential ambitions to enter into and shape his political plans.
Still, as he would discover, under these more optimal conditions his restoration policy was still
largely shaped by the tempo of local politics wherever restoration was concretely undertaken.
In fall 1863, Lincoln attempted to reorganize Louisiana along lines that rewrote the state's
fundamental laws in order to incorporate some form of emancipation. Successfully
reorganized, Louisiana, Lincoln's prototypical militarily governed ex-rebel state, could have
served as a model for Arkansas, Tennessee and later Mississippi. The President encouraged
the Free State party in Louisiana, a party that housed both radical and moderate elements, to
call elections for delegates to a convention that would draft a new constitution. The Free State
party was opposed by an organization of pro-slavery planters-turned-conservative-Unionists
who were willing to declare secession illegal and void the Louisiana's ordinance of secession,
but who desired state reorganization on the unchanged basis of the status quo antebellum.

After initial efforts at registering voters, Free State party officials recognized they did not have
the support to call an election for delegates, and postponed the action while continuing to
attempt to register voters. The pro-slavery elements in Louisiana were evidently a good deal
stronger and more popular than the political tendency supported by Lincoln. By the end of the
year movement forward on rewriting the state's constitution was at a standstill. Slow
movement on the same objective, for different reasons, but with similar outcomes in Arkansas
and Tennessee, forced Lincoln to reconsider his approach to restoration. (In Tennessee,
Grant's successes culminating in the late November capture of Chattanooga had opened up
possibilities that military governor Andrew Johnson was reluctant to embrace - even under
prodding from Lincoln - as testified to by his correspondence with Montgomery Blair.)430
In his message to Congress and his Proclamation of Amnesty in early December, Lincoln
swung rightward. In his decree, he openly indicated he was amendable to different
approaches to restoration as long as they committed the recaptured districts, as nuclei of
"reconstructed" state governments, to abolition of slavery. With 100,000 freemen in the Union
army (half of whom were in arms, the other half engaged as teamsters, on bridge construction
and rail crews, etc.) by the end of 1863, Lincoln had come this far. While by this time he
repeatedly asserted words to the effect that, "We cannot turn our backs on freedmen who
have come to our aid," his newly acquired antislavery scruples were based on a political
calculation: With victory finally within grasp, Lincoln could throw it all away only if he ignored a
newly freepeople. The resistance of the working classes in eastern cities to the draft and farm
boys in the old West to fighting for black emancipation, as well as the organized and growing
opposition by peace Democratic state legislatures and Copperhead newspapers, had left him
heavily dependent upon the universally Unionist freemen. Thus, "coming this far" was an
absolute minimum. "This far," then was clearly a fait accompli largely created by the selfemancipatory activity of free blacks and slaves-becoming-a-freepeople on the ground. It, that
is, some form of emancipation (and Lincoln was still offering the possibility of gradual
emancipation to more reactionary areas such as Arkansas), was the new basis on, the newly
constituted terms of reference from, which northern Unionists were compelled to take their
point of departure by the end of 1863. It was a measure of the extent to which the war to save
and restore the Union had merged into and had become indistinguishable from a war to free
slaves, a revolutionary war directed at (the largest portion of) planter property. The sociohistorical dynamic generating conflict and war between contradictory societies had finally
become conscious among ruling class social groups in the North (and, as we shall later see,
among western soldiers); and this consciousness was directing military action while
simultaneously attempting to hold back the floodgate (limit the freedom of a freepeople, and
secure property broadly speaking): Lincoln kept a military-based, Constitutionally dubious
restoration policy in his own hands because he was self-consciously the first and last line of
defense of property in the political system.431
Thus, at this moment a limited emancipation policy was as far as Lincoln went. He stated that
"any provision which may be adopted by such State government in relation to the freed
people of such State, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for
their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their
present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the
national Executive." This was the first version of "home rule" which southern Bourbon
politicians in the later years of the Reconstruction period proper would cultivate - pass a few
430 For Lincoln's difficulties in restoring Louisiana, Belz, Ibid, 143-147, 150-152 (and 152-153 for Arkansas and

Tennessee); also Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 21-26. For Johnson's ungrounded fear that Lincoln had
gone over to the radicals, specifically with regard to reducing former states to territories, Belz, Ibid, 154-155.
431Lincoln himself provided the figure of 100,000 freedmen in military service, Collected Works, 7:49-50.

fine sounding laws and get the Yanks off our backs, but keep the "nigger" in his place. But
home rule on the basis of emancipation was just the beginning.432
Lincoln's plan for restoration indicated that ten percent of the number of votes cast in a state
in the 1860 Presidential election would be an adequate basis for participation in formation of a
new state government. Obviously, there was not even a thought to black suffrage; but, just as
obvious to contemporaries, states that re-entered on this basis would be states who would be
electorally beholding to the Lincoln (as would be representatives of these states in the House
and Senate). Voters would have to take, and hence that government was to established on
the basis of, an oath of loyalty - to the Constitution, to the Union, and to all Congressional laws
and Presidential decrees passed during the war (unless revoked by the Supreme Court). The
oath was open to everyone (and proven loyalists had to take it also). Thus, it was intended
and functioned as a condition of amnesty and pardon for all those who had participated in the
acts of rebellion against the Union. These terms of pardon, moreover, assured those rebels of
restoration of all property, excepting slaves. The entire process presupposed continuation of
military governorships and largely reduced reconstruction to a pardons policy. (This was the
policy that Andrew Johnson as President attempted to effect.) Thus, it secured Lincoln's
personal or, more formally, Presidential, control, over the entire process of restoration. This
policy refused, excepting slavery, to recast state laws and constitutions, allowed for repeal of
the emancipation decree and oaths by the courts, and permitted the states to deal with
freepeople as free according to their own lights. Generally speaking, it eviscerated
reconstruction by rendering it a matter of individual pardons.433
On a novel political terrain where emancipation was militarily necessary and socially
unstoppable, Lincoln recapitulated the policy prescriptions drawn from his message to the
Special Session of Congress nearly 2 years earlier. Most importantly, he continued to hold
the reins which effectively meant the party of property was still best positioned to determine
the overall shape of the postwar settlement. The party's informal members in Congress,
outside those dwindling number of recalcitrant border state Unionists, approved, and the large
newspapers, the house organs of the party (e.g., New York Times), voiced their
acceptance.434
Radicals such as Sumner, Chandler and Wilson, too, also nodded their assent for Lincoln's
reconstruction policy. Sumner, elated with Presidential support for emancipation, for the time
at least put the best possible gloss on the message and decree. Later in December, James
Ashley put forward a bill in the House, one representing the consensus of radical opinion, that
was intended, seen and understood as a specification of Lincoln's proclamation. This bill
rejected the central components of his territorialization bill of 1862: According to the latter,
when the rebellion states had ceased to exist as states, slavery similarly no longer had (local)
legal foundation. Treason and criminality lay to the side of states, not individuals.
Reconstruction entailed a provisional civilian government administered nationally. For the
former (late December 1863) bill, states still existed, slavery was to be prohibited on the basis
of the Constitutionally-mandated, federal objective of providing states with a republican form
of government, individuals were charged with treason, and the use of military governors under
Congressional control was accepted as the means for reconstructing seceded state
governments. This radical bill only differed from Lincoln's plan in providing, most importantly,
for inclusion of freemen in participation in reconstructing those governments, while more
432For the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, Ibid, 7:53-56 (citation, emphasis added, appears on 55).
433For contemporary comments that noted the one-tenth formula neatly dovetailed with Lincoln's ambition to be

reelected, Belz, Ibid, 164, 173, 187-188, 234.

434For conservative acceptance of Lincoln's reconstruction policy, Ibid, 167, for the newspapers, 169-170, 171-172,
and for the radicals, 166-167, 170, 171-173.

rigorously excluding rebels from enfranchisement. Once, however, the depth of southern
resistance to emancipation became clearer, the logical direction of Lincoln's plan (entailing
heavy reliance on Presidentially directed military authorities) would be become more visible.
Radicals, in defense of a more thoroughgoing policy that would secure the foundations of
emancipation, would be compelled to assert the authority of Congress in opposition to the
Presidency.435
Louisiana Events and Congressional-Presidential Confrontation
Lincoln had not been happy with the slow progress in restoration of a Unionist state
government in Louisiana. Since that progress had ground to halt altogether by December
1863, he had also lost confidence in his military governor, Gen. George F. Shepley. To make
matters worse, Shepley, it appears, leaned toward the small radical faction in the Free State
party. Lincoln was in regular communication with the military commander of the Department of
the Gulf, Nathaniel Banks, which included Louisiana and whose headquarters were in New
Orleans. On 24 December 1863, he authorized Banks, in what both took to be a mere
clarification of the latter's powers in Louisiana, to take complete charge and proceed with all
speed in implementing the policy outlined in his amnesty decree.
Meanwhile, radicals of the Free State party had managed to hold a convention of "Friends of
Freedom of the State of Louisiana" as a prelude to delegate election for a constitutional
convention which they anticipated Governor Shepley would call. But radicals were by-passed
by Banks, who instead issued a call for a (22) February (1864) election of a governor and six
other major state officials. Banks, following Lincoln's plan - particularly the provisions for an
oath, allowed former Confederate sympathizers and military personnel to take the oath and
thereby participate in the elections. At the same time, he studiously ignored not only the
freemen but also the historically free, 10,000 free people of color in New Orleans - a large
number of whom were both well-educated and substantial property owners. Banks, and
Lincoln, backed the Free State party moderate, Michael Hahn who, holding the center against
radicals he condemned for advocating black suffrage and against conservative Unionists he
stigmatized as Copperheads, easily won the election. Significantly, the class coalition at the
basis of Hahn's power, (re)constructed according to the Louisiana historian Joe Taylor by
Banks, consisted of New Orleans laborers, in particular the huge dock proletariat, and loyalist
yeoman farmers. With over 11,300 votes cast, more than 20% of the 1860 count, Lincoln
recognized the election of Hahn as governor under the state constitution of 1852 and, in
addition, relieved Shepley and replaced him with Hahn as military governor.436
In practice, Lincoln decree of amnesty had come to mean that he would take a more active
role in administering, and lean more heavily on his military officials to implement, his
restoration policy. Free State party radicals, and by mid-February their counterparts in
Congress, condemned Lincoln's support for Banks' actions. These condemnations were made
on the grounds that, first, in so acting Lincoln recognized the old state constitution and placed
the military unchecked above all civil power. He, second, thereby denied Louisiana a
republican form of government. This, in turn, might, third, allow slavery in by the backdoor
since reactionaries (who would uphold slavery) could be elected from New Orleans and
surrounding parishes, Union occupied territory on 1 January 1863 and hence not subject to
the Emancipation decree. Clearly, Hahn's power in Louisiana rested on the bayonets of Union
soldiers. (In the western part of the state, a Confederate government continued to operate
until the end of war, and regularly raided the interior which was factually a no man's land.)
435For Ashley's bill of December 1863, Ibid, 173-184.
436For events in Louisiana, Taylor, Ibid, 24-32.

Congressional criticisms echoed those of Free State party radicals and by late February the
stage was set for a confrontation between the President and Congressional radicals.437
The confrontation came to fruition in an unexpected veto of the Wade-Davis bill, a
Congressional act developed during spring 1864. The bill originated and retained the shape it
had taken in the House under the authorship of Henry Winter Davis. Demonstrating the impact
of the position developed by Charles Sumner in his Atlantic Monthly article the previous fall,
the overriding Constitutional concern of the bill was with legal continuity, and thus for this
purpose it continued the legislative trend since the defeat of the territorialization bills in the last
Congress (a trend, by the way, clearly in opposition to the entire drift of Sumner's argument).
That is, the bill assumed rebel states had in some respect remained "in" the Union, and it
based legislative authority on an expansive interpretation of Congressional powers under the
"guarantee clause" of the Constitution (which secured a "republican form" of governance for
all states). While much less radical than the territorialization bills (particularly Ashley's) of 1862
and while sharing some of the basic assumptions of Lincoln's decree, the Davis bill differed
from the Amnesty Proclamation on the following counts. First, it provided for a civil rather
military governor, one who would register voters, hold delegate elections to a constitutional
convention, and then call for that convention. Second, the abolition of slavery would be written
into that constitution, and legal guarantees of the freedom of freepeople would be secured.
Third, however, suffrage would be restricted to qualified whites only. Fourth, provision was
made for a greater restriction on white eligibility for voting (since all persons who held military
and civil offices in the Confederacy or in rebel state governments would be disenfranchised).
Fifth, an "iron-clad" oath (binding oath takers to swear to never having voluntarily taken up
arms against the Union) would be imposed in contradistinction to Lincoln's prospective oath
(which merely required its takers to swear future allegiance to the Union). Lastly, by way of a
later (4 May) amendment, a full fifty percent of the registered population was required to take
this oath before elections to a constitutional convention could be held.438
While Davis himself was considered a radical, the bill did not meet with the approval of
extreme radicals such as Stevens and Kelley. They criticized it for precisely the concession it
made to the conservative perspective, namely, for its partial recognition of rebel districts as
states with (some) rights under the Constitution. But it did meet with the approval of the
Republican party center as well as all party conservatives who opposed slavery. In the
Senate, the bill was seen through committee to the floor by Ben Wade, and after a good deal
of maneuvering that initially included a rejection of the bill on a vote, it was approved. It was
sent to the President for his signature on 2 July, two days prior to the Independence Day
session end of Congress. Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill offering no explanation for his action.
Then four days later (8 July), he promulgated a proclamation. He indicated he let the bill die
because it contradicted his restoration policy in Louisiana (and Arkansas), while
simultaneously declaring the Congressional plan for reconstruction was satisfactory and he
would implement it should any state decide to adopt it. Broadly, Republicans were shocked by
his pocket veto and, more narrowly, radicals were infuriated by his public statement. With
437For Free State party radical criticisms of the Lincoln-Banks policy, Belz, Ibid, 191-193. Banks had resolved the

problem of recognizing an antebellum constitution that in turn had recognized slavery by simply issuing a military
decree voiding those provisions which did so. In so doing, he made explicit the martial law basis of the new state
government, Ibid, 190 n. 31.
438Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution states, "The United States shall guarantee to every State of this Union a
Republican Form of Government ..." For the expansion interpretation of the clause which granted Congress a
"plenary, supreme, unlimited political jurisdiction" (Davis), Belz, Ibid, 207-208; legal guarantees for black freedom
included the use of writs of habeas corpus in federal courts to lay aside any claims of ex-masters for involuntary labor
and a criminal code identical for blacks and whites, see Ibid, 201; for the features that distinguished the Wade-Davis
bill from Lincoln's amnesty proclamation, Ibid, 200-203, 210.

Congress in recess until December, the bill was dead. Having gained an upper hand against
the radicals, Lincoln would be again weakened by the turn of military events.439
The 1864 Campaign Propels Revival and Decline of Opposition to Lincoln
Lincoln had appointed Grant as general of the Union armies toward the end of the winter just
past. Shortly after his appointment, Grant traveled to Virginia (Brandy Station) to meet with
Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac. There he devised a four-pronged,
coordinated strategy aimed at destroying the Confederate armies in the field, not merely at
taking this or that city. This was new in Union military thinking and finally signaled a really
determined effort to victoriously end the war (and it also, we might add, implied a recognition
of the Confederacy as an independent State-form because it suggested a far superior
understanding of the well-springs of Confederate power, the essential armed, military basis of
the Confederacy as a State). This strategy entailed sending Franz Sigel's army up the
Shenandoah Valley; it had Ben Butler lead his army up James River in southeastern Virginia;
Sherman's forces were instructed to advance on Atlanta from Chattanooga; and, Meade, with
his 110,000 man Army of the Potomac and with Grant among the troops and actually in
command, was ordered to follow and engage Lee whose army was situated in eastern
Virginia.
On 5-6 May 1864, the Army of the Potomac moved toward the Rapidan River and engaged
70,000 Confederate soldiers in tangled thicket known as "The Wilderness." After two days of
some of the bloodiest fighting of the war - numerically more costly to the North
(proportionately more costly to the Confederacy), Union losses totaled some 17,000 men. Still,
on 7 May, Grant ordered Meade's forces to move south, in pursuit of Lee's army which had
withdraw. Unlike as in the past, there was to be no retreat. On 12 May, the two armies meet
again at Spotsylvania. A battle over the breastworks of well-entrenched Confederate troops
waged back and forth for days. Combined losses came to some 12,000 men. Lee ordered his
men to fall back. For three weeks, the two armies move in lockstep, the Union army now on
the offensive. On 3 June, having dug in at Cold Harbor near the Chickahomany River, the
Confederate soldiery was again confronted by Union forces. Nearly 60,000 Union troops
launch early morning attack. They were riddled to pieces, with losses put at somewhere
between 5,600-7,000 men, most of whom fell mostly in the first eight minutes! For 3 days,
both sides lay confronting each other while the dead rotted and wounded died in no man's
land between the two sides. On 6 June, Union forces slip away and headed for Petersburg, a
communications and resupply center for central Virginia and Richmond. Lee, for the first time
misjudging the movement of the Union forces, pushed his forces toward Richmond. On 15
June, 15,000 advanced Union forces under Gen. W.F. Baldy Smith overran a tiny rebel army
force holding the northeastern approaches Petersburg. The general in charge, mired with his
own internal caution generated doubts, halted the assault. The halt allowed Lee who had
already recognized his error, to turn south and invest the trenches surrounding Petersburg.
Two days of renewed fighting ended in stalemate. The Union forces dug in for a siege
opposite the foe. Building gigantic earthworks, the Confederates with smaller losses in the
month of battles but ill-prepared to absorb those losses had no choice and followed suit. Lee,
however, did had a strategic motive: He hoped to hold on in a siege posture until the national
election in the North - still almost four months away. A Democratic party victory, he correctly
reasoned, would likely mean the North would sue for peace. His calculations, at first,
appeared prophetic.
Since Cold Harbor, the Northern press had been screaming that Grant was a "butcher." Fiftyfour thousand men had been lost, as prisoners, wounded or dead, since the campaign began.
439For extreme radical criticisms of Wade-Davis, Ibid, 206; for responses to Lincoln's pocket veto, Ibid, 225, 227-228.

Now with a siege, that is, with no clear-cut Union advantage consequent upon these terrible
losses, the delay worked against Lincoln, appearing to adversely effect his reelection
chances.
The situation on the fields of battle got worse. Between 6 May and mid-June, Sherman's
forces advanced toward Atlanta. By employing flanking tactics, Sherman's army, numerically
preponderate in relation to Confederate forces under Joseph Johnston, was able to gain
ground in the direction of Atlanta (though not to bring on a decisive battle in which the rebel
army could be crippled). But on 27 June with Johnston's forces dug in at Kennesaw Mountain,
Sherman changed tactics and ordered at straight-up, stand-up attack against entrenched
forces in an attempt to win that decisive battle. The 13,000 man Union assault was beaten
back with the ease of shooting ducks paddling on a pond. On 30 July, in an incident dubbed
by the northern press "the Crater," a large, Union-engineered explosion under Confederate
lines around Petersburg was followed by an ill-conceived and poorly executed advance into a
gap in Confederate lines. The number of captured and killed Union soldiers, especially blacks,
was large relative to the size of the operation. Meanwhile, Sigel's forces had been routed in
the Shenandoah Valley, Butler's were stalemated as Grant's right wing north of the James,
and Grant was just "sitting" - laying siege to Petersburg. After "the Crater" incident, northern
newspaper again referred to Grant as a "butcher."440
Yet the criticisms of Grant and his armies did not effect the renomination of Lincoln. The party
was controlled by its managers, staunch conservatives - members of the informal party of
property embedded in the formal Republican organization. These men dominated delegate
selection. The boon for radical Salmon Chase, Lincoln's Treasury Secretary, never really
amounted to anything, and Lincoln was easily renominated. Lincoln dropped Hannibal Hamlin,
anti-slavery radical and Vice-President during his first Administration, from the ticket. Andrew
Johnson was selected in order to secure the border state and war Democratic votes, and the
party platform studiously avoided mention of reconstruction thereby effectively endorsing
Lincoln's policy.
Instead radical opposition came from outside the convention, in the issuance of the 5 August
Wade-Davis manifesto. The document accused Lincoln of blocking Congressional action on
reconstruction. The President did so, first, by attempting to reverse Congressional judgments
in rejecting military, legally unsanctioned governments in Arkansas and Louisiana (both
Houses had refused to seat their representatives). These, as the manifesto noted, were
governments altogether lacking popular foundations. Second, Lincoln blocked Congressional
action by negating the legislative will of Congress on questions of slavery, the political
standing of ex-rebels, and the Confederate debt.
Lincoln had, by decreeing the Wade-Davis bill merely one possible form of adoptable
reconstruction plan, asserted the primacy of Presidential restoration over Congressional
reconstruction in order to keep control over the re-entry of southern states in his own hands
and out of those of radicals. In so doing, he was consistent with the pledges he made at the
outset of his Presidency, pledges for which he retained the loyalty of the informal party of
property, pledges to deter attacks on private property in the means of production and to
implement the Whigs aspects of the party program (affirmation of resumption of federally440Gen. Ambrose Burnside, on his own initiative, allowed miners amongst his men attempt to burrow a tunnel under

Confederate lines, the purposes of which was to sow confusion, creating a gap in the rebel lines, after exploding
charges in the tunnel. It was exploded, and it took an hour for three Union divisions to rush into the opening (and not,
as they should have, around it). Poorly planned, poorly organized and executed, Union soldiers were trapped in the
crater and surrendered - but among them were black soldiers whom the Confederated slaughtered during and after a
surrender. Over 1,000 died, 1,100 were captured, total losses were placed at 4,500 men. Burnside was granted leave,
never to be recalled, and the commanding officer, Gen. Ledlier, drunk while it all happened, was relieved of
command.

guided economic development, including reconstitution of a central bank, immediately upon

the cession of hostilities). The authors of the Wade-Davis manifesto had in producing their
document come into conflict with the imperatives of the men who dominated the Republican
party, not the least of which was the President. Both authors were motivated by deep
dissatisfaction with the President. Henry Winter Davis was antagonistic to Lincoln not only
because the President had not supported his bill but because he refused to support him in his
forthcoming electoral struggle with the Blairs in Maryland. Ben Wade differences were greatly
magnified by the frustration accumulated over three long years of struggles against Lincoln.
Their manifesto was, in fact, a call to those radicals to abandon Lincoln for a third party based
on one of their own (rumored to be Ben Butler). Published just prior to the national Democratic
convention, it was an attempt to get the extreme war Democrats (presumably men of the
character of Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's War Secretary) to join them in forming a true Union
party in opposition to that headed by Lincoln and, of course, that of the peace Democrats.
The radical response, while privately largely in agreement with the manifesto, was publicly
lukewarm at best. The Republican center, the party rightwing and, of course, the house
organs of the informal party of property, especially the New York Times, deflected the
legitimate and accurate criticisms of Lincoln by questioning the loyalty of Davis and Wade.
Meanwhile, the northern Democracy, especially the party's peace wing, pursued its own
course. Nominating the Union army's former de facto Lieutenant General, George McClellan by now a soft war Democrat, peace Democrats ran a Copperhead campaign, calling for an
end to the draft, an armistice and the restoration of slavery, on the ground while sidetracking
criticisms of treacherous behavior with the presence and speeches of a very unhappy
McClellan.441
By 22 July, Sherman's forces had laid siege to Atlanta. Confederate forces, now under the
command of the young Texan John Bell Hood, were defeated three times in front of Atlanta
and their losses ran heavy - over 20,000 men or a third of Hood's army. After a month long
artillery siege beginning 31 August, Sherman's forces broke the grip of Hood's Confederates
on the city. Torching Atlanta, the western armies undertook preparations to began an eastward
march to the coast (Savannah). Further north, soldiers under Phil Sheridan, now commanding
the 45,000 man force in the Shenandoah Valley, razed crops, tore up rails, drove off rebelsupporting farmers and their herds in pursuit of Jubal Early's Confederate force. On 19
September, a clash of Union and Confederates at Winchester, Virginia in the northern end of
the Shenandoah Valley forced rebels to withdraw.
By the first week of September, these battlefield outcomes had already condemned the
sponsors of the Wade-Davis manifesto to abysmal failure in their efforts to unseat Lincoln's
hold as the standard-bearer of Unionism. Thereafter, party members (with tacit support from
border state Unionists and a goodly number of war Democrats) rallied to Lincoln and closed
ranks behind his leadership in the Presidential contest.
On 18 October, Early's Confederate forces engaged Union forces at Cedar Creek, Virginia.
After initial rebel success, Sheridan rallied his troops, re-formed his lines, lines which held,
and pushed Confederates back until they were forced to flee, leaving the Shenandoah Valley
for good. On the practical presuppositions of Republican party unity and the presence of a
popular border state, war Democrat on the ticket, against the background of the Union
successes in early and middle September, it was this victory that secured Lincoln's reelection.
441For the political maneuvering surrounding the Wade-Davis manifesto, Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade,

226-229, wherein part of the manifesto is reprinted, and Belz, Ibid, 228-231, esp. notes 44, 46; for the charges
against the two radicals in the press, Trefousse, Ibid, 227.

The Military End of the Confederacy Vastly Strengthens Lincoln

On 16 November, having burnt everything of military value in Atlanta, without communications
and resupply, intend on living off the land and laying waste to all southern crop and crop fields
in their path, Sherman's forces, 60,000 men, begin a march to Savannah. Confederate
commander John Bell Hood meanwhile moved north to join Bedford Forrest in order to invade
Tennessee in hope of diverting Sherman. On 30 November and 5 December, Confederate
forces suffered defeats at Franklin and then Nashville, Tennessee. In the battles' aftermath
(which included further, less well-known confrontations such as East Point, Jonesboro, Bear
Creek, etc.), Hood's army began to disintegrate under hammer blows from Union forces. By
Christmas Eve, 1864, Sherman's forces held Savannah. The population of freepeople
following in the wake of his army had swollen to 25,000. On 17 January 1865, Sherman's
soldiery moved north into South Carolina, using the same tactics as in Georgia. On 17
February, Columbia, South Carolina fell to Sherman's army. By mid-March, the Union force
under Sherman was well established in North Carolina. On the 19th, a Confederate force
under Joseph Johnston confronted a Union army five times larger at Bentonville and was
forced to retreat. After nine months of confrontation over siege fortifications surrounding
Petersburg, Grant's forces, which, on their left flank, had extended themselves to the south
and then to the west, had ballooned to 125,000, while massive defections had shrunk Lee's
army to 35,000. On 25 March, Lee's forces attempted to break out in order to link up with
Johnston's men in the North Carolina hills. The break out was permitted, but movement
southward was repelled. Hungry and raged, Lee's residue army moved steadily west losing
more men to food foraging. A series of hopeless encounters ended with the 9 April surrender
at Appomattox.
As the Second Session of the 38th Congress re-assembled in early December 1864, Lincoln's
position in relation to radicals, and specifically in pursuit of his restoration policy, was greatly
strengthened by the unity achieved in closing ranks behind him in the fall canvas, by his reelection, and finally by the Union victories at Cedar Creek in October and Atlanta in
November. The course of military events in the winter only strengthened him further. During
the session, Congress and the Executive had been able to agree on two major pieces of
legislation. The first was the Thirteen Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery
everywhere in the United States. Enacted 31 January 1865, this amendment, an enormous
achievement given attitudes in the North at the outset of war, was not just important for its
intrinsic significance but because, in incorporating emancipation into the organic law of the
nation, the objective, slave-freeing outcome of Lincoln's military emancipation policy was
placed beyond all positive law, custom and local institutions. The second piece of legislation
was the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands passed
by both Houses of Congress, and signed by Lincoln, all on the same day, 3 March 1865. The
Freedmen's Bureau, discussed in detail below, was designed to assist a freepeople in their
transition from conditions of slavery to their new status, presumably, as wage laborers in a
capitalist market society. With the attempt to enact reconstruction legislation, however, conflict
reemerged.442
In the House, James Ashley, representing the radical-controlled Select Committee on the
Rebellious States, proposed on 15 December a trade-off with Lincoln's reinvigorated
conservative bloc, namely, support for Lincoln's ten percent, militarily-upheld state government
in Louisiana in return for support for a modified version of the Wade-Davis bill that included
black suffrage. Lincoln objected to the suffrage provision, and the bulk of the Republican
members that had in the last session supported Congressional reconstruction embodied by
the Wade-Davis bill now fell into line behind him. For nearly two months, Ashley attempted to
442For the Freedmen's Bureau, see chapter 10, "Role of the Army and Freedmen's Bureau," below.

expand the support for his bill by introducing different amendments that ranged back and forth
from restrictions on freemen enfranchisement (such as its limitation to Union soldiers only) to
recognition of the state governments of Louisiana and Arkansas with severe strictures (such
as the disenfranchisement of Confederate officeholders, Constitutional prohibition of slavery
and an equal rights guarantee for blacks, and repudiation of the Confederate debt). Generally
speaking radicals opposed the restrictions on black suffrage while the informal party of
property as a bloc objected to strictures on recognition of Lincoln's governments. Because
support for Lincoln was in practice support for Presidential restoration, the conservative bloc
constituted a massive fifth column inside the Congress. Yet the limitations of radicalism along
the lines advocated by Henry Winter Davis, that is, slavery opposition and black suffrage
support based in a Unionism recognizing seceded states as states in the Union (thereby
sharing assumptions with Lincoln), also became clear: In the extreme, a trade-off recognizing
Lincoln's ten percent governments compromised the position of loyal men, southern Unionists,
by allowing Confederates sympathizers, supporters and active military officers and
officeholders to assume positions in and eventually to dominate the government. In fact, this
extreme was precisely the direction toward which Lincoln's policy would evolve in the early
spring. At any rate, the bill was doomed to failure in the House as peace Democrats and the
Republican representation as a whole to the right of the radicals, a truly revealing if temporary
alliance, voted as a bloc to kill it.443
In the Senate, the test of Lincoln's restoration devolved on seating two elected senators from
Louisiana. Radicals, led by Sumner, Wade, Zach Chandler, Jacob Howard and B. Gratz
Brown, arguing Presidential reconstruction constituted an usurpation of Congressional
authority, were able to successfully block seating the Louisiana members-elect through a
filibuster. The Congressional session ended in early April with the question of reconstruction
still undecided. Lincoln, on the other hand, in the last public address of his life on the issue
(made 11 April 1865) reinforced this undecided character of the question by asserting simply
"the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union." The
indecision, in fact, suited largest number of members on both sides of the issue, as well as
"informed public opinion" as formulated by the big city newspapers, since they wished to wait
gauge the temper and loyalty of southerners as it would play out in the rapidly approaching
immediate aftermath of the war.444

443For Ashley's bill, Belz, Ibid, 251f.

444For the Senate situation and filibuster, Ibid, 269-272; for Lincoln's statement, Collected Works, 8:403; and for the

wait-and-see attitude prevalent in the North, Belz, Ibid, 275-276.

Two Notes
on Positions with Respect to Reconstruction in the Immediate Aftermath of Defeat
[Property and Reconstruction]
In that aftermath, southerners also offered a response to the question of relations of the
secession to the Union. The southern theory held that the attempt to establish "state
sovereignty" had in fact been frustrated by the outcome of the war, thereby proving the
inviolability of the federal Union, making it imperative for southerners to submit to
constitutional authority along the lines of the status quo ante in order to restore the states in
as quick a fashion as possible.445
President Johnson, on the other hand, retreating to Lincoln's position at the outset of the war a view, as we have seen, favored by border state Unionists, held that the states had never
been "outside" the Union in the first place. After all, how could they since the Union was
"indissoluble?" Thus, once restored, the states would enjoy all rights they had ever had as
states (that is, when restoration was completed and the states, employing a favorite border
state Unionist metaphor, "reawakened" - having been raised out of a "sleep"), full, unimpaired
states' rights would become once again operative. Having thought their status during the war
metaphysically on the model of "sleep," which we take to having the meaning of a "false 'state'
of secession," Johnson declared the states as states during the war were merely dormant.
The act of secession was, then, not undertaken by states, but, consistent with the entire
doctrine tenaciously clung to by conservative Unionists against all wartime experience, the
treacherous act of individuals. Individual treachery "proved" the states' relations to the Union
were not dissolved. Beyond, then, reforming the states through the time-honored method of
electoral delegate selection, a constitutional convention to rewrite the old southern
constitutions (in order to incorporate the Thirteen Amendment abolishing slavery) and the
election of new legislatures and governorships, the central problem of "reconstruction"
according to Johnson was clarifying the status of individual rebels. This could be handled
through the Presidential authority of pardon. Accordingly, individuals would be punished or
(Presidentially) pardoned as the case may be, while the states would be practically
reintegrated in an expedient manner.446
During the early months of his Administration, Johnson would, like Lincoln did, take great
liberties with (actually contravening) allegedly inviolable states' rights under cover of the
Presidential war powers. But he was consistent with that doctrine to the extend that, once
restored, he clearly recognized from the beginning that even the President would have little
authority to intervene in the affairs of those states. The bankruptcy of the entire perspective
was nonetheless obvious: From the beginning, that is, while actively engaged in Presidential
reconstruction by decree, Johnson maintained the fiction that even the President could not
compel states to construct their franchise according to notions foreign to each state, its
legislature and, at bottom, its qualified voting populace. This position, of course, expressed his
commitment to the central practical concerns of the informal party of property, if not to that
party itself; moreover, it neatly dovetailed with his class stand, that is, his non-planter southern
white's fear-based, unmitigated hatred of the Negro, slave or freeman. And this position in
relation to a freepeople would allow the President to retreat from his romanticized and
politically Jacksonian, yeomanly predilections to a position that recapitulated arguments for
and attempted reinstitution of planter domination of the old class coalition.447
445For the southerner Constitutional view, Erik McKitrik, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 97.
446 For Johnson's Constitutional views, McKitrick, Ibid, 97, 102, 109.
447Johnson's retreat, its motivations and its consequences for his subsequent policy, is dealt with in the sections "The

Role of the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau" and "The Reconstitution of White Mastery" in chapter 10, below.

Johnson's usage of vitalistic metaphors - such as "remaining asleep but not fully 'dead,'"
having "'their [the states'] life-breath ... only ... suspended,'" "fully 'awaking' in all senses" suggests the ultimate incoherency of his position and all those that attempted to logically
sidestep the historically constituted problem of secession in relation to the Constitution: The
crucial problematic, the historical fact that the states had actually left the Union, could not be
mastered by conservative theory. While Lincoln merely logically contravened fact, among
border state Unionists, the problem was breached metaphorically and could not be confronted
head-on, since to do would have required openly and publicly admitting that all efforts to place
emancipation on the firm ground of socio-economic reconstruction had be abandoned for the
defense of property. Both the southern and Johnson's "Constitutionalist" perspectives, then,
never touched upon, rather in their hurry to achieve rapid, painless Union reintegration they
denied, the central, historically factual problematic created by secession and war.
Whether conservative, southern or "strict Constitutionalist," a politically counterrevolutionary
approach to restoration neatly dovetailed (after all, it was fashioned) with the intent to restore
the southern status quo ante under the guise of "state rights," which, as we noted earlier, had
long before undergone a metamorphosis from the defense of rural liberty to an ideological
rationalization for slavery: The autonomy of the rural freeholder had been undermined by the
expansion of capitalist production and market exchanges, and the conceptually unassimilated
status of this long historical process in which the freeholder had become dependent was
precisely what rendered the concept of "state rights" ideological. Theoretically, "state rights"
rested on an appropriation from the ancients Greeks mediated by Italian civic humanists and
English republicans, namely, the historically transcended pre-18th century conception in which
social life was determined, because subsumed, by the organization and structure of the
political community (State). This was a theory, that of the "Founders," whose relevancy had
been superceded by the destruction of a social order materially based upon oikos (household)
economies, by the (originally) exchange-based integration of "civil society" and, by mid-19th
century, the production-based formation and integration of a nascent industrial capitalist
society.
There is an aura of unreality about all the Constitutionally faithful theories of reconstruction:
Upon examining them - especially those baldly asserting that the states had never been out of
the Union in the first place, such is the simple, overwhelming impression. To logically attempt
to jump over history or as it were, fly in its face - ignoring de facto secession, establishment of
a separate, distinct and well-functioning Confederacy and, then, the waging of four years of
bloody war against the federal Union - is to, in theoretical terms, generate an ideological
construct. Because that construct was so oblivious to real historical movement, asserted the
absolute primacy of an abstract, lifeless, and invisible and irrelevant piece of paper that had
been contravened, contradicted and rendered meaningless by fact, all anti-reductionist
concern for the integrity of the ideas of the parties of property was (and remains)
sentimentality bordering on apology.
At any rate, all the discussion of whether the states where "in" or "out" largely missed the
point: The question was a practical one and could not be Constitutionally decided; and, it had
been practically decided. At the end of the war, a "state of nature" in the language of early
bourgeois theorists, reigned in the South. Devastated, bewildered and in disarray at war's
end, the peoples of the South were not only without governments but did not exist as political
communities or even as civil societies for several week and, in some cases, months. In other
words, prior to being either "in" or "out," in the immediate aftermath of the war, the states did
not even exist. The question concerning the states status could only answered in the
conservative fashion because the Union armies had won this practical struggle. Counterhistorically the question, like the Constitution itself, would have demonstrated its real

unequivocal meaninglessness to all parties involved in the counterfactual event of a southern

victory.448
[Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Reconstruction]
The end of the war created the propitious moment, and the advanced development of the
Lincoln-Johnson restoration policy undertaken by the new President rendered it urgent, to lay
out the full, extreme radical reconstruction program. This task was undertaken by Thaddeus
Stevens. Stevens was a brilliant parliamentarian, forceful speaker and unsurpassed caustic
wit, and historically the moral yet pragmatic center of Republican radicalism in the House.
In three speeches, the first given in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 6 September
1865, and the other two on the floor of the House on 18 December 1865 and 10 March 1866,
Stevens addressed the range of issues involved in reconstruction and brought the full force of
radical thinking to bear on this burning issue.449 In a programmatic sense, these speeches
overcame the central theoretical shortcoming of previous radical position, namely, the failure
to relate secession to the Union and the Constitution in such a manner that would, beyond
grounding the abolition of slavery, justify reducing secessionist states to territories for the
purposes of destroying the social foundations of secession in, and with these the class power
based on, the great planter estates.450 Thereby, radicalism articulated the material premises
securing freedom to a freepeople, and was able to challenge Lincolns successor, and in
particular to expose Johnsons ad hoc, crudely theoretical effort to rationalize his restoration
policy.451
448The other significant theory of reconstruction according to McKitrick, that of "forfeited rights" authored by Samuel

Shellabarger - an Ohio Republican, while appearing to contemporaries to have satisfactorily clarified the problematic
status of the southern states, still floundered on this rock of non-recognition but at a remove. According to
Shellabarger, a state had a dual character: As a territorial entity with its respective inhabitants, it was unalterable; as a
"'body politic' with the powers of government" is was alterable, and in relation to federal Union, it was precisely this
feature which had been changed by the war (McKitrick, Ibid, 113-114).
This formulation was designed to satisfy all Republicans and their supporters who were offended by Johnson's
arrogation of reconstruction powers in toto, who were, moreover, outraged by the de facto re-enslavement of
freepeople proceeding apace in the South under cover of the President's policies, yet who could not accept the
implications - such as confiscation of property - implicit in extreme radical, e.g., Steven's, analyses and perspective
which aimed at the recreation of southern society in its entirety.
But the problem of the actual "return" of the South by war's end to a "state of nature," a tabula rasa as Sumner's
described it, which was as a consequence amendable to reconstruction in its entirety and the Constitution in all its
glorious irrelevancy be damned, was not addressed by this theory, merely deferred. This deferral? If all states
retained an unchangeable territorial integrity, how was the genesis and reality of West Virginia, a geographical, Civil
War-based detachment from the state of Virginia resting upon its pro-Unionist sentiments, to be accounted for? It
could not. Constitutionally, a strict procedural format had long been established to justify the institution of a new state
from the territorial body of an older one. From this standpoint, the formation of West Virginia was patently irregular,
extra-legal and "revolutionary." See Randell, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 441-444 (incl. n. 14), 449, 450,
452-453 (incl. notes 28 and 29), 459, 466. Attorney General Bates' decidedly and officially unfavorable assessment of
West Virginia statehood appears on 459.
449The speeches can be found The Collected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, Vol. 2, April 1865 - August 1868. As
Stevens indicated in his remarks of 10 March 1866, the speech of this date had been prepared for presentation after
the 8 January 1866 reconvening of Congress, and had been put off in deference to other speakers in the House. Ibid,
98-99.
Johnson's position and his motives as well as the course of the radicals' struggle against him are more fully treated in
chapter 10, "Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction" and passim.
450See "Theoretical Weaknesses of the Radical Position," the text immediately preceding n. 17, above.
451By developing this position in explicit contrast to the President, Stevens' efforts made possible a polarization of the

highest reaches of the State, pushed Johnson to defend his position by ever more regression and reactionary actions
(i.e., vetoes of the Freedmans Bureau extension bills, 19 February and 16 July 1866; the Civil Rights Bill, 27 March
1866; and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, 2 March 1867 and 19 July 1867), and created the space in which this
revolutionary legislation of the early Reconstruction era was enacted. (The other, central pieces of said legislation in

Stevens proceeded by undercutting what in the wars immediate aftermath had become the
core of the informal party of property, including the Presidents, position, namely, the assertion
in one form or another that the ex-Confederate states had never been "outside" the Union in
the first place. This, of course, was generally a counter-historical, counter-factual assertion, a
Constitutional legalism since the latter forbade secession.452 As a matter of indisputable fact,
events had moved in the opposite direction: Rebels formed a government, pledging their lives
and fortunes to support it, that government raised large armies, and insisted on and received
recognition from the governments of the western world as an independent belligerent, that is,
as engaged in public war (as opposed to a mere insurrection). In response, the Union
government treated it as an independent belligerent in blockading its ports, acknowledging its
seafaring plunders as privateers, not pirates, treating their captive crews as well as soldiers on
every front as prisoners of war, etc. In these matters of state to state interactions, for four
years the Confederacy was de facto, regardless of moral or legal right, recognized as a
sovereign political body and effectively able to compel this recognition. 453 By the same token,
private individuals engage in vendettas, may murder each other, but they do not, contrary to
the Johnson-conservative perspective, make war. Societies or State compel persons,
appropriate property, raise armies and make war.454 Reconstruction as reconstruction, in other
words, could not be reduced to a pardons policy aimed at punishing treacherous individuals.
Stevens then demonstrated this de facto status was all that, as a matter of international law,
was in the full sense required to establish the Confederacy as an independent State. As
evidentiary confirmation, he cited, in what he claimed was the methodologically proper format
of such argumentation, corroborating statements from the leading domestic jurists of his day,
and the greatest legal philosophers of the bourgeois era, Grotius, Puffendorf, Rutherford, and
Vattel.455 Having made his demonstration, Stevens drew the singularly appropriate conclusion;
to wit, as belligerents engaged in public war, the Confederacy had broken off all previous ties
that bound it to the Union. Instead, it was entitled to (and received) all the rights this status
confirmed, and it was for the same reason subject to all the liabilities it might incur.
Conclusively defeated on the field of battle, it armies dismantled, the Union government was,
as victor, fully entitled to treat the secessionist states as it deemed fit, always with due regard
to logic, legitimate authority and the law of nations.456 This position, now fully articulated, had
in the past been disparaged (and, among adherents of the informal party of property,
loathingly so) as a theory of conquered provinces."
As provinces existing outside the body politic, the Constitution provided for a mechanism to
reintegrate the ex-Confederate states back into the Union. Now, like Sumner, Stevens was
mindful of legal norms and precedent; moreover, he was not particularly disposed to
the broadest sense, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the latter approved by Congress in February 1869
after Johnson had left office, were under Constitutional law not subject to Presidential scrutiny, but instead went
directly from Congress to the state legislatures for ratification.)
452"Reconstruction" speech, 6 September 1865, Ibid, 13.
453Speeches of 6 September 1865, 18 December 1865, and 10 March 1866, Ibid, 14, 47, 99, respectively.
454Ibid, 46 (18 December 1865).
455Ibid, 46-48 (December 1865), 100-101 (10 March 1866). Stevens' procedural claim is that argument of this sort

has to be based on established and recognized legal authority, both judicial decision and the reflections of leading
legal minds. It cannot be based on personal opinion without further substantiation, which is all his opponents offered.
Ibid, 100, 107. In our view, the core of a rationally coherent argument resides in the internal consistency and
systematic coherency that characterizes theoretical analysis and account of established fact, and not on appeal to
authority. Stevens authorities, however, do offer compelling reasons as grounds for their (identical) positions on the
issue at hand.
456Ibid, 45 (18 December 1865), 99 (10 March 1866), 22 (6 September 1865).

exemplary punishment.457 Thus, he did not, unlike the imputations distracters aimed at him,
advocate imposition of a military government on the South and necessarily despotic,
dictatorial rule (which was, as he pointed out, precisely the practice of Johnson as
President).458 The Constitutional mechanism he preferred was territorial government.
Controlled by Congress, territorial government was the civilian-based, American method of
schooling a population in the principles of freedom."459
A Congressionally-controlled territorial framework for readmission of ex-Confederate states
into the Union could be successfully achieved on two, further assumptions. The first would
entail changes to the very structure of the Constitution, amendments that would allow for
development of a reconstructed polity. Logically and existentially preceding this assumption
was, moreover, a second assumption, that of the necessary transformation of the sociomaterial premises of the southern regional economy and society. Not only had the power of
the southern slaveowners as a class had to be broken, a bulwark consistent with republican
convictions had in class terms to be formed in order to preclude re-establishment of the
Slavepower. Take the changes to the Constitution first.
Stevens asserted the necessity of incorporating four elements into the organic law of the
nation, with the appropriate practical safeguards, in order to render reconstruction viable.
These elements were presented on the floor of the House (8 December 1865) in the form of
Constitutional amendments.
First, it was necessary to change the basis of representation of the states in Congress,
specifically to overturn the three-fifths rule written into the Constitution as its foundations (i.e.,
the clause that gave states 3/5 representation of the entire slave population domiciled in their
territories while no slave could vote).460
457"I have never desired bloody punishments to any great extent, even for the sake of example." Ibid, 108.For

Sumner, see "Theoretical Weaknesses of the Radical Position," especially the text following n. 15, above.
458The President has no legislative powers. Rather, all his powers are those of enforcement deriving from his status
as "Commander-in-Chief" of the army and navy, an executive exercising military authority. Ibid, 105 (10 March 1866).
Thus, Johnson laid down conditions of readmission (the "President says 'before you can participate in the
government you must abolish Slavery and reform your election laws. 'That is the command of a conqueror."); he
appointed a provisional, i.e., non-elected, governor to South Carolina; etc. Ibid, 22 (citation, 6 September 1865), 105106. (Emphasis in the original.) In fact, in our view Johnsons assessment of southern planters was correct: By and
large, as masters (of slaves, of their huge estates, of their state legislatures, of the national polity), what they really
understood was mastery. It would be much easier to make them cringe than to school them in the principles of
freedom, since for them freedom did not begin with "equality," i.e., mutual recognition, in bourgeois terms, in the
political arena, but with unbridled or unrestrained license. This is discussed in chapter 4 , "Officer Ambition, the
Southern Model, Risk and its Rationalization," below.
459Ibid, 50 (18 December 1865).
460Ibid, 50-51.

Now Stevens held, or he recognized his Congressional colleagues inflexibly held, that politically a Constitutional
amendment could not be ratified if an element of state rights doctrine was not preserved, namely, states must be
allowed to determine who was in fact eligible to vote within their territories. Thus, the change in basis of
representation to be written into the fundamental law had two moments. First, with the abolition of slavery
representation would be based on the whole population (and not a portion of it). Second, a state that refused to
enfranchise a portion of its population (adult males only) that now included newly free people would be deprived of
that portion of the representation in its entirety. Thus, in December 1865 the South as a whole had nineteen
representatives in the House based on the 3/5 rule. Counting the entire black, ex-slave population of the South would
add thirteen more thereby raising that representation to thirty two. Ibid.
Without this change in the basis of representation, say by pursuing Johnsons restoration cum pardons policy, the
South voting as a bloc, as it had always done on crucial national issues, would, with its Copperhead allies in the
northern Democracy, in a real sense return the nation to the status quo ante bellum: It would always be able to
dominate the House (and also the Senate), the electoral college, and it would, amassing this power, repudiate the
Federal debt (or have the Union assume the Confederate debt). From the radical (and moderate) Republican
nationalist standpoint (not to mention that perspective of capital with its desire for a unified national market and
industrialization), that blood and treasure lost in the war would truly be rendered meaningless.

A change in the basis of representation more or less insured Republican ascendancy in the
national State. (If the South disenfranchised blacks males it would not, even with northern
Copperhead allies, be able to control the Congress. If it enfranchised them, blacks would as a
bloc vote for the party of emancipation securing Republican control in the State.) In this
context, it was necessary to provide every Constitutional remedy to secure the viability and
health of that State. Excessive financial liabilities could strap its development and that of the
nation. Thus, second, an amendment to prevent assumption of the Confederate debt was also
offered.461
Third, Stevens proposed an amendment to establish a duty on exports. This was, ostensibly,
aimed at cotton, the Souths sole significant export, to return some of the revenues its sale
abroad would generate to United States coffers. It would, of course, be more inclusion than
mere cotton, and would also protect youthful American manufacturing (including the steel of
Stevens home state, Pennsylvania).462
Fourth, Stevens put forth an amendment to render all laws uniform." Stevens presented this
proposal in conjunction with that aimed at preventing assumption of the Confederate debt: He
held together they could prevent a South-North Democratic bloc from legislating against Union
interests, conceived along nationalist lines, in the case of formation of accidental planterCopperhead majority.463 In our view, this amendment has the sense of nationalizing a people,
subjecting them, irrespective of color or race," to the same laws of the national State in
regard to matters of citizenship, providing thereby, if you will, the logical foundations to the first
amendment as proposed.464
The real foundations to the proposed Constitution changes, i.e., those to be found in the
practice of daily life, lay in a transformation of property relations in the South. Here Stevens
proposed (and this what was really most dear to his heart and the hearts of the extreme
radical Republicans) the confiscation of planter estates valued at $10,000 (or more) or in
excess of two hundred acres.465
Stevens indicated confiscation would net the national State 394,000,000 acres, worth $10.00
an acre at current market prices, valued at $3.94 billion. Leaving nine-tenths of southern
property intact, he proposed to divide this confiscation and its proceeds four ways.
Thus, 40,000,000 acres would be given over to providing a homestead for roughly 1,000,000
ex-slave, freeman householders at, say, forty acres per head of a family. (Though slaves were
not generally permitted to marry in traditional fashion, planters were not able to suppress
tightly-knit families amongst the slave populace as Reconstruction era would show.)466 That
would leave 354,000,000 valued at $3.54 billion with which he further proposed to invest $300
million in 6 per cent government bonds," with the interest to be added semi-annually to
pensions for war veterans and their relatives; appropriate another $200 million to pay for
damages, loss of property (land, crops, animals, etc.), incurred by loyalist, North and South, in
the Civil War; and apply the residue," all $3.04 billion, towards payment against the national
debt.467
461Ibid, 52.
462Ibid, 51.
463Ibid, 52.
464In this specific regard, Stevens asks the question "do you wish it [the Constitution] to provide that all laws, State

and national, shall operate equally on all?" Ibid, 110 (18 March 1866).We have explicated this view below. See
chapter 10, "The Fourteenth Amendment."
465Ibid, 18 (6 September 1865).
466For the slave family in the American South, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 450-519, and the families

among freepeople during the era of Reconstruction, Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 82-88.
467Ibid, 18-19 (6 September 1865).

The core of this proposal was the State-sponsored establishment of small farms for black
freemen. It was precisely this element in Stevens proposal that, as a nationalist, reconnected
his republicanism to the classical, American Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions: A large,
diffused middling yeomanry based on small property was the only guarantor against the
formation of an landed aristocracy whose wealth and power inevitably rendered democratic
institutions non-functional, irrelevant, and "corrupt." Where landed property is monopolized,
political institutions become playthings of aristocrats, plots and intrigues become the text of
political life, and despotism is always the outcome.468
Put forth by the greatest of the revolutionary democrats, it was precisely this proposal, to
materially establish and empower a freepeople, that generated a visceral disgust and horrified
all elements of the informal party of property, and, taken together with their fear of the
precedent set by confiscation, motivated the recoil of these elements from the extreme radical
Republican position.469

468Ibid, 23 (6 September 1865), 108 (10 March 1866)."The whole fabric of southern society must be changed, and

never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it has never been, a true
republic. Heretofore, it had more the features of aristocracy than democracy. The Southern States have been
despotisms, not governments of the people. It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few
thousand men monopolize the whole landed property. The larger the number of small proprietors the more stable and
safe the government. As the landed interest must govern, the more it subdivided and held by independent owners, the
better." Ibid, 23. (Emphasis in the original.)Significantly, too, Stevens supported his aversion to "bloody punishment"
on the same grounds: "But there are punishments quite as appalling, and longer remembered, than death. They are
more advisable, because they would reach a greater number. Strip a proud nobility of their bloated estates; reduce
them to a level with plain republicans; send them forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshops or
handle the plow, and you will thus humble the traitors. Teach his posterity to respect labor and eschew treason." Ibid,
108.
469See chapter 10, "The Fourteenth Amendment," below.

4.
Problems of Army Leadership (I): Democratic (Pro-Slavery) Leadership in and the
Failure of the
Union Armies in the East, 1861-1863
I'm tired, Colonel. You know what I mean? I'm tired. I've had all of this army and all of these
officers, this damned Hooker and this goddamned idiot Meade, all of them, the whole
bloody lousy rotten mess of sick-brained pot-bellied scabheads that aint fit to lead a johnny
detail, aint fit to pour pee outen a boot with instructions on the heel. I'm tired. We are good
men and we had our own good flag and these goddamned idiots use us like we was cows
or dogs or even worse. We aint gonna win this war. We can't win no how because of these
lame-brained bastards from West Point, these goddamned gentlemen, these officers.470

Part I
Union Armies and Command Problems
Nature of Command Problems and their Sources
In the East, there were three major Union armies from the First Bull Run, the first major
campaign in the Civil War, until the desultory fighting in the aftermath of the Gettysburg
Campaign. The first two were short-lived, namely, the Army of Northeastern Virginia and the
Army of Virginia which, under the respective commands of Irvin McDowell and John Pope,
fought the campaigns and battles of the two Bull Runs. The third was the Army of the
Potomac, which, in the period under discussion, had four different commanding generals
(McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade). George Meade took command in late June 1863,
and remained formally in command of this army for the balance of the war; however, after
Union Army of the Potomac emerged from its 1863-1864 winter quarters (beginning in early
March 1864), Grant, as overall commander of all Union forces, de facto exercised those
strategic (and occasionally tactical) leadership functions normally devolving upon the
commanding general. Though perhaps concealed for contemporaries by the overwhelming
reality of distinctively modern warfare manifested in the ferocious fighting and stalemate that
characterized the 1864-1865 Virginia Campaigns, Grant marked a turning point because his
leadership largely overcame the numerous problems in the organization and command that
had characteristically plagued all eastern armies during the entire previous period of the war.
There were several categories of problems that distinguished the eastern Union armies, either
as armies or in contrast to their Confederate counterpart (and often to the western Union
armies as well), prior to Grant's assumption of command. Some of these problems, such as
the weakness of the Union cavalry, were at once problems of command and inexperience.
While the former often persisted, the latter were worked out during the course of the war as
Union forces accumulated, assimilated and learned from their experience (as well as from the
very contrast between themselves and their enemy). The result was a great improvement in
their performances. Some of these experientially resolved problems, such as the lack of a
cadre of trained officers relative to southern armies as well as the lack of shared military
doctrine among officers, were of an historical as well as a command nature. Still other
problems, both typical leadership problems such as that of political generalship or broader
problems such as those consequent upon the use and employment of close-order formations
and tactics under battlefield conditions, were never adequately worked out. Finally, a certain
kind of problem, disruptive at a command level and affecting, more broadly, the very conduct
of entire Union armies, were not even amendable to a military solution. The problem of the
470Joseph Bucklin, a soldier in the 2nd Maine and alleged mutineer, to Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain, colonel

commanding the 20th Maine, 1 July 1863 on meal break during the V Corps march to Gettysburg. From Michael
Shara's historical novel, The Killer Angels.

presence in command positions of men (politically Democrats) who held, and were prepared
to act upon, grand strategic ideas about the national objectives of war differing from those
Lincoln and his Administration, and the concomitant problem of whether to conduct a "soft" or
"hard" war particularly in relation to rebel property (as well as in relation to the thoroughly
problematic method of raising troops), had to be worked out politically, and inadequately we
add, by the President.
The array of problems, command and otherwise, that confronted the Union armies in the East
were for the most part only analytically separate. In practice, these problems though not
seamless were tightly knotted together. At the risk of decontextualization and abstraction, we
shall devote the following discussion to an examination of the what, in our view, can be
identified as the central difficulties objectively confronting the Union armies in the East
(particularly the Army of the Potomac): The difficulties were twofold, namely, the presence in
command positions of southern-sympathizing gentleman-officers with Democratic party
political convictions and, inextricably bound up with this presence, the lack of shared military
doctrine among these officers.
Leadership Caution in Battle471
The first major campaign in the war set the tone for Union command problems for the next two
years. It occurred in northern Virginia in July 1861 and culminated in a battle near the Bull Run
Creek. That battle pitted the Union Army of Northeastern Virginia under Irwin McDowell and
the two Confederate armies (those of the Potomac and of the Shenandoah Valley) whose
command, largely exercised on the field until late in the battle by P.G.T. Beauregard, was
formally (by way of seniority) held by Joseph Johnston. In a defeat which turned first into
route, then, into panicked flight, two command problems emerged. These, the inability to get
adequate men into battle and the significant role of excessive caution, were decisive for the
battle's outcome.
Both problems could and should, given both proper performance review and self-criticism,
have been at worse progressively overcome. Instead as the war unfolded, as the Peninsula,
Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg campaigns and
battles would all progressively reveal, adequate leadership selection (Lincoln's seemingly
unending problem) would more and more become the condition of resolving these problems
of command in the field.
The commanders who were responsible for these problems, as well as the regular army
officer cadre that held the bulk of higher command positions in the Union armies in the East
(and all commanding general positions throughout the war), consistently complained that their
problems were the result of assumption of command positions by militarily untrained, Lincoln
Administration political appointees.
Political Generalship
The problem of militarily untutored, political generalship could not and cannot be detached
from the manner in which troops were raised.
The presence of "political" commanders (militarily unformed, politically influential and
important men commissioned by Lincoln as generals who held command positions) went to
the federalist heart of the American political system. According to Constitutional practice
471For the pre-Grant period of the history of Union Armies in the East, the battles and campaigns of the Peninsula

and Antietam are discussed in more detail later in this chapter; for those of the First and Second Bull Run, and
Fredericksburg, see our "Tactical Accounts and Summaries of Battles and Campaigns of the Union Armies in the East
in the American Civil War" (manuscript, 1998); and, for those of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, see Appendix II,
below.

carefully followed at the war's outset, state governors raised volunteer regiments following a
Presidential request. The request included assignment of population-based quotas to each
state. Governors raised regimental officer staffs as well as troops, and trained and initially
equipped the regiments. Only after this organization was completed in the states were these
military formations swore into federal service and turned over to the regular army. In actual
practice and in time of (the Civil) war, both former military officers and prominent citizens,
most often politicians (but also lawyers, merchants and manufacturers), would, with
gubernatorial consent, raise and "train" the regiment. In the prevailing atmosphere, a short
and decisively quick war was anticipated, both governors - who sought to reward friends, pay
off old debts or enhance their prestige and expand the circle of their dependents through
patronage, i.e., granting military commissions (captaincies, colonelcies and brigadiers) - and
leading men - who sought to build their social and political reputations and improve their
wealth aggrandizing prospects - were eager to recruit men to service, primarily farming and
working class youth who, in turn, were motivated by the opportunity to leave the land or a
waged job, get out into the world, go off on a lark, embark on a noble, patriotic cause, etc. In
the absence of prominent citizens, it would have been an impossible task for the governors to
raise troops: They lacked the standing in localities to encourage volunteers, the administrative
apparatus to organize (minus prominent citizens) the local volunteers, the financial resources
to bring potential soldiers from all over the state to its capital for initial training or the force to
compel (had it been necessary) recruits to enlist. On the other hand, if the national (or, in
deference to state rights' usage, "general") government, that is, Lincoln and, beginning with
the Secretary, his operatives in the War Department were to have to an army at all, it meant
not only accepting the regiment but its officers, that is, those prominent citizens who more
likely than not were ambitious, militarily untrained and inexperienced. Thus, the federalist
system of troop recruitment itself created the problem, where it existed, of the military
undisciplined, untrained and inexperienced politically appointed commander.472
Thus, militarily untrained and inexperienced politically appointed officers could not be done
without. The basic dilemma confronting the military and civilian leaderships was that,
numerically, the existing officers corps, roughly 4,000 men, had been designed to
accommodate a regular, pre-war army of 20,000 men. But by early spring 1862, Lincoln had
already issued calls for 525,000 volunteers, a figure that, based upon his grand strategic
calculations, McClellan undoubtedly considered inadequate. Under these conditions "political"
officers would be ubiquitously present at nearly every level of command in the Union armies.
But the real problem was not the politically appointed commander.473 To the contrary, during
472The federalist system of recruitment also created a much more serious problem experienced only after the attrition

due to campaign casualties began to create manpower shortages. The precise problem was that instead of allowing
depleted regiments to return home to recruit replacements among the men and in the localities they knew the best,
replacements were supplied by creating new regiments. This was accordance with the wishes of the state governors
(particularly Republicans) on whom, in the first two years of the war, Lincoln had been heavily dependent. Recall that
the issue for the governors was prestige, patronage and the aggrandizement of their power. This problem was largely
resolved with the first national conscription law enacted in March 1863 and used - after July and especially in the
autumn of that year - as a whip to secure nationally encouraged and enforced enlistments. Beginning in fall 1863, with
the governors no longer responsible for troop recruitment, regiments did return home to recruit replacements to their
units.
473Under the heading of "Political Generalship," we have, by way of demonstration, provided an exemplary account
of generalship that vitiates the antithesis of political appointment-incompetence and West Point formation
competence, in our "Tactical Accounts and Summaries.
Note the type of actual experience that West Point, by and large almost without exception provided. In his
Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (hereafter Butler's Book, 863), a partisan in this controversy, Ben Butler,
related: "During my whole service in the army it was always thrown in my face by the regular officers that I had no
technical military education. That meant that I had not been to West Point. Now a West Pointer if he graduated very
high never was employed in the army in managing troops until our war. He was simply assigned to public works,

the course of the war for every military blunder a politically appointed officer made on the field
of battle, a regular officer made a much more serious, often disastrous miscalculation or
misjudgment. The real problem, as we shall see, was the contradiction, in a formal sense,
between a Republican Administration with a free-soil orientation (and a forceful radical,
abolitionist party component) committed in policy and practice to a modern, centralized
concept of nationhood and a southern sympathetic, Democratic party supporting military high
command committed to the defense of southern refinement, culture and state rights (which
under the rubric of "republican liberty" constituted an ideological rationalization of slavery). In
a material sense, however, the problem and the contradiction exhibited another dimension
and involved not merely the presence in positions of command of conservative Democratic,
regular army officers but, inextricably intertwined with their presence, that of trained yet
militarily incompetent officers engaged in a subtle defense of the West Point-based exclusivity
of high command (an institution which, in turn, was historically southern dominated).

generally of a civil description, until he was fifty years old at least. If he graduated in the next grade he was to
command a battery of artillery until he was about the same age, except a few of them who served in the Mexican war.
If he graduated in the next grade he was to command an infantry company, and they were so few and scattered that
he got near fifty before he ever commanded a company of them as a rule, and very few of them got to be captains
before they were fifty years old, and except against the Indians they never acquired any experience in the field. The
lowest rank was to be a lieutenant of cavalry. So, with the exception of the Mexican veterans, there were no West
Pointers at the breaking out of the war who had any experience in the field. But during the Rebellion all was changed.
It was assumed that West Point officers knew the whole art of war and were ready-made generals."

Part II
Intertwining of Personality and Command Structure Problems (I)
George McClellan and the Union Armies in the East
George Brinton McClellan
George McClellan was a central figure in the history and drama of Union armies in the East. It
was through his energies and devotion that the Union Army of the Potomac was organized; he
commanded that army in two of its great campaigns (the Peninsula and Antietam); and, of
transcendent significance, in his personality he concentrated all the aporias, contradictions
and shortcomings, while in his leadership he at once exhibited and (re)created, the difficulties,
obstacles and dilemmas that not only characterized but haunted the command of the Union
armies in the East long after his departure.
George Brinton McClellan was born to a well-to-do Philadelphia family in 1826. His father, also
George, was a New Englander, Connecticut born coming from a family that dated its
respectability back to the Revolutionary War. His father had graduated from Yale College (in
1816) and obtained a medical degree (as had his father's brother) at the University of
Pennsylvania. His mother, ne Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton, was a refined, cultured and
southern lady from a leading Philadelphia family. Much like Washington DC, antebellum
Philadelphia - one of three leading national commercial centers whose socio-economic and
political life was dominated by big bankers and great merchants tied to the finance and export
of cotton - was at least among the ruling families very southern in attitudes and politics. The
gentlemen planters of the South, after all, were aristocratic in their manners, bearing and
outlooks - unlike the vulgar hawkers, the stereotypical Yankee shopkeepers who, allegedly,
were ubiquitous in the North. Major General McClellan will have assimilated and internalized
these perspectives. George McClellan, Jr., at any rate, was a beneficiary of his mother's
refinement. He was extremely well educated, attending an "infant school" at the age of five,
followed by private school, private tutors, a preparatory academy to the University of
Pennsylvania and, at the tender age of thirteen, the university itself. He was trained in the
classics, and fluent in French and Latin. At fifteen, the young McClellan had a change of heart:
Training as a lawyer, he decided to pursue a military career instead. Thus, he entered West
Point.474
A charming young man, who gave off an air of confidence, McClellan had graduated second
from the West Point class of 1846 at the age of twenty. He had seen action in Mexico, and
during peacetime had several appointments, primarily as either an engineer or surveyor, at
West Point, Fort Delaware (a military installation on an island in the Delaware River forty miles
downstream from Philadelphia), Washington DC, Fort Smith (Arkansas) and on a Red River
expedition, on the Texas frontier and Gulf coast, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington
state, and the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic. In March 1855, McClellan
was one of three officers appointed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, with President
Franklin Pierce's approval, to a military commission to examine the latest military
developments in Europe, which (in a practice that spanned a period from June 1855 through
March 1856) meant studying the organization of European armies and exploring and
inspecting Anglo-France (Prussian and Austrian) facilities, fortifications and weaponry in the
Crimean War. On his return and shortly after finishing his section of the report for the War
Department in late 1856, he resigned his commission with the United States Army. In January
1857, McClellan was hired by and took a position as chief engineer with the Illinois Central
railroad. Within a year he had achieved vice-presidency of the rail company, and, in a
reorganization designed to avert financial collapse during the Panic of 1857, in October of that
474For McClellan's family background and early education, we have closely followed Stephen Sears, George Brinton

McClellan, 2-3.

year McClellan assumed the chair of a board of officers that controlled the daily operations of
the firm. In June 1860, he left the Illinois Central for an executive position with the Mississippi
& Ohio, his position designed to administratively reorganize this failing road.
In his years as regular army officer and a railroad executive, George McClellan's characteristic
political commitments, growing naturally as it were out of his pre-political attitudes and views,
had been formed. As an officer, he was a protg of Secretary Davis, 475 with friendships and
contacts among many other well-connected conservative Democrats including the newspaper
man (and railroad investor) Samuel L.M. Barlow; he actively supported Stephen Douglas in
the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign (and not only opposed, but had already grown to accord
little respect to the sometimes Illinois Central lawyer, Abraham Lincoln); and he had engaged
the services of and learned to rely on Allan Pinkerton. McClellan moved in the charmed circle
of real economic and political power in mid-century America, the great propertyholders (both
agrarian and industrial) and was possessed by a visceral dislike for "black Republicans."476
McClellan's Early Commands
Following the firing on Fort Sumter, McClellan was offered command of Ohio forces by Gov.
William Dennison. He accepted that command as a major general of volunteers on 23 April
1861. McClellan set up camp near Cincinnati. At McClellans insistence, Gov. Dennison began
appointing experienced (i.e., regular army) officers, men such as Randolph Marcy and Seth
Williams, to McClellan's staff. The general promptly began training officers and the mass of
volunteer soldiers who were pouring into the camp. McClellan's previous service record, and
his enormous capacity for work and a behavior that suggested apparent competence, won
him immediate notoriety. On 3 May, Winifred Scott, senior general in the regular Union army,
put him in charge of the Department of the Ohio, a military district that included Ohio, Indiana
and Illinois and was later expanded to include western Pennsylvania and western Virginia. On
14 May, backed by Salmon Chase - Lincoln's Treasury Secretary and former Ohio governor,
he was commissioned a major general in the regular army. McClellan was now only second in
rank to Scott in the Union armies.
McClellan's early Civil War career revealed those attitudes, practices and commitments that
would distinguish his later leadership of the Army of the Potomac. In building a force to defend
the Ohio Valley line (against the possibility of rebel "invasion"), he impatiently derided
"Washington" for not immediately fulfilling his requests for armaments. If "Washington" was
coping with ongoing fighting in Missouri, southern sympathetic demonstrations and sabotage
in Baltimore and its environs, or the presence of a Confederate army not more than thirty
miles south and west of the seat of national government, so much the worse for "Washington."
It was "apathetic" in relation to McClellan's requirements. (It should be noted that the War
Department nonetheless managed to get 25,000 muskets as well as heavy weapons to his
series of outposts within five weeks, including travel time, of McClellan's initial request.) 477
This exhibition of a typical myopic absorption with the problems of his own command,
expressed in impatience and intolerant criticism of his superiors (and subordinates), would, of
course, never issue in the reflective self-analysis necessary to grasp his own shortcomings,
and address and overcome them in future personal and military practice.
475That is, Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederacy.
476Biographical materials on McClellan pre-Civil War career have been derived from Sears, Ibid., 12-13, 28-67. The

term "black Republicans" referred in the strict sense to abolitionists, but among conservatives and southern fireeaters (soon to be rabid secessionists) it included all men who were politically committed to the nascent Republican
party.
477Sears, Ibid, 73-74.

McClellan's opposition to "Washington" under a Republican Administration was the other side
of his fundamental attitudinal orientation toward slavery. The latter involved directly muddling
in Lincoln's already retrograde borders' states policy.
Lincoln's government had militarily occupied and de facto exercised martial law in the
dissident areas of Maryland (in and around Baltimore under Ben Butler on his own initiative
commanding the 8th Massachusetts volunteer regiment); in Missouri, Union forces based
largely on the German populace of St. Louis held that city and parts of the state radiating out
from it, but there, in Missouri, raids, armed conflict and actual civil war had already broken out.
In Kentucky, however, allegiance had yet to be settled and fighting had not erupted. It was at
Kentucky that Lincoln's conciliatory border policy was primarily directed. Kentucky was a slave
state and its governor, Beriah Magoffin, was pro-slavery and favored the Confederacy; while
the state legislature was predominately pro-Union: It had blocked Magoffin's effort to call a
special legislative session in order to consider an ordinance of secession. The state militia,
headed by an old McClellan acquaintance, Simon Buckner, was also southern sympathetic
and appeared, potentially, as an armed beachhead of Confederate power. Unionists had,
accordingly, established a pro-Union militia both as self-defense and to counterbalance the
official state body. The regular processes of state governance would soon likely clarify who
would and who would not dominate the state and determine its allegiances: Come 20 June,
elections were to be held to chose Congressional representatives, and, on 4 August, a new
legislature was to be selected. In advance of these elections Magoffin as the state's chief
executive had, though, already settled on a policy - a truly pro-Confederate ruse - in his
announcement that Kentucky would remain neutral in the unfolding struggle. Such a policy
was, of course, untenable first, in a border state, and second, because it was unacceptable to
the nationalists and centralizers, ensconced in the Lincoln Administration, among them first
and foremost the President himself. Enter McClellan.
Having in his military capacity already distributed weapons to the pro-Union militia and
undertaken to militarily fortify Cairo (which stood at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio
Rivers), McClellan proceeded to muddy the waters. On 7 June, he met with Buckner in
Cincinnati. In their discussion (one which McClellan would later claim was merely informal, an
exchange of ideas, nothing more), Buckner unfolded a plan to secure Kentucky's "neutrality."
Essentially, this plan called for a trade-off, that is, national governmental non-interference in
the affairs of Kentucky (i.e., recognition of neutrality) in return for continued state obedience
to federal laws. Under these conditions the Governor, the state militia and the planters would
not make an effort to secede, and the terms of this proposed agreement would be superceded
by the outcomes of forthcoming elections. (If, however, state secessionist forces agreed to
abide by the terms of election results, it was only because they had concluded their best
chance for success lay in using the administrative, political and military machinery they had to
hand to secure a desired electoral outcome in the first place.) Buckner reported to Magoffin
that he and McClellan had come to a formal agreement, and the Governor released the
contents of the discussion to the local newspapers. McClellan had, from the pro-Confederate
Kentuckians' perspective, effectively stipulated to the terms of a "treaty" between the state and
national government. From the Unionist side, the upshot was, of course, denials and
disavowals, but McClellan very early on had established a pattern of using his military
authority to engage in militarily transcendent political dirigisme with conservative Democratic,
southern-sympathetic overtones.478

478For the events in Kentucky (their interpretation is ours), Sears, Ibid, 76-78, 81-82.

Early on in the war, allowance for denials of such intent might be made; but, as the war
progressed, the treacherous political character of the practice that made such denials
necessary would stand exposed.479
McClellan in Western Virginia: Tactical Account and Military Ascendancy
McClellan's existential attitude toward slavery, taken together with the whole of his formation,
exercised an enormous compulsion on him and necessarily issued in his practice of politically
overreaching the limits of his military-based authority. His pro-slavery views and militarily
transcendent political dirigisme had already come together by late May 1861, in a small Union
operation that had been undertaken in western Virginia on the basis of his instructions.
Rebel forces had successfully burned bridges along the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, lifeline of
the Union army between the East, Washington and the Ohio Valley. McClellan detached three
regiments, mostly Ohioans and Pennsylvanians with some (western) Virginians, to remove the
rebel threat. Bridges were rebuilt, and a short time later rebels, scattered southward of the
important junction town of Grafton, were routed in a skirmish at Philippi eighteen miles south
of Grafton. Without Administration clearance, McClellan issued a proclamation to the
inhabitants of that portion of western Virginia now occupied by Union soldiers. In it, he
committed his troops to not merely forgoing attacks on civilian persons and property, but also
protecting and defending it. Now "property" in areas in which rebels were active was an
euphemism for chattel slavery, and it is important to note that McClellan proclamation was
intended for a much larger audience (namely the gentlemen planters of the South as a whole)
since slavery was never an issue worth fighting for in the pro-Unionist, traditionally yeoman
upcountry and mountainous regions of western Virginia. To this point, the proclamation was
fully consistent with Lincoln's border state policy, but beyond this McClellan further committed
his forces, rather unnecessarily and without cause it might be added, to "crush[ing] ... with an
iron hand ... any attempt at insurrection on their part."480 (Those who, presumably, were just
watching and waiting for the opportunity to rise, to wreck havoc on landed estates, to abuse
and rape good southern white women, etc., were, of course, the slaves).
On 20 June, McClellan undertook to lead the campaign in western Virginia himself. What
remained was to disperse and render operationally ineffectual those Confederate forces that
had been routed at Philippi as well as those, under orders from Robert E. Lee - presently
479McClellan's innocent protestations aside, this would not be his last effort in his capacity as military commander to

arrive at a political settlement to the war. Encamped east of Richmond following the battle of Fair Oaks (Seven Pines)
in June 1862, a truce was arranged to discussion a prisoner exchange. McClellan instructed staff officer Thomas M.
Key, in preparation for this meeting, to expand the discussion to include ways of ending the war. Stating the typical
southern-sympathetic line of the day, Key indicated his commander and the latter's army were fielded only to uphold
the Constitution and the nation's laws. Key's Confederate counterpart, Howell Cobb - a real political powerhouse in
Washington in the fifties, recalled for the Union officer the purpose of their meeting was to discuss a prisoner
exchange - nothing more. Upon receiving word of this affair, Secretary of War Stanton mildly rebuked the unrepentant
McClellan by reminding him that truces were designed were to discuss military matters only. See Sears, To The
Gates of Richmond, 161.
480For McClellan's proclamation, Ibid, 79 (including citation). In western Virginia, McClellan gave a practical
demonstration of his politics. While there were numerous cases of depredation of southern property by the Union
soldiery, plundering, robbing and rifling homes and farms, McClellan chose to make an example of a company of the
19-OH, specifically a group of three-month volunteers from Cleveland. He had them court-martialed. (Ibid, 85.) Why
this group? Cleveland was in the heart of the Western Reserve - itself at the center of the rural belt of the pro-Union
and anti-slavery Yankee corridor, a region settled by a stratum of independent farmers who had migrated westward
from New England in the previous two decades, and by the mid-fifties, having made themselves prosperous, formed
the backbone of the new emerging Republican party. On 7 July, McClellan's wrote his wife, "I have been obliged to
inflict some severe punishments & I presume the Abolition papers of the Western Reserve will be hard down on me
for disgracing some of their friends guilty of the small crime of burglary. ... I fear I shall have to have some of them
shot or hung" (emphasis added). The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 49.

commanding all of Virginia's men under arms, that had reinforced this initial force. Second,
McClellan had hoped that by moving his force east he could link up with Robert Patterson's
brigades at Harper's Ferry and drive the Confederate army (under Johnston) from the
Shenandoah Valley altogether. McClellan moved his army, some 11,000 men, east by way of
the Baltimore & Ohio to Grafton. He assigned Brig. Gen. Jacob Cox to head up a brigadesized force (roughly 4,000) and once in the Ohio Valley to move east into the Great Kanawha
(River) Valley (south southeast of McClellan's intended operations) against a rebel force under
former Virginia governor Henry Wise. The enlarged rebel force (some 5,300 men) confronting
McClellan was commanded by Brig. Gen. Robert Garnett. Lee had ordered Garnett to defend
the Turnpike leading east from Parkersburg on the Ohio River to Staunton in the Shenandoah
Valley. Garnett, taking advantage of the local geography, had placed his forces along two
mountain passages. The first, the bulk of his forces, on Laurel Hill on the road leading from
Philippi south through the mountains to Beverly (east of Rich Mountain); and, the second
smaller force of some 1,300 men under Col. John Pegram on the Turnpike at the point at
which it crossed Rich Mountain. Brig. Gen. Thomas Morris, with a brigade of some 4,000 men
was detached from McClellan's 11,000 man command to demonstrate and occupy Garnett
who led the larger Confederate force. In front of the smaller force on the Turnpike at the
mountain pass, McClellan instructed Brig. Gen. William Rosecrans (who had found a guide
that would lead a column around Pegram's line on a narrow, winding footpath) to take several
regiments, approximately 1,850 men, execute a flanking movement, get in the rear of the
enemy and engage it from there. Once the engagement under conditions of surprise had
begun, McClellan would attack in the front (see Map 3).
McClellan plan had been strategically flawless, but once actual execution was undertaken nearly three weeks (12 July) after McClellan had left Cincinnati, typical battlefield conditions
created problems. Morris found that he confronted a much larger force than either he or
McClellan had expected; still he proficiently accomplished his feint. It took Rosecrans' men
much longer to get in the rear of Pegram's forces, messages back to McClellan had been
intercepted and word of Rosecrans movements were not forthcoming; but Rosecrans did get
in the Confederate rear and engaged in a sharp, victorious engagement with a rebel column,
some 350 men, who Pegram had been sent to block his advance. In the event, uncertain of
the course of the unfolding action, McClellan, hearing the firing from Rosecrans' skirmish,
hesitated. It was late in the day and the commander decided to wait until the morrow. As it
turned out, the brief sharp fighting in the rear had been all that was needed to compel rebels
to withdraw: Knowing that they were now trapped, a number of rebels defenders made a
disorganized retreat in the night. Pegram surrendered the balance of his forces the following
morning. Garnett, now with his own line of retreat threatened, evacuated Laurel Hill.
McClellan, facing a typical battlefield condition that defied his plan (one in which contact
between commanders is lost), had hesitated, exhibiting a characteristic caution, and left
Rosecrans and his men without their promised support. Yet it was the same McClellan who
berated each of his commanders: Morris for questioning the value of attacking, even if only a
demonstration, a large, well-fortified force; Rosecrans (years later) for failing to maintain
communications; and Cox for acting too slow in the Great Kanawha Valley as obstacles
mounted in a difficult pursuit of the Confederate retreat.481
481The account of McClellan's western Virginia is based on Sears, Ibid, 83-93. McClellan's irritation with subordinate

commanders over their legitimate concerns took on the color of an enfant terrible. In these matters, he
characteristically lacked officer professionalism and exhibited the most petty, mean-spirited behavior: He threatened
to relief Morris and told Lincoln (by his own account) that he was "unfit" to serve. Morris, in fact, as Sears notes (Ibid,
421, n. 26), saw no further wartime service.

McClellan Heads to Washington

Triumphant and encamped in Beverly, Virginia, the northern press played to McClellan. The
admiration increased dramatically after the defeat of McDowell's Army of Northeastern Virginia
at Bull Run (21 July).482 McClellan was called to Washington DC. Enthusiastic crowds
gathered at every stop - Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, finally Washington along the Baltimore & Ohio to greet him. The northern, particularly Democratic press glowed
with reports about an emergent "young Napoleon." The same press, as well as Democratic
party politicians, rumored the presence of a dictatorial savior. According to McClellan himself,
President, Cabinet members and Gen. Scott all deferred to him. Why?
First, there was fear-based excitement. Against the background of defeat at Bull Run, the
"country," i.e., a layer of the popular masses of farmers, workers, artisans and shopkeepers,
and small businessmen, fearful for their sons, their productive activities and the integrity of the
nation, were looking to a leader who might quickly, and decisively, end the war. Cotton
magnates and eastern factors, brokers and bankers involved in the cotton trade feared a
cutoff in that trade, and held similar expectations. (Note how among the popular strata
enumerated above, reveling in the appearance of a "great man," had "outgrown" its earlier
"republican spirit of independence." In this double respect, with a view to a "great man" and
the belief in the efficacy of a single climactic battle, Napoleonic views had diffused among the
pre-political attitude of the "country.") Second, Republicans, especially the radicals but also
Lincoln's much more moderate and pragmatic Administration, needed a victory badly to justify
their "hard" positions on secession, as well as the necessity of war (as opposed to some
compromise which soon could only come to mean according recognition to the Confederacy),
vis--vis northern Democrats. At the time it occurred, it should be remembered that the first
battle of Bull Run had been the largest battle ever fought on the North American continent.
The disastrous outcome weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of the men who in the
secession crisis of winter 1861-1862 had stood against any compromise that would admit,
even if only implicitly, the reality of a southern nation. Any man who could militarily achieve the
goal of victoriously concluding the war, regardless of his previous political commitments, was
welcomed. Third, while a large amount of the outpouring of popular support for McClellan was
spontaneous, just as much of the crowd presence and all of the newspaper worship was
orchestrated, organized in the various cities by the local Democratic parties. If conservative
Democrats could not control national policy at the Executive level in the fashion they had
historically grown accustomed to, then they might at least effectively control it on the ground,
that is, in the different theatres of military activity. McClellan was a Democratic party Trojan
horse.483
In Washington, McClellan demonstrated the same organizational sophistication (a skill rooted
in his tenure with the Illinois Central), 484 enthusiasm and skill, the same attention to detail and
prodigious energy he had evinced in Cincinnati. He set out to personally inspect the
fortifications and camps ringing Washington, as well as every regiment in the growing
(numerically speaking) army. Occasionally he paused to talk with a soldier. His genial
482For an account of the Second Manassas Campaign and the role McClellan had in helping to subvert it, see the

relevant discussions in our "Tactical Accounts and Summaries of Battles and Campaigns of the Union Armies in the
East in the American Civil War" (manuscript, 1998).
483For McClellan's greeting and McClellan wonderment at deference, Sears, Ibid, 95-96. Sears rightfully points out
that "dictator" was used in the classical sense of a "temporary expedient in time of crisis" (Ibid). For a less blunt
assessment which nonetheless sees McClellan as the man on which Democratic party politicians fixed their hopes,
Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 46.
484Recall that the railroads in the fifties were entirely novel forms of organization, dealing with problems of
production, maintenance, operation and administration on a scale not previously known. See the section headed
"Railroads, Regional Integration and Capitalist Development" in chapter 2, above.

disposition toward the soldiery was matched by rigorous discipline in cases where he
considered insubordination was afoot. Word of the General's personal inspections and his
cordiality toward the ordinary soldier spread. He thereby developed a rapport with his men,
began to gain their confidence, and achieved a rapid rise in morale. Basic training, organized
and directed by an old regular, Brig. Gen Silas Casey, began immediately upon arrival of new
volunteers from the various states. McClellan and regular army officers deemed this initial
training necessary since the federalist system of troop recruitment, described above, was
acutely felt as problematic: From the centralizing perspective of the professional officer,
recruitment of Union army soldiers through the states resulted in a diffusion of centers of troop
training that, in turn, led to unevenness in training and quality of troops. For this officer, it was
tantamount to no training at all.
Following this basic instruction, new Union army soldiers were assigned to regiments,
brigades and divisions. Drill and more drill was the order of the day. Artillery batteries were
organized and attached (four) to each division. McClellan personally oversaw efforts to
standardize guns, their types and training in their use. Veteran, regular army officers were at a
premium, but McClellan's eastern army now had a solid cadre of them. Generals commanding
armies in the field were authorized by Congress at McClellan's behest to institute review
boards to examine the military qualifications of the states appointed regimental officers. In the
Army of the Potomac two such boards were established, and acted effectively to purge the
burgeoning officers corps of those lacking the competency to stand a military review. Still the
presence of largely militarily untrained political appointees as officers was, at least according
to traditional accounts, a problem that not even the organizationally and administratively
skilled McClellan would begin to adequately resolve.485
McClellan was under increasing pressure to act, to undertake a campaign that would bring on
a decisive battle that would end the war. Yet into the fall (1861) and winter (1861-1862) he
continued to train and prepare his troops. Lincoln thought McClellan had the "slows." For his
part the commanding general, deeming to let word escape that in the tradition of Napoleon he
planned a grand campaign aimed at the capture of Richmond, pointed to his raw troops and
new officers insisting on the necessity of more (and more) men and further (and further)
training and preparation. Lincoln, of course, was largely correct in his assessment:
McClellan's perfectionist preparations and habitual procrastination were behavioral
expressions of precognitive efforts rationalizing emotional insecurities, uncertainties and
questions of confidence. Yet it should be borne in mind that with the exception of Winfield
Scott no one, in the North in particular, ever commanded much more than a regiment-sized
formation prior to the Civil War. Militarily trained or no, there would, accordingly, be men who
were constitutionally incapable of commanding divisions, much less corps or armies. This was
just a true in the South; but here, unlike the eastern Union armies, incompetent Confederate
leadership was quickly weeded out. It was just that in the North these men would appear at
the highest levels of command.486
As the spring approached, in late January Lincoln, impatient himself and no longer able to
hold back the pressure, issued a war order instructing all Union land and naval forces to
485For organization of the newly forming Army of the Potomac, Ibid, 97-98, 112, 113-114; and, Catton, Mr. Lincoln's

Army, 51-52, 61-66, for assessment of McClellan that recognized his unmatched strengths as an administrator,
organizer and trainer of this army. One problem McClellan failed altogether to adequately address was the lack of an
Union cavalry force. See the accounts of the Peninsula and Antietam Campaigns, below.
486Weeding out of incompetent rebel commanders should be qualified and refer to the officers in eastern
Confederate armies. Witness the role and quick exit of Benjamin Huger (a politician coming to the aid of his "country")
in Lee's Army of northern Virginia during the Seven Days.

simultaneously advance on 22 February. After a final false start, McClellan revealed his
intention of unleashing his Peninsula Campaign.
McClellan and the Seven Days487
In his early days in Washington until the moment the Peninsula Campaign began, McClellan
repeatedly made grandiose assertions about a great climactic battle that would finally end the
war. These claims had an authentic ring to them: In winter 1862 (February) Fort Henry, Fort
Donelson, and Nashville all fell to Grant's army; Burnsides' force captured Roanoke island on
the North Carolina coast and appeared to threaten an advance on Norfolk; in the early spring,
Grant's army reversed a near disaster - at the cost of heavy casualties - in the two day battle
of Shiloh (4-5 April), and, not only were Confederates defeated, the commander of the main
rebel western army, A.S. Johnston, was killed; at about the same time, Mississippi Fortress
No. 10, a rebel Confederate waterway defense on the Mississippi River, fell to a Union force
under John Pope; in short order Fort Pulaski at Savannah and Fort Macon in North Carolina
were captured; and, on 25 April, New Orleans fell to the joint naval-land command of David
Farragut and Benjamin Butler.488 The Peninsula Campaign that followed did not, however,
herald the end of the war on Union terms; rather, it was the onset of a slow, steady decline in
Union fortunes. The campaign unfolded with the pursuit of a fixed idea, siege warfare, and the
consequent dependency upon heavy weaponry, hence, on the slow, ponderous movement of
a siege train. When Lee demonstrated his mobility and tenaciously and insistently kept his
army on the Union's right flank, McClellan collapsed, deserting his commanders in the field,
finally abandoning and de facto abdicating command itself.489
By late June, the Union Army of the Potomac rested just six miles from the Confederate
capital at its most advanced point. As McClellan prepared his army for a siege of Richmond,
its right wing (Porter's V Corps) was detached across Chickahomany Creek at Mechanicsville.
This detachment was designed at once to link up with anticipated reinforcements (which
would never come) from McDowell who was headquartered to the north at Fredericksburg and
to protect the Army of the Potomac's line of communications to the York River. But the
detachment also left V Corps unconnected to the main body of the army. On 26 June, the
Confederate Army of Northern Virginia massed a poorly coordinated attack against the Union
right, and was decisively and bloodily repulsed. Attempting to re-link up with the main body of
the Union army, Porter marched his V Corps east (looking to cross the high-watered creek),
and, unable to do so, had to turn and fight again. On 27 June, the rebel army pushed Porter's
corps back across the creek at Gaines Mill in an enormously costly tactical victory equaled
only in the enormity of strategic gain. The Union right had been turned and McClellan, who
singularly failed to get support to Porter before the battle had been decided, was now
committed to a retreat (see Map 4).
On 29 June, ostensibly to prevent Maj. Gen. Edwin Sumner from taking charge, McClellan left
no one in command after he and his staff abandoned the army's field headquarters at Savage
Station. With the rebel army now fully in pursuit (it also having crossed the creek), the fight
that came on found Sumner, Heintzelman and Franklin, commanding II Corps, III Corps and
IV Corps respectively, left to decide on a battle plan and a command structure among
themselves. Franklin, of course, a McClellan protg also trained in the school of caution,
withdrew his Corps before the battle commenced: McClellan had ordered Slocum's division
487For this very brief summary of Peninsula Campaign including the Seven Days, we have based ourselves on

Stephen Sears, To the Gates of Richmond. The Peninsula Campaign.

488Butler, Butler's Book, 358-374, presents a rare and reasonably sound tactical account of the fall of New Orleans.
489Williams, Ibid, 106, maintains that McClellan, always "nervous and oppressed" as he confronted a battle (78, 93,

95), was already unnerved and began to collapse after the battle Fair Oaks (Seven Pines), 31 May - 1 June.

(Heintzelman's corps) and Franklin's corps away to White Oak Swamp without informing any
other field commanders. Heintzelman then proceed to leave without informing anyone,
Sumner in particular. So Sumner was left to fight at Savage Station alone. By standards of the
day, it was a small and bloody, stalemated affair.
By the next morning Sumner's corps had rejoined Heintzelman's in a crescent-shaped,
irregular line of battle facing roughly westward. The line had significant gaps in its front. But
the balance of the army with the ammunition and meal trains in the lead (guaranteeing
agonizing slow movement), now instructed to withdraw southeastward, was following a narrow
winding road in the eastern Virginia swamplands immediately behind the fortified positions of
Sumner's and Heintzelman's corps. Here on 30 June, the battle of Glendale (Frazier's Farm)
was fought. Again, McClellan had not designated a field commander. He personally retreated
to Haxall's Landing on the James River behind Malvern Hill without telegraphic
communication and too distant to have an impact on the battle. Yet McClellan knew what was
coming, since Glendale represented the last weak spot at which Lee's army, joined now by
Jackson's command, could half the Union army on its route southeast. This battle too was
bloody, a massive stalemate but a strategic success from the standpoint of the invisible and
absent McClellan since it allowed the rest of the army to pass without harm.
The rest of the Army of the Potomac, consisting of Porter's V Corps and divisions of II and III
Corps regrouped that evening on Malvern Hill, a prominence just above the James River. On
1 July, Confederate forces attacked the well-fortified Union army. Artillery was central: The
Union's was well positioned by Henry Hunt, its artillery chief, and the Confederates was illplaced and ineffectual. The assaults on the hill were uncoordinated and heavy casualties were
inflicted. By mid-day, the Union army had achieved a decisive repulse, a major victory that
Union soldiers, officers and commanders - with the exception of McClellan - well understood.
The commanding general had long ago slipped over the edge.
Already by 25 June, McClellan had begun preparing his retreat. Pinkerton's inflated estimates
of rebel strength, and Confederate sponsored rumors of reinforcements from Tennessee fed
to the gullible McClellan by planted captives and escaped slaves, nurtured by his deep-seated
fears, had rendered him frantic. From here onward, he could only think of how to salvage "his
army" in retreat - tactical initiatives that opened up to him were invisible. He abandoned his
campaign, attempted to cut his losses and ran for safety. Constitutionally incapable of
commanding in a raging battle, completely demoralized, McClellan refused to follow up the
disorganized, and in part crushed, Confederate army with a counterattack. The Seven Days
had ended.490
490McClellan's commitment to the capture of Richmond flows from his view of a siege of a city (as, say, opposed to

the destruction of the rebel army) as the most viable form of military reduction of a hostile force. This much is clear
from his attempt to lay siege to Yorktown at the outset of the Peninsula Campaign: There were other ways for dealing
with the Magruder's Confederate force in front of him, not least of which was finding a water route around it. The siege
had, moreover another, less explicit function: It, unlike a raging battle, was in principle susceptible to more command
control. Bombardment could be graduated, falling or rising as realization of the objective of capitulation appears more
or less close at hand. At any rate, this presupposed McClellan's nonexistent willingness to use his cavalry for
reconnaissance. Should a siege have been conducted, and had the Confederate authorities surrendered the city
while it was still intact (as there can be little doubt McClellan, in projecting that possibility, fondly hoped), the
commanding general would have been the officer of record, there to accept the surrender. It is difficult not to imagine
McClellan sending couriers threw the lines to propose terms of cease-fire, disengagement, the immediate
convocation of talks on a political settlement, etc. In other words, the siege, as a form of militarily reducing an
opponent, offered McClellan the best possible method of ending the war in a fait accompli manner by presenting
Lincoln with an already established set of social and political facts on the ground.
McClellan's commitment to the siege (Yorktown and Richmond) can be measured be the fact that in anticipation he
sent for and studied his books on the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea (Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, 48). His
dependency on his siege train (which, rendering him poorly mobile, in turn, made the Confederate flanking movement
that much easier) was duly noted by Lee (Ibid, 173-174).McClellan's detestation of political, but more broadly of all

McClellan at Antietam
Following the defeat of the short-lived eastern Union Army of Northeastern Virginia under
John Pope, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by Jackson's wing had crossed the
Potomac above Leesburg and entered Maryland on 2 September (1862). For the
Confederates, there were two kinds of drawbacks to this campaign. Most notable were
specific absences of matriel, a lack of horses and mules for transportation, men without
proper clothing or shoes and, perhaps, a serious shortage of ammunition. Most important,
though, was the damage it did to morale. Among the upcountry and western (i.e., traditionally
Unionist) regiments of North and South Carolina in particular, dissension developed. For these
men, there was a question of principle. They had fought the Yankee invader on the Virginia
soil of the Confederacy, and now they were being asked to cross into the North. It rubbed hard
against their grain. While estimates vary, the result was, when combined with the numerous
footsore and stragglers, that a significant number of rebel soldiers did not cross the Potomac
into Maryland. Nonetheless, the campaign was undertaken because of the overriding
significance that a victory on enemy territory would have likely held for the fate of the
Confederacy.491
Screened by Stuart's cavalry, by 6 September the balance of the Confederate "first" army had
slipped into Maryland unbeknownst to the Union military and civilian leadership. Jackson's
wing occupied Frederick City on 7 September. Because Henry Halleck, Lincoln's Washingtonbased "general-in-chief" since 22 July, had ordered the garrison at Harper's Ferry held, some
14,000 Union soldiers and officers including those stationed at Martinsburg and Winchester
had concentrated at the federal arsenal. Lee, accordingly, divided his army to eliminate the
advanced threat to his campaign that might emanate from this source. (The garrison at
Harper's Ferry, at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, blocked or at least could have harassed
the supply line Lee had opened from Maryland into the Valley.) Jackson's divisions, and
additionally under his command those of McLaws, Anderson and Walker, some 25,000 men in
all, were to invest Harpers' Ferry. The balance of the army marched northwest toward
Hagerstown, Pennsylvania. When word reached Washington that Jackson's force had entered
Frederick (2 September), McClellan put his army in motion. On 12 September, its advanced
detachments reached the same city. It was on that day that soldiers in the 27th Indiana found
a lost copy (intended for D.H. Hill) of Lee's orders, dated 9 September, in which he spelled out
his instructions to divide the army. The orders were authenticated, and now that McClellan
had stumbled, so to speak, onto this piece of paper, he had himself an extraordinary piece of
luck: He knew the order of battle of the rebel army, where each division was to be situated, the
projected plan of action in whole and in part. This knowledge would give McClellan,
civilian, interference in military affairs is well-known. His lack of professional consistency (that other side of which is
officer pettiness already demonstrated in the case of Brigadier Thomas A. Morris) is not surprising: Allan Pinkerton
had no officer training nor experience, and the use of his intelligence was on these grounds alone questionable.
491For the lack of matriel of warfare, Lee to Davis in War of the Rebellion. Compendium of the Official Records of
the Union and Confederate Armies [hereafter WR], V. 19, Pt. II, 590, 591; for the Carolina regiments and the morale
problem, Garland Ferguson, a lieutenant with the 25th North Carolina, reported "when it was first made known to the
men by General Lee's order that the army was to cross the Potomac there was a considerable murmur of
disappointment in the ranks. The men said they had volunteered to resist invasion and not to invade, some did not
believe it right to invade Northern territory ...." Walter Clark (ed.), North Carolina in the Great War, 2:296; Freeman,
Lee's Lieutenants, 2:151-152, who subsumes the questions of conscience under the heading of "straggling"; and,
Stephen Sears (Landscape Turned Red, 71) who cites the Reverend Joseph Stiles, traveling at the time with Lee as a
kind of unofficial headquarters chaplain. In an unpublished letter dated 30 September, Stiles referred to those who
stayed on the southern side of the Potomac as constituting a "second army." Basing himself on Confederate reports
and dispatches, George A. Bruce ("The Strategy of the Civil War," 454), though relating this estimate to exhaustion,
states that about 20,000 men fell out of the Army of Northern Virginia before it reached Antietam.

commanding the Union Army of the Potomac, the opportunity, and as it turned out several
opportunities, to fight and effectively destroy the (already smaller) Confederate army in detail
before it could concentrate. On seven different occasions McClellan lost opportunities to
accomplish this objective.492
On 14 September, two battles over the mountain passes on South Mountain were fought at
Turner's and Fox's Gap. Both battles and their aftermaths constituted lost opportunities to
defeat a portion of the Confederate army in detail and turn on the balance of Lee's force.493
On 15 September, Confederate forces were still dispersed. At Sharpsville (lying between
Antietam Creek and the Potomac), rebel leaders were obviously concerned whether their
forces could be brought together before the Union army appeared in their front. Rapid
movement by all Union wings on Sharpsburg could have kept the rebels from concentrating,
cut off a retreat and forced dispersed Confederate forces to fight separate battles against
overwhelming numbers. McClellan may have, in fact, had something like this in mind. On the
morning of the 15th, he ordered I, II and XII Corps to move through Turner's Gap on the town
of Boonsboro, while Burnside was instructed to advance IX Corps over Fox's Gap (on the Old
Sharpsville Road). Burnside's force was further instructed to meet the main body of the army
at the western foot of the mountains, and, if possible, establish connection with Franklin's
forces to the south. This concentration was to move on Keedysville, a village on the
Boonsboro Road just over two miles northeast of the middle bridge over Antietam Creek, from
where a(n assumed) Confederate retreat could be cut off.494
McClellan issued further orders, which on the face of it, if not contradictory, expressed his own
indecision if not confusion. Having given Burnside his orders, to Franklin he gave instructions
to pursue McLaws' force (but not until he had determined its strength). If VI Corps was to
pursue McLaws' division to its south, there could not be contact established with IX Corps to
its north. It, however, mattered little: Franklin would not (and had indicated during the
campaign that he intended not to) advance without specific instructions to do so. Burnside, on
the other hand, had not even begun to push IX Corps forward (to the west side of South
Mountain) until noon. When he "caught up" with his command at Fox Gap (Burnside had been
at McClellan's headquarters about one thousand yards off the National Road a little under
three and a half miles west of Turner's Gap on that road), he found his troops still encamped
(though he had already reported them on the move). In his report, Burnside cited "fatigue" and
492A movement into Pennsylvania had been mooted for a long time by the Confederate military-civilian leadership

nexus. Davis, and Generals G.W. Smith, Joseph Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard had, for example, discussed it prior
to Jackson's Valley Campaign in the October 1861 (and later similar discussions would occur between Davis, Lee and
Secretary of War Benjamin). That movement was attempted but aborted in Lee's Maryland Campaign, and again the
next summer (1863) in his Pennsylvania Campaign which culminated in the three day battle of Gettysburg.
The purpose of such a campaign would be, and in the event was, several. In order of ascending importance these
included instigating a secessionist movement in Maryland against the Union (though, it might be recalled, prosouthern sentiment was strong only in the Tidewater area of the state while the Potomac was crossed and the
campaign cut through the central portion of Maryland, historically western, pro-Union counties); protecting the
Shenandoah Valley against Union incursions; cutting major Union east-west communications and supply lines,
gathering foodstuffs, livestock and fodder in the rich farming valleys of central Pennsylvania; and, menacing and
capturing major northern cities - beginning with Harrisburg, then Philadelphia and, in the more fanciful rebel accounts,
Baltimore, Washington or New York - in order both to produce panic and resignation among the urban, northern social
classes and to impress European powers (Britain and France) with the overwhelming military power of the
Confederate army. The last purpose had embedded in it a grand strategic objective, namely, creating a crisis - one
based on popular pressure and foreign recognition of the secessionist state - that would compel the Union
government to enter negotiations with the Confederacy to end the war. For a summary those occasions, Sears, Ibid,
299-306, and James Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets, 226.
493For the battles, Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army, 221-227, 233-245 and also Sears, Ibid, 204-205.
494For Confederate anxieties, Freeman, Ibid, 2:204; for McClellan strategic intent on 15 September, WR, Ser. 23, Pt.

I, 53.

"hunger" as the reason for the delay. There would be no combined advance on Keedysville
that day.495
Still by mid-afternoon Israel Richardson's division (II Corps) and George Sykes' regular army
division (V Corps reserve) stood on each side of the Boonsboro Road at Antietam Creek, and
I and II Corps were immediately to their rear. All awaited instructions. Opposite them was Lee
with the bulk of Longstreet's wing, some 15,000 men, formed up in a battle line (and patently
not in retreat). Jackson's wing in its entirety - including McLaws, Anderson and Walker
divisions - were still not present. McClellan (with his staff and his confidant, Fitz-John Porter,
at his side) made an on-the-spot tour, a "rapid examination," of the opposing line of defense.
At best, this examination was cursory: Cavalry were not brought up for reconnaissance, nor
were pickets thrown out. Nonetheless the Union army (and McClellan had to have known it
given that fact that he had a copy of Lee's order for disposition of his troops in his possession
and that he knew that Jackson's wing was not to be counted among the defenders opposite
him) still held a crushing superiority in numbers against an army that had yet to concentrate.
Later he reported, and one gets the sense that he did so with a nonchalant wave of the hand
(maybe his stomach was growling), that it was too late in the day to initiate any action. The
day of 15 September as the whole was the third lost opportunity496 (see Map 5).
On 16 September, a heavy fog enveloped the fields between Antietam Creek and the town of
Sharpsville. McClellan waited. No orders were issued the previous evening nor that morning,
no troops advanced into assault positions. The mist, he wired Halleck, had made it impossible
to evaluate enemy strength. Further, McClellan later wrote, he needed time, time for
"examining the ground, finding fords, clearing the approaches, and hurrying up the
ammunition and supply trains..." Thus, McClellan had learned absolutely nothing from the
disastrous campaign on the Peninsula: He still prepared for battle largely on the model of a
siege. Eighteen hours after his advanced forces began to invest the east side of Antietam
Creek, no preparations had been made for an attack on small enemy force in front of him. Yet,
if the Confederates had 20,000-25,000 men by McClellan's count, the Union forces numbered
some 60,000. This was still almost a 2 to 1 numerical advantage. Now no military
commander, McClellan included, seriously believes that in warfare superior numbers alone
generally prevail over skillful direction. But then McClellan himself outwardly exhibited the
conviction that he was every bit "Bobbie Lee's" equal. Yet the chance of a real fight brought
McClellan to panic. His apparent confidence, like that of so many other Union commanders
masked, a sort of existential insecurity as a military leader, a fundamental, ineradicable fear of
a fight. That fear, rooted perhaps in the same internalized and personally formative, socially
passive structures of consumption that generate the need to rationalize risk, led to a depthpsychological inability to assimilate battlefield experience, hence to an unsurpassable
absence of combat (leadership) practice, hence to battlefield-based incompetence. At any
rate, by noon the concentration of the Confederate army was well advanced as six of nine of
Jackson's divisions had come up from Harper's Ferry and onto what would be the battlefield immediately falling right into line on the field as they arrived. The morning of 16 September,
then, was the fourth lost opportunity497 (see Map 5).
495For the Union delay in concentrating, Murfin, Ibid, 204-205, and Sears, Ibid, 155-156 (who details Franklin's

hesitation in front of McLaws); for orders to Franklin, WR, Vol. 51, Pt. 1, 836; for Burnside's report WR, Ser. 1, V. 19,
414-422, esp. 415.
496For McClellan's "rapid examination" of the Confederate line of defense that led curtly to the conclusion that it was
"too late that day to attack," see his Report on the Organization and Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, 374, and
also Sears, Ibid, 159.
497Sears (Landscape Turned Red, 162-163) provides a brief, but excellent description of McClellan's failure to seize
the opportunity presented to him on the morning of 16 September. For force calculations, Ibid, 160, 163.

On 17 September, various units of the Union did engage their enemy in truly ferocious and
deadly fighting that, from the Union side, was singularly marked by a series of uncoordinated,
unconnected assaults. Three separate battles were in effect fought that day.
The battle opened at just before 6 am, about daybreak, in the north end of the field of action,
an area known as the "North Woods." Hooker's I Corps, some 8,600 men, marched south
along the Hagerstown turnpike toward a church belonging to a Dunker sect. Two divisions
(Doubleday's and Rickett's) moved in columns along each side of the road, and a third
(Meade's) was held in reserve. Rickett's division held the left and was to advance on that side
into a cornfield and just beyond it, the "East Woods." It is unclear who, McClellan or Hooker,
drew up this plan, since there are no specific orders on record for this action. However, it is
clear, at least retrospectively, that there was no design for an assault that combined Hooker's
corps with Manfield's (XII Corps) which was encamped just a mile away north and east of I
Corps' point of departure. I Corps opened the battle alone and largely fought, until it was
spent, alone. This (part of the) battle was fought on the east side of the turnpike, particularly in
the Cornfield where both sides slugged it out in charge and countercharge. By 7 am, though
the Union force had gained ground, the battle here was essentially stalemated. The fighting
had been extraordinarily heavy and bloody with massive casualties on both sides. (The next
day in the Cornfield men composing entire regimental lines were found to have fallen under
withering fire in the formation they had advanced in.)
Because the assault - at each level, brigade, division and corps - was even in this part of the
battlefield uncoordinated, Rickett's three brigades were met by Confederate forces that
numerically were roughly equal. Confederate artillery, moreover, played a decisive role. The
Union forces held overall superiority in artillery. Yet Rickett's division's support was
inadequate: Stuart's guns held the high ground, Nicodemus Hill just to the east of the field of
action, a prominence that had been conceded to the Confederates without a fight, without
even an effort to take it prior to the rebel arrival on the hill the previous evening. While, on the
basis of the campaign reports, it is not known who made the decision (McClellan or Hooker),
XII Corps remained in reserve. (The lack of overall coordination leads to the suspicion it was
McClellan.) Manfield's corps could have been brought up earlier to turn the rebel flank during
Hooker's assault. It was not. In fact, as of 7:00 am no orders had been issued to Burnside's IX
Corps in the south end of the battlefield (opposite the Confederate right), nor to Sumner's II
Corps encamped near army headquarters (due east of Sharpsburg on the opposite side of the
Antietam Creek, opposite the weak rebel center).
Thus by 7:15 am, Lee, well posted on the inactivity on the Union left, ordered Longstreet to
move George T. Anderson's brigade of Georgians on his right north to the other (left) flank to
support Jackson against Hooker. McClellan (with Porter and both staffs - all situated on the
high ground of the Pry farm house east of Sharpsburg and across Antietam Creek) could not
for his part see either flank from his position. The central part of the field in front of Sharpsburg
was visible enough on a clear day, but to add to his (and their) disorientation was the smoke
McClellan, through a convenient rationalization, did not consider the Peninsula Campaign disastrous. Reversal of his
strategic objective (Richmond) was irrelevant, for against great adversity (and not the rebel army) his army
successfully conducted a retreat. If the massive failure of the campaign were laid out before him in newspaper story
one after another, in speech after speech in the Congress, through the displeasure evident in the Administration's shift
of men and matriel to Pope's army, in the gossip in cultured circles in Washington, etc., McClellan remained immune
to criticism, fixed in his belief (of success). This psychological rigidity was a necessary emotional structure sustaining
his megalomaniac sense of his role in "saving" the Union.
Socially passive structures of consumption entail a parasitism, a living off the labor of others at a remove without the
contact with those others that would entail the necessity of a character-forming interpersonal struggle to appropriate
what others produce. Anyone whose work is bureaucratized or purely administrative would be subject to such
formation. This passive, calculative personality is here opposed to the active man who works among or with,
commands or leads others.

of massed musketry and cannon. Consequently, McClellan felt it simply too much of a risk to
bring II Corps into the engagement until the situation clarified. By 7:00 am, Hooker's division
had advanced enough to be partially visible through the smoke from Union headquarters. It
was also clear that Lee had brought Hood's division from out of its reserve in the Dunker
church area. At 7:20 am, McClellan countered by ordering Sumner II Corps into the battle.
But, posted east of Antietam Creek, II Corps had a two mile march to the field. That would
take time; moreover, McClellan's commitment was limited, typically timid and cautious: Israel
Richardson's division, one of three in the corps (of 15,200 men) was instructed to remain east
of the Creek as a reserve until Morrell's division (Porter's V Corps) could be brought up to take
its place. Morell's division was bivouacked a mere mile to the rear. Yet it took an hour to
advance, and Richardson's division was not set free to move until 9:00 am. McClellan had
justified misgivings about launching Sumner's corps because he feared the old man would be
the ranking officer on the battlefield. Perhaps that in part accounts for his hesitation, his failure
to put the corps into the fight early and decisively, his delay in putting the weight of II Corps on
the Union right flank. In throwing II Corps into the battle, McClellan intended Sumner to go in
under Hooker, as the officer commanding on the scene. Unfortunately, Sumner's corps came
into action at the same time that Hooker, seriously shot in the foot, personally redrew. Sumner
went in with an independent command. McClellan's caution, hesitation and halfway measure,
his failure to seize and consolidate what had been so arduously taken, essentially gave up
what the I Corps had won at such enormous cost.
As his forces came up, Sumner stopped in the East Woods to evaluate the situation. He knew
(having met Hooker's ambulance in its departure) that Hooker would not be able to brief him.
He found Rickett (and thereafter listened little to anyone else, including Alpheus Williams,
divisional commander in XII Corps). It should be recalled that Rickett's division had not only
been at the center of most of the fighting, it had also suffered the heaviest casualties. Sumner
came away with the sense that I Corps had been scattered and the battle in this part of the
field was in danger of being lost. Noting the position on his far left of a portion of XII Corps,
convinced that I Corps had practically been pushed off the field, Sumner reckoned his men
would have to advance alone and that, moreover, he had advanced to this point beyond the
enemy flank (since the XII Corps troops, he assumed, must indicate the Union flank).
According, his force only need march due west then wheel left in order to come behind the
rebels. At that point he could drive that force southward into the teeth of Burnside's strength.
The rear division in II Corps formation (French's) started maybe twenty minutes behind
Sedgwick's lead division and was never really connected to it. When French reached the East
Woods Sedgwick's division, and riding with it Sumner, was not to be found. This type of
confusion, rooted in the characters of men who were slow to advance and did everything by
the book, was typical of the Union army leadership in the East. It was nearly always
disastrous. At any rate, French saw the same XII Corps troops to his left and veered off to aid
them. Far ahead, Sumner, having wheeled, lined up Sedgwick's division in three brigade-wide,
parallel lines, a formation designed to sweep the enemy south. An effective formation for the
task at hand, if the Union soldiers had indeed reached the rebel rear. They had not. In fact,
Sedgwick division was in effect deployed in flank in front of very concentrated strength of what
forces Jackson had, at this point in the battle, mustered. In the fighting that followed,
Sedgwick's division was hit and hit hard across its front. The regiments collapsed left to right
like a row of dominoes and retreated, routed and wrecked, to the north back into the (North)
woods from which Hooker had initiated the morning's engagement, bearing along with them
the advanced units of I and XII Corps.
During the course of 17 September, Lee, in masterly fashion, moved his forces from one
portion of the battlefield to another where the growing intensity of the fighting, or his

anticipation of such, dictated a concentration. McClellan, committed from the outset to

hoarding his forces behind the line of Antietam Creek, hesitated and then finally committed, as
we have seen, troops in piecemeal fashion to an area on the battlefield. As a result of the
effort to husband, reserve and preserve his forces, McClellan's decisions to throw in fresh
troops invariably entailed a hour delay, maybe more, before they reached the actual field of
battle. The Union commander made his decision as mere reactions to ongoing battlefield
developments without any effort to anticipate or shape them. McClellan not only had no taste
for bloodshed in war, but lacked in field generalship altogether. If the Seven Days revealed
McClellan's incapacity for command in the heat of battle, Antietam would find him not only
aloof but would also exhibit the characteristic failure of all Union commanders before Grant,
namely, the inability to get adequate numbers of their troops into battle. At Antietam, the Union
army fought in large, dispersed formations, engaging in piecemeal attacks (in the West
Woods, the Cornfield, the East Woods, "Bloody Lane" and at "Burnside's bridge") without
coordination or concentration. This manner of fighting during a battle, one in which, moreover,
the commanding general exercised no control over the fightings development, leveled the
Union army's numerical superiority (of nearly two to one), and equalized the forces of two
armies thereby squandering a massive Union advantage. The intuitively obvious,
counterhistorical "fact" is that had McClellan coordinated his flank attacks that battle would
been over by noon and Lee's army would have been crushed. This was the fifth lost
opportunity.498
As the day of the 17th unfolded, the fighting would shift first to the center along a road known
as "Bloody Lane," and then to the south (Union left - Confederate right) to a bridge which has
come down to us with the name "Burnside's bridge." The heaviest fighting of the day took
place in the center, as both sides engaged in a style of fighting - Napoleonic tactics, closed
order formations entangled in charges and countercharges - that maximized casualties. By
1:00 pm, no later than 2:00 pm, fighting in the center had come to a lull. Losses on both sides
had been immense (3,000 Union, 2,700 Confederate). Men were exhausted and praying for
an end to fighting. (An Alabamian with Dick Anderson's division wrote "we were praying for
night to come.") In other words, wills on both sides had been sapped. Lee simply hadn't the
wherewithal, the human resources, to put anyone more men into the battle in the center. What
did McClellan do? Rephrasing the question allows insight into what might have been done.
What had Grant, in a similar situation, done? The previous winter at Fort Donelson, the rebels
had conducted an assault in preparation for a breakout. The Union forces under Grant had
partially and costly repulsed the attack. Retrospectively, Grant recalled that both sides were
exhausted, and at that moment it was a test of wills, for the side that could mount an offensive
would carry the day. The offensive was launched and Grant's soldiers took the fort and
compelled a surrender. What did McClellan do? On the 17th, McClellan had Darius Couch's
division, sent to Harper's Ferry the previous evening, marching up and down Pleasant Valley
to no apparent purpose. Franklin had 10,000 fresh troops under Smith and Slocum. There
were still another 10,000-12,000 men of I and XII Corps and some 6,500 more who had seen
action at Burnside's bridge fit to fight and on the field. Porter's entire V Corps of 12,800 men
remained uncommitted to the battle. During the battle McClellan committed no more than
50,000 men (including artillerymen) to the fighting. Nearly a third of his army had not in
anyway been involved in the engagement. What did McClellan do? The situation at the center
along Bloody Lane remained unchanged the next morning (18 September). Lee had no
498This account has drawn freely on Sears' Landscape Turned Red, Murfin's The Gleam of Bayonets, and

McClellan's Report. The former two authors arrive at the same assessment of command failures as we have. For a
similar judgment from a Confederate sympathizing historian, see Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American
Civil War, II, 278-279.

reserves. A drive at the Confederate center would have destroyed the Army of Northern
Virginia. The Union Army of the Potomac still had enormous troop strength as yet
uncommitted to the battle. What did McClellan do? Fearing an imaginary rebel reserve, he
thought (as he did during the Seven Days) of little more than holding off his own defeat. He
did nothing. In his Report McClellan stated, "Whether to renew the attack on the 18th ... was
the question before me. After a night of anxious deliberation, and a full and careful survey of
the situation and condition of our army, the strength and position of the enemy, I concluded
that the success of an attack on the 18th was not certain. I am aware of the fact that under
ordinary circumstances a general is expected to risk a battle if he has a reasonable prospect
of success; but at this critical juncture I should have had a narrow view of the condition of the
country had I been willing to hazard another battle with less than an absolute assurance of
success." If he could not rationalize away the risk, it would not be undertaken. Across the
divide of 134 years one can still feel the urge to reach out, grab McClellan by the scruff of the
neck, shake him, and demand "how much more in blood and treasure must these boys pay for
your hesitation, indecision and lack of determination? When, in history and the history of
warfare, has there is there ever been 'an absolute assurance of success?' When, if not now,
would it ever be more certain?" He had, in fact, issued detailed orders that morning "not to
precipitate hostilities." This was the sixth lost opportunity.499
The evening of the 18th, Union soldiers and officers heard the steady rhythm of men marching
as Lee's army withdrew across the Potomac through a single passable ford. No effort to
challenge it was made. The order not to do so had already been given. McClellan was quite
satisfied, so it seems, to have "driven" the "invaders" from Pennsylvania and Maryland. This
was the final lost opportunity.
McClellan's Leadership
In the aftermath of the battle of Antietam, McClellan felt he had redeemed his reputation and
honor - both of which had been severely damaged by the onslaught of press criticism
following the Seven Days and by the ascendancy (since fallen) of John Pope. Subjectively
certain he would soon be publicly vindicated, his sense of self (once more) began to grow to
grandiose dimensions. He had saved the country (again), and as his price he would, he
informed his wife, insist Halleck and Stanton be removed. It chafed McClellan that the public
vindication he most prized (because it would be humbling, would admit misjudging his own
greatness and misplacing confidence in Pope, etc.), that from Lincoln, Stanton and Halleck,
was not immediately forthcoming and when it finally came it was (so he judged) stingy.500
499In his retrospect, the great Confederate artillery commander, E.P. Alexander (Military Memoirs, 262), wrote that on

the morning of 18 September, "Lee's army was ruined and the end of the Confederacy was in sight." McClellan's
remarks are cited from his Report, 393. For the Alabamian, Sears, Ibid, 269; for Grant, The Personal Memoirs of
Ulysses S. Grant [hereafter cited as Memoirs], 181; for Union army available manpower, Murfin, Ibid, 297-298 and
Sears, Ibid, 291, 926.
While Couch's division marched almost leisurely, A.P. Hill's Confederate division had in contrast been at Harper's
Ferry accepting the surrender of the Union garrison, issuing paroles to Union soldiers and officers, and gathering up
captured matriel. The last rebel force to come onto the battlefield, Hill marched his division furiously with the greatest
celerity to get to the battlefield. Couch, upon his recall - nothing urgent in McClellan's request, had arrived to the east
of the battlefield in the evening, at least four hours too late to provide reinforcements. McClellan is cited from WR,
Ser. 1, Vol. 19, Pt. 1, 65; for his order against engagement, Ibid, 280.
500For the McClellan's subjectively certain redemption of self and honor, Civil War Papers, 476 [to Ellen, his wife, 20
September 1862]. He thus indicated to his wife, his confidant, that he would seek the removal of Stanton and Halleck.
Ibid. ("I feel that I have done all that can be asked in twice saving the country. If I continue in its service I have at least
the right to demand a guarantee that I shall not be interfered with - I know I cannot have that assurance so long as
Stanton continues in the position of Secy of War & Halleck as Genl in Chief.") Their removal was to achieved by
pressuring Lincoln through "certain friends of mine" in conjunction with similar pressure from northern governors
meeting at this time in Almata, Pennsylvania. This fantasy was obviously never realized.

McClellan's world was increasingly turned upside down: Not only did his two immediate
superiors remain in office, Lincoln exacerbated the tensions McClellan felt (vis--vis those two
superiors) by issuing what he considered a scandalous and shocking decree (preliminarily and
limitedly freeing slaves), while Halleck, representing himself as the instrument through which
his superiors spoke (Lincoln in particular), insisted McClellan abandon his own strategic plans
and immediately put the army in motion in pursuit of Lee's. After seeking advice (all of which
warned him against opposition), McClellan issued a purely formal statement (perfunctory
mentioning Lincoln's proclamation) to his soldiery and officers which reminded them of the
allegiance they owed the government. On the other hand, he was loathe to abandon his plan
for slow pursuit of the Confederate army by way of the Shenandoah Valley; and, when
compelled to, he engaged in dilatory argumentation. McClellan insisted he must first
reorganize his army: The army lacked men, men lacked shoes and clothing, the cavalry
lacked horses, lines of supply and retreat had to reconstructed, fortified, etc., and when this
failed he returned to and re-argued previously rejected strategic positions, viz., (re)acquired
territory had to defended (requiring construction of fortifications and more regiments), defense
of the line of the Potomac and the Shenandoah was strategically most desirable, etc.501
While McClellan - headquartered at various times from late September through almost all of
October at Sharpsburg, in Pleasant Valley (west of South Mountain in Maryland) and Knoxville
(MD) - stalled, the Army of Northern Virginia had been busy. Jackson's corps engaged itself by
tearing up the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio along rail bed from Harper's Ferry southwest to
Winchester and from Manassas Junction west to Staunton. To McClellan's embarrassment,
Stuart's cavalry literally road (some two-hundred twenty miles) around his army's
encampments. Lee, wishing to know the disposition of the Union army, had ordered a
reconnaissance in force. Embarrassment was, at any rate, cast aside. The raid was grist for
McClellan's mill: He used Stuart's raid as an object-lesson, insisting to Halleck that his inability
to circumvent the raid was the consequences of a lack of horses (or fit horses) among his
cavalry. The unfitness of cavalry in turn justified his army's immobility. This dilatory
argumentation went on unabated.502
Because, both inside and outside the army, there was a good deal of opposition to Lincoln's
preliminary decree, the immobility of McClellan's forces played to that opposition. McClellan,
as a central actor in that opposition, full well knew this. Whatever other interests Lincoln's and
the radicals had in prosecuting the war, immediate, decisive action also functioned as a
diversion. It would deflect criticism from an otherwise unpopular policy. Just how unpopular
would be fully revealed by early November when the autumn elections for governors and state
legislative representatives ran their course.
In a 13 October telegram to McClellan, Lincoln dismantled the main props underpinning
McClellan's position. First, he indicated that heavily fortifying the route of advance up the
Shenandoah Valley (which, for McClellan, meant above all else rebuilding the railway from
Harper's Ferry southward to push his supplies forward) made little sense when his army was
qualitatively better provisioned than Lee's. McClellan, according to the President (and
rightfully so), would have his army in winter quarters wasting the entire autumn on this project.
Second, citing a maxim of warfare ("operate on your enemy's communications as much as
possible without exposing your own"), he noted that the commander behaved as if this applied
only to him, not to the enemy. The Confederate army's lines of communication were exposed,
501For McClellan's order to the army concerning the preliminary proclamation, Ibid, 493-494; for McClellan's attitude

toward Lincoln's decree, his 25 September letter to Ellen ("I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed
doctrine as that of a servile insurrection - it is too infamous"), Ibid, 481.
502For Stuart's raid, Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, 2:284f; for McClellan's object-lessons on cavalry, Civil War Papers,
494, 495, 496-497, 497-498, 498-499 (telegrams to Halleck of 10,11,12,13 and 14 October).

and an obvious course of action could be predicated on an understanding of such: Lincoln

remarked that as Lee's force moved up (southward) the Valley toward Richmond, it moved in
the arc of a circle; and, that in moving south southeast toward Richmond east of the Blue
Ridge Mountains, the Army of the Potomac moved on an inside, less circuitous arc. Lee's
army not only had a greater distance to travel to reach and defend Richmond (should
McClellan's army attempt to interpose itself between that movement and Richmond), but the
Union army kept its lines of communication and supply behind itself, away from Lee's army
and accessible via a series of good road all along the line of the less circuitous arc.503
After much prodding and a direct order from Lincoln, McClellan moved off the Potomac line
below (east of) the Blue Ridge Mountains and not (as he had wanted) above (west of) the
Shenandoah River. In other words, he had, all too slowly of course, essentially undertaken the
course of action recommended by Lincoln. But by the time McClellan had issued instructions
to his various corps commanders to cross the Potomac and the army as a whole had begun to
move southward, the Army of Northern Virginia had once again concentrated, moved, and
prevented the Union forces from placing themselves between it and Richmond, an object
which had until now been within McClellan's reach. When this occurred, Lincoln removed
McClellan and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside.
At Antietam, excessive caution had, as in previous campaigns and battles (and ones that
would follow), prevented a commander from getting adequate men into the fight. In the
aftermath of this battle, the same caution had prevented a fight on advantageous terms.
Excessively cautious militarily trained, regular army leadership in the Maryland Campaign
recapitulated a litany of command failures following upon it that, having become visible in the
very first major battle of the war (Bull Run), were by now all-too-familiar. But excessive caution
was not fortuitous. For regular army officers, it was in practice indistinguishable from their
status as such. For McClellan, as well as his coterie of fellow gentlemen-officers, their status
as regular army officers was, moreover, inseparable from their opposition to emancipation and
their Democratic party politics.504

503For Lincoln's letter, WR, Ibid, 13-14.

504At this point in the war McClellan seemingly judicious use of his soldiery, to all appearances his regard for their

lives, it should be noted, was extremely popular among the soldiery of the Army of the Potomac. See Catton, Mr.
Lincoln's Army, 34-35, 69, 71, 84, 87, 88, 89, 139, 146, 188, 194, 196.

Part III
Historical and Theoretical Structure of the Union Army Command Problematic (I)
West Point Formation and Southern Sympathetic Politics of a Caste-like Officers Corps
If lack of specific military preparation and political appointment (in order to satisfy a
constituency of the Republican Administration) did not with necessity make for poor field
commanders, and if the West Point trained officers of the eastern Union armies were
responsible for numerous command errors, some of disastrous proportions, how are we to
understand these really important failures, those accruing to the latter group of officers?
Review the history of the United States army, and the structure of its institutional life.
Outside a brief war with Mexico (1847-1848), which it should be noted was by Civil War
standards little more than a single campaign, the United States Army had engaged in no major
conflicts since 1815. This absence of war created a situation in which the life of a regular army
officer largely consisted in the habitual routines of daily military activity. The exceptions
included occasional reassignments where once established the routine began anew,
infrequent assignments to engineering projects (coastal fortifications, fort construction), if
assigned to the "frontier" skirmishing with various Indian groups (a form of activity which soon
too developed its own routine), and rarely commissions to survey unmapped territory. Apart
from these exceptions, the life of a regular army officer was primarily made of drill, muster,
preparation of reports and limited free time. (Some of the officers, Halleck and McClellan
included, used their free time to advance a theoretical understanding of warfare. In their
cases, it was to no avail.) This side of the free time, then, it was mostly routine.
In the forty-six years since the end of the last major conflict with Great Britain, West Point,
though hardly commissioning a great number annually, had nonetheless produced a steady
steam of cadets. At any given moment in that forty-six year period these men were heavily
concentrated in the lower ranks of the army as junior officers. Thus, the solidness and stability
of daily army life and the relative lack of fighting meant that promotion was a slow, lengthy
affair. Since very, very few occasions for the rapid promotion typical of battlefield conditions
presented themselves, it was the infrequent retirement of a senior officer (or the resignation of
a middle ranking one) that created the opportunity for advancement. With slim prospects for
demonstrating battlefield-based leadership ability, promotion was based upon two criteria,
namely, seniority and a daily military practice that exhibited a consistent commitment to the
rules, regulations, procedures and discipline of the army as an institution. Though small prior
to the Civil War, the United States Army resembled nothing more closely that a large modern
bureaucratic organization wherein only those who played by the rules were members and
advance was made through seniority and not by achievement.
When examined institutionally, the pre-Civil War history and, in particular, the historically
constituted structure of daily army life cannot be said to have "conditioned" army officers.
Rather, this structure compelled men to the extent they pursued career objectives in the army
to adapt their life practices to a quotidian that was dull and quintessentially routine, that is, to
(re)make themselves at once as a human incarnation and extension of this institution: In and
through the daily practice of regular army life officers tended to (re)create themselves as a
typical army officer, a personality which was methodical because highly disciplined, slow,
cautious and unimaginative. Because army officers were subject to and accepted this routine,
they were largely committed to the army as an institution with all its bureaucratized
shortcomings (which is doubtful most of them ever grasped). If the dead weight of an
institution hung over them, it should be noted that it was also because these men remade
themselves as a typical army officer that they were consciously committed to all that was dull,
routine and unimaginative in the army as well as to its martial discipline. (It is in this context
that the term "old army habits" acquires its true significance.) Moreover, and this is added

anticipatorily, once the war-based, massive expansion of the army militarily demanded an
equally rapid infusion of a new soldiery (i.e., "political" officers) into the regular army officers
corps, regular army officers would become fully conscious of themselves as such: Protecting
themselves against officers corps dilution by political appointees, against the occasional
reality of a politically appointed officer assigned command over a number of regular army
officers, and against the fear of superior politically appointed generalship, regular army
officers became exclusive. Among these officers in the East, self-defense of their status
hardened an already formed corporate identity. Midway through the war, the latter began to
take on among northern officers the appearance of a closed caste.
Commitment to their special status as officers (and to the army institutionally embodied in its
training academy, West Point, wherein for many young cadets this concept was for the first
time encountered, assimilated and internalized) fused with a concept of manliness that both
consciously defined the relation of the "better" to the "lower" classes. Of course, gentlemanliness not only consciously defined the "better" classes of people as better - it was
operative in their behavior: Gentlemanly behavior meant, among other things, refinement in
speech, social grace, and smartness in dress and appearance. In America at mid-century
there was, furthermore, a culturally diffused model of gentlemanliness, namely, the southern
gentleman: Everything that was mannered and cultivated was expressed in the already
romanticized and idealized behavior of southern planters. The corporate identity of the regular
army officers corps was strengthened by the practice of gentlemanly behavior and aspirations
to be gentlemanly on the southern model. With these aspirations came by and large a more or
less well-defined commitment to pro-slavery politics, to the southern planters' form of life as a
model of civilized existence and inseparably both a disgust with (if not outright revulsion for)
slavish life, concretely embodied in and indistinguishable from black slaves, as a degraded
form of humanity, and a distinct distaste for the lower orders, the laboring commoners who
were inspired by concepts like "democracy." Because the attitude toward blacks was culturally
diffused (shared by whites of all social classes, particularly, tenants as well as well-to-do
capitalist farmers in the West, artisan workers in the urban East and West, small middling
groups of professionals in the North as a whole, ruling class social groups in the East, etc), it
would have indeed been odd had the vast majority of northerners in the army officers corps
not shared this social attitude. If the gentleman officer, contemptuous of degraded black
humanity, held himself aloof from the "free laboring" masses in northern society, in this respect
the southern ideal of gentlemanliness, neatly dovetailing with his own class prejudices,
exercised a compelling attraction on him. Hailing from largely first half nineteenth century
northern middle strata and well-to-do backgrounds (whether urban or rural), such as that of
large and smaller merchants, lawyers, bankers, older denominational clergy, academicians or
larger farmers, all too many West Point commissioned officers were already disposed to
disdain the lowly, unruly or rowdy crowds, mobs, or "rabble" made of urban "mechanics" and
"country rustics." The egalitarian and democratic aspirations of antebellum common men
offended their sense of order, discipline and hierarchy. McClellan's well-known and notorious
snub of Lincoln is fully consistent with his patrician, and this haughty, attitude. (However,
Lincoln's deference to McClellan, often exhibited in their correspondence, is merely the other
side of the latter's insolence. That deference, the internalization of "commoner" status, is
much of what makes the corresponding insolence of the well-bred possible. Socially
generalized capitalist practices are the solvent of both.)505
505On the evening of 13 November 1861, McClellan, returning to his Washington home late in the evening, refused to

the see the President and his aides who awaited him in his parlor. Instead he went straight to bed.
For a flavor of McClellan's southern sympathizing side, Canton (Mr. Lincoln's Army, 71) describes the extraordinary
care with which McClellan, while moving up the Virginia Peninsula in spring 1862, protected against his own soldiers

Planter society, on the other hand, embodied that sense of order, and southern gentlemen
exhibited the cultivation and refinement that brought that sense literally to life. If republican
hostility toward a permanent military establishment represented by West Point and the United
States Army was characteristic of the democratic "masses" of Jacksonian America, it should
come as no surprise that the national military academy stood outside the main currents of an
era in which native sensibilities of the independent yeoman or artisan were deemed
paradigmatic for virtue, citizenship and soldiering.506
Commitment to the ideal of gentlemanly behavior and practice on the southern model had
specific political connotations: Since after 1844 the southern Democracy was the party of the
big planters, and since the northern Democracy existed in a tight symbiosis with the southern
party (best expressed in adherence to the party by the social strata most deeply involved in
the cotton trade, the great export merchants, bankers and financiers of New York and
Philadelphia), pro-slavery politics most often meant a pro-Democratic party outlook.507
Officer Ambition, the Southern Model, Risk and its Rationalization
In the North at mid-century, entrepreneurial activity, innovation, opportunity and business
creativity were, so to speak, in the air, that is, a constitutive moment of the cultural climate. In
many cases, a military career did not satisfy the accumulative greed of northern bourgeois
officers. It did not take long for almost all officers to grasp that the routine characteristic of
daily army life was, so to speak, "endless." Moreover, their ambition gnawed at any number of
them: The army offered little in the way of fame, little opportunity for promotion and none for
making money. Thus, these officers left the military after a short "tour of duty" to avail
themselves of the opportunities to make their fortunes. The operative term here is short.
McClellan, for example, engaged in supervision of fort construction, surveying expeditions,
and toured the continent to study the organization of European armies. He spent ten years in
the army after graduation from West Point, and by almost any account nearly exhausted the
range of activities that (even the most romanticized account of) army life had to offer. It should
come as no surprise, then, that while there were exceptions, by and large only the
unambitious, dull, non-imaginative northern officers remained in the service.
Among southerners, commitment to military service should be carefully distinguished from that
of their northern counterparts. In contrast to the North, it is legitimate to speak of a southern
martial tradition. A military "career" was not merely an acceptable but was a valued form of life
for southerners - for whom greed and business gave way before honor and gentlemanliness
as cultural ideals. Unlike the North, which at worst could offer the speculator-con artist and at
best could recommend the sober, industrious shopkeeper or farmer as social role models, the
South could, consistent with the aristocratic-planter vision of life, offer the gentleman military
officer as exemplars of a form of life that was distinctively southern. Robert E. Lee (whose
military assignments included superintendent at West Point) and J.E.B. Stuart present two
extreme variants on this southern model. This rarefied model had its actual foundations in the
real life practices of southern society.508
southern property that has fallen into Union hands.
506For classically republican hostility toward military establishments, see " Doctrine and its Absence among Officers
of the Army of the Potomac," below. Michael Adams, Our Masters the Rebels, 54-55, makes the point that West Point
as an institution was impervious to the vulgar charm of Jacksonian egalitarianism. He also notes the class-based
bigotry of "Americans of breeding" in relation to the democratic "masses." Ibid, 15, 55.
507Of course, not all regular army officers shared pro-slavery, Democratic party politics.
508In literature of the period, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man most forcefully, brilliantly and critically examines

the dark side of ambition, the "really existing" social model of the con artist, speculator and adventurer who was not
only ubiquitous on the geographically advanced edges of the "American Empire" but who is endemic to all
economically dynamic capitalist societies with an advancing frontier.

Control over slave labor constituted the practice in and through which these foundations were
laid; first, in the actual daily enforcement of slave labor by masters, overseers and drivers. The
daily life of a planter gave rise to a psychology of mastery expressed in a language of
command: The forms of awareness characteristic of southern gentleman raised on the planter
model were rooted in behaviors paternally encouraged from a very early age. Thomas
Jefferson, a planter and slaveholder himself, had noted, "The whole commerce between
master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most
unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children
see this, and learn to imitate it." These behaviors, e.g., sensitivity to issues of honor,
aggressive self-defense, calculated risk-taking, etc., as well as the contexts (mastering slaves)
in which these behaviors were originally learned and internalized, made it much easier for any
number of southern army commanders to adopt themselves to offensive, initiative-seizing
battlefield operations and to handling military formations whose size far exceeded any unit
they had previous experience in handling. The real life-practice foundations of the southern
gentleman-officer model lay, second, in the regular, systematic planter utilization of poor white
farmer-manned slave patrols that terrorized blacks (insuring continued submission) and
secured the capture of slaves who had the audacity to attempt to escape their "natural"
condition. The partially militarized slave patrol, in conjunction with the life-practices of poor
farmers who hunted and trapped to reproduce themselves and their families, formed the basis
for the martial superiority of the southern soldier in the first two years of the war.509
The ambitious, especially the younger, northern army officers admired their southern
counterparts no end. But while they held the romanticized, southern gentleman-officer in high
regard, their ambitions drove them out of the army. The greatest number of them (like the
politicians they otherwise disdained) trained as lawyers, or as businessmen often finding
positions in the newly emerging large, modern firms, the railroad companies. Their legal and
business training and experience taught them a style of accumulation specific to the capitalist
firm (and it is likely that the reflected summation of this experience was reinforced by any
religious training, likely Protestant perhaps specifically Calvinist, that they may have already
had). That is, these (now) ex-officers discovered, as contemporary businessmen were
discovering, the activity specific to modern, rational firms. That activity concerns the peculiar
nature of risk-taking.
Each time the businessman advances money for capital (plant, new equipment or even
inventory), he is investing in an uncertain future and thereby incurs a risk. Will he, in fact, be
rewarded with a return on his investment (profit), will he ultimately recover his investment as a
whole or will his firm at some near-term future date collapse (bankruptcy)? While there were
means of avoiding risk (e.g., in the case of the rail lines, state subsidies for rail construction,
huge land grants, etc.), the capitalist learned that risk can at least in part be eliminated
through rational calculation of his very daily activity. If he systematically and methodically lays
out in advance the whole of his activity, breaks it up in whatever component parts the division
of labor in his firm allows, then, again, systematically and methodically plans the manner in
509For Jefferson's remarks, which continue, "The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath,

puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives vent to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated,
and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the
Sate of Virginia, 162.
The presence of southern military traditions, and in particular the superiority of southern Civil War generalship on
eastern battlefields, cannot be accounted for in terms of the more superficial indications of a southern martial
tradition, e.g., the South's nine military schools (such as the Virginia Military Institute where Thomas Jackson taught
prior to the war) or in the numbers of southern versus northern graduates from West Point. At this level the entire
issue has been thoroughly treated by Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians.
For excellent discussions of the language of command which clearly also creates within the planter a psychology of
mastery, Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South, 105-106, 133-136.

which, he desires, each and all of these component parts of his activities are to be structured,
to unfold and develop, etc., then he can minimize the element of risk in his venture. We call
this bourgeois and capitalist attitude toward risk its rationalization. In a large portion of
bourgeois social types this attitude has a compulsive character that dominates the individual
personality.
The ambitious ex-military officer (who has now with the war rejoined the army) had well
learned the (business) lesson of rationalizing risk. This lesson rejoined his former military
training. The lesson was assimilated, it became characteristic of the man. It was another route
to caution, that is, among eastern Union army commanders already marked by a cautious
approach to operations, calculated, rationalized risk-taking exacerbated their caution and
often led to delay, indecision and command paralysis on the battlefield. George McClellan,
because he carried rationalizing activity to extreme and in so doing because he reveals the
motivational well-springs of such activity, was a prototypical northern military officer in this
respect. McClellan's rise had been quick and spectacular. After a success in an early, small
western Virginia campaign (operating out of Union Department of the Ohio), he was, following
the defeat at the first Bull Run, brought to Washington in late July 1861 as commander of all
Union armies in the field, Lincoln's "general in chief." At the same time he was the organizer
and commanding general of the Union Army of the Potomac. After early March 1862,
McClellan lost his position as "general-in-chief," while continuing as the commander of the
main eastern army, a position he held until his final dismissal in early Nov 1862.
McClellan was a past master at rationalizing activity.510 He made constant and, from his
standpoint, never adequate preparations. At its ideal (and unrealizable) limit, his goal - a goal
which was that of any extremely cautious man - was to reduce the risk involved in actual
battlefield engagement to a zero point, that is, to rationalize it away. McClellan meticulously
rationalized the administrative side of his command activities in preparation for battle to the
point when confronted with battle he refused all risk and initiative. Here the pure type of
northern military officer comes into view: Completely devoid of initiative and imagination; in
practice, extremely cautious, hesitant and reticent with a view to battle and fighting; often
punctual and conscientious and in the narrow sense competent, a good army officer. Yet if
opportunity involved a residue of incalculable risk, it was alien to his character and constitution
to initiative action to seize that opportunity. (The only fight McClellan, for example, would "risk"
was a siege, because this form of battle most adequately lent itself to constant preparations,
to rationalization, to absolute command control from atop.)511
Battle, on the other hand, entails risk. Battle engages masses of men. In battles where, like
Civil War engagements, the fight is a fight to the death, battle entails an irreducible,
incalculable element of risk. This risk flows from the fact that it is impossible to decide in
advance with any certainty how masses of men will respond once subject to the extremes of
life-threatening activities. Extreme situations do not allow men to stop and think, to reflect on
and weigh the consequences or outcomes of various possible courses of action. Among men,
extreme situations require responses that are precognitive and behaviorally sedimented; they
draw out the socially-formed "natural" responses of men. In inculcating a "second [fighting]
nature," drill is designed to, as it were, overcome these "natural" responses. (Battlefield
experience, of course, also forms an altogether more reliable second fighting nature.) It also
510In the 1864-1865 Virginia Campaigns, Governour K. Warren, commanding V Corps, would emerge as another

army officer for whom this description of risk calculation was tailor made.
511Among those officers most incapable of independent initiative, and least competent in the broad sense of
generalship, the vast array of army rules, regulation and procedures were internalized, no doubt in a selfcompensatory and self-defensive way: On the one side, these officers completely depended upon the commander
above them for direction; and, on the other hand, they demanded absolute obedience from their subordinates.

allows men to familiarize themselves with one another, to come to understand what they can
expect of each other in a combat situation (though only actual fighting itself will tell if these
expectations are to be fulfilled). Thus, with raw or untrained soldiers, a fight to the death can
bring out a heroic element in their character; but it is more likely, especially if the confrontation
with danger has never been apart of daily experience of living, to engender extreme fearbased panic and flight without regard for comrades who depend each upon the other. In the
Union armies of the East class formation, status and standing of high-ranking officers was, in
almost all cases, qualitatively different from that of their soldiery. These officers did not know
their men. Particularly in the early years of the war, they could not, based upon their own lifeexperiences, reasonably anticipate how their men would response under battlefield conditions.
Such a lack of understanding and knowledge exacerbated the irreducible, incalculable
element of risk involved in battle. Ironically, it is the seizure of initiative in battle which reduces
risk: It provides a commander's forces with the element of surprise, initially allowing his men
(assuming they basically trust that commander) to operate according to a predetermined plan,
i.e., to function "calmly," to emotionally prepare for the fight that they are bringing forth on their
own terms. At the same time, seizing the initiative magnifies the prospects for the enemy's
emotional collapse, i.e., a falling-back on the pre-drill, "natural" responses. This is because
surprise, if achieved, often produces a battlefield confrontation in which the first response of
the enemy is shock, i.e., that emotional experience which at least at the outset stripes the
enemy soldiery to his most primitive (earliest formed) responses and dissolves at least initially
his drill-formed "second nature."512
Characteristically, extreme, compulsive caution hides inexperience-based fear of residue,
incalculable risk, at bottom, the risk of defeat. In deed, it led to halfway measures, sometimes
inaction (paralysis), and the abandonment of initiative. In other words, either we find Union
commanders, such as Pope as in the first year of war, whose speech revealed a tendency not
to take rebel commanders and their military leadership capacity seriously, or those who made
up with bravado (McClellan and Hooker) for what they lacked in command capacity. Too often
northern military commanders were simply in over their heads. Examples of this abound Antietam being the instance we have examined. Among Democratic party officers coterie, and
with McClellan in particular, all their talk of decisive battle was just talk, and, more importantly,
a mask behind which they hid, first, their command incompetence-based fear of a fight (of
risking and losing, as it were, everything) and, second, their objectively southern-sympathetic
512This theoretical account is concretized in the discussion of the 1864 Virginia Overland Campaign (reviewed under

the same heading) in chapter 7, below, and in Appendix II, particularly the discussion of Jacksons flanking movement
at Chancellorsville, also below, where what we take as an exemplary account of the role of risk and initiative in
combat situations is presented.
Grant and, of course, Lee both understood that militarily great advantage lay with the army that could seize the
initiative. In some instances, it was of supreme importance. Grant, for example, states of Shiloh that, "So confident
was I before firing on the 6th that the next day would bring victory to our arms if we could only take the initiative"
(Memoirs, 206). Grant explicitly grasped the significance of drill (though he emphasized only that side that concerns
the importance of familiarity, and even if he never theorized it as a "second nature"): Referring to a criticism made of
his generalship at Shiloh (he should have entrenched), he states, "The troops with me, officers and men, needed
discipline and drill more than they did experience with the pick, shovel and axe. Reinforcements were arriving almost
daily, composed of troops that had been hastily thrown together into companies and regiments - fragments of
incomplete organizations, the men and officers strangers to each other" (Memoirs, 212).
Grant's account of Shiloh elicits an instance of battlefield behavior that exemplifies the distinction between raw
recruits and combat experienced veterans, between, militarily speaking, first and second "nature," between panic and
calm battlefield comportment (where panic is the outward, active behavior response to shock as experienced and
lived). Grant states, "I regarded the campaign we were engaged in as an offensive one and had no idea that the
enemy would leave strong intrenchments to take the initiative..." He goes on to say [we lost the initiative, were
surprised yet...] "better troops never went upon a battle-field than many of these, officers and men, afterwards proved
themselves to be, who fled panic-stricken at the first whistle of bullets and shell at Shiloh" (Memoirs, 196, 203).

desire not to fight but to maneuver and bluff their way into a peace. They, in fact, took no
satisfaction at all and often experienced precognitive resistance to a fight against those
officered southern gentlemen they admired so much. Their helpless hatred of the abolitionists
who for many were not merely lodged in but dominated the Union government and who
incessantly pushed them to fight the kind of "total" war they could not, infuriated them, and led
them to put up more resistance - by way of support for McClellan's dilatory practices, plodding
campaigns and primarily defensive battlefield conduct - to the new policies emerging from
Washington beginning in July 1862. The cumulative weight of defeat - Seven Days,
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville - found their confidence deserting them, and intensified their
hidden fear and suspicions that southern gentleman really were more capable of command
and in battle.

Part IV
Intertwining of Personality and Command Structure Problematic (II)
McClellan, Defeatism and its Consequences
Reorganizing the Army of the Potomac
In early March 1862, Lincoln issued an order directing McClellan to divide the twelve divisions
of the Army of the Potomac into four corps. McClellan, not consulted in the formulation of this
directive, recognized this move was militarily sound because he understood the importance of
centralizing his command (that is, restricting the number of immediate subordinate
commanders with which he had to deal and, according, limiting the sheer quantity of
movements he would be directly responsible for under battlefield conditions). He had intended
to subsume the numerous divisions into a corps organization, but resisted doing so, so he
maintained, because he wished to wait until actual operations got underway in order that he
might make corps command appointments with a view to actual performance.
Lincoln, however, not only instructed McClellan to centralize his army, but also specified the
new corps commanders - and this was the real problem. Those officers were Edwin Sumner,
Samuel Heintzelman, Erasmus Keyes and Irwin McDowell. McDowell, former commander of
defunct Union Army of Northeastern Virginia, was politically Republican (thus, objectionable)
and already at this early stage of the war proven in command capacity. But with him excepted,
the other three were senior military officers of long service in the United States Army. That was
precisely McClellan's problem. As senior officers, he knew the command had to go to these
men. But as long-serving, older officers, Sumner, Heintzelman and Keyes owed their loyalty to
the Union, to its government and, perhaps, to the party in power to the extend that it sought to
preserve the Union and its government. It would be wrong to mistake this loyalty for
Republican party politics, but it was equally clear these officers owed no allegiance to
McClellan as such, particularly to his politics, that of the Democratic party. There was,
moreover, a not-so-latent generational conflict between these officers and their commander.
(Heintzelman, in particular, felt snubbed.) McClellan, himself a mere thirty-six and desperately
wanting like-minded (that is, politically Democratic) officers in the corps command positions,
had raised a bevy of young officers with Democratic party politics to positions of divisional and
brigade level commands. These men, such the Porters (Andrew and Fitz-John), Franklin, W.F.
Smith, Hooker, Reynolds, Meade, Slocum, Gibbon, Sykes, Warren and Patrick, were largely in
their late thirties. (Contrast Sumner, Heintzelman and Keyes who, in mid-1862, were sixty-five,
fifty-six and fifty-two, respectively.) McClellan took his council from these officers (ignoring his
senior officers) and favored them with command assignments whenever he could. In turn,
these men gave their allegiance to McClellan first, and then to their country but only in
conditional terms of an anticipated resumption of Democratic party power in the government.
These conflicting loyalties would form a central contradiction that each of these men, and
many more like them, would live after McClellan's final dismissal: For the resumption of
Democratic party control of the State, fervently hoped for and anticipated, would not come to
pass.513
513T. Harry Williams (Lincoln and the Radicals, 118-119, and Lincoln and his Generals, 68-69) makes the mistake of

assuming because Sumner, Heintzelman and Keyes did not support McClellan's ambitions, they were necessarily
Republican. (He also imputes this same assessment to Congressional radicals.) The little evidence he musters
(Lincoln and the Radicals, 80, 118) shows, however, the radicals (in this case, Zach Chandler) played upon the intraarmy resentment of older officers (Heintzelman) against McClellan for their own ends. Older officer resentments were
based on McClellan's youth and, especially, his meteoric rise to the top. Review the actual fate of these
Congressionally privileged "Republicans.
Sumner asked to be relieved in late (28) January 1863. He was transferred to command of the Department of
Missouri. On the way to assume his command, he took ill, and on 21 March died. In spring 1863, Keyes was pushed
out of command in the Army of the Potomac. He was transferred to Fortress Monroe and assumed its command
replacing John A. Dix, a politically appointed Democratic party general. In late 1863, Dix held Keyes responsible for

McClellan and a Grand Strategy of Defeat

George McClellan is the object of so much attention because he decisively shaped the
institutional character of the Union Army of the Potomac. As commander of this army, and,
more importantly, as both organizer of the body of the army and its officers' corps, McClellan's
legacy was, relatively speaking, lasting. In a hierarchical institution whose activity is based on
relations of command-obedience, McClellan had embedded his politics, those of a southernsympathizing gentleman-officer, in the command structure of the army through the selection of
the body of officers that surrounded him, many of which survived his departure. The great
failings of the Union armies in the East, those of partial, piecemeal commitment of troops to
battle and the extreme caution that characterized crucial command decisions in battle,
expression in part of Democratic party politics, haunted these armies from their inception until
the arrival of Grant in March 1864 (and later).
McClellan's deep-seat fears were entangled with and inseparable from a megalomaniac and
paranoid illusions of grandeur.514 But like the southern-admiring, southern officer-intimidating
the failure of the former's Peninsula expedition early in the summer of that year. As a consequence, Keyes was forced
into retirement in May 1864, and never again held military command. Heintzelman too lost his field command. After
the second Manassas (late August 1862), he was transferred to the Northern Department (headquartered in
Columbus, Ohio) as its commander where he served until late August 1865, at which time he was mustered out of the
volunteers. He remained in the regular army after the war returning as a colonel to his old regiment on Hart Island in
New York harbor. (For Sumner and Keyes, see the National Cyclopeadia of American Biography, IV, 183, 398,
respectively; for Heintzelman, Ibid, XII, 287.)
Reassigning corps and army commanders to departmental commands was a common method of removing less than
fully competent regular army officers. Men who Republicans radicals in Congress wished - regardless of their
competency - to protect, such as Hooker and Howard after Chancellorsville, were in fact protected. This was not the
case with Sumner, Keyes and Heintzelman. The formative experiences of Sumner (an army officer since 1817 who
had never attended West Point), Heintzelman and Keyes (who held West Point commissions dating from 1826 and
1832, respectively) largely predated that era, the forties and early fifties, in which the ideals of the South as a fully
distinctive culture and society began to forcefully exercise an attraction on young military officers. The social and
cultural distinctiveness of the South had, of course, been fully constituted before 1840. What, however, galvanized
sentiment about it, viz., its mode of production, the form of life of its central classes (planters and slaves) and its ruling
class cultural ideals, was the emergence in the North after 1834 of the abolitionist movement. (Recall that the earliest
political embodiment of moral-religious opposition to slavery was the Liberty party founded in 1840.) Sumner, Keyes
and Heintzelman, as older senior officers unaffected by the southern cultural ideals and their Democratic party
political defense, were mere army "professionals" who had no political axes to grind against Lincoln's Republican
Administration.
514The other side of McClellan's grandiose illusions was his persecutory suspicions. But listen to the commander
himself:
"I have reason to believe that Genl Halleck is to be made Comdr in Chief of the Army, &, ... I think I detect the
premonitory symptoms of still further changes." Describing symptoms (lack of response to dispatches, removal of
Burnside's corps from his control, lack of reinforcements), he declared, "The game apparently is to deprive me of the
means of moving, & then to cut my head off for not advancing - in other words ... I will be removed from the command
of this Army in a short time." Further, McClellan proposed the general character of this policy is "merely a continuation
of the inveterate persecution that has pursued me since I landed on the Peninsula - weakening my command so as to
render it inadequate to accomplish the end in view, & then to hold me responsible for the results" (emphasis added).
To William Aspinwall, 19 July 1862, Civil War Papers, 365. Writing to Ellen, his wife, the next day (Ibid, 367),
McClellan, referring to his letter to Lincoln composed at Harrison's Landing and advising against a policy of
emancipation, stated that the President, since he "never will - he cannot" publicly respond, may "avail himself of the
first opportunity to cut my head off" (emphasis in original). In a letter of 23 July to Samuel Barlow (Ibid, 369),
McClellan, just three days later, considered the prospects of his dismissal so real that he was already expressing
relief at the outcome: "I have not been in any manner consulted as to Halleck's appointment ... I am weary, very
weary, of suffered to the whims of such 'things' as those now over me - I have suffered as much for my country as
most men have endured, & shall be inexpressibly happy to free once more" (emphasis in original).
Taken together these statements form a perfect statement of the logic of a paranoid with illusions of grandeur: Begin
with suspicion grounded in real events but open to different interpretations the only one of which is valid is the
paranoid's; then grand suffering for an objective that only he best understands emerges, suffering, moreover, rooted
in the shortcomings, failures, incompetency and stupidity of those with real control over events (simply because they

coterie of officers he headed, his subjective drama had larger significance only because it was
highlighted by the constellation of class forces he was at the center of. First, there were those
of the northern popular classes who, because they had seen enough of the dead, mutilation,
and carnage and destruction, in a word, the horrors of war following Shiloh, the Seven Days,
the Second Bull Run and Antietam, desperately hoped for a peace to end the war; second,
there were those in the North objectively tied to the southern planter economy, both the poorer
farmers and merchants of the "Butternut" belts of the old West who had historically traded
along the Mississippi River southward, and, much more powerfully, the bankers, factors and
export merchants who had historically financed and actually carried on the cotton trade. These
groups were more or less opposed to the war and would, in the months following the fall 1862
elections, form the social class basis of the peace Democracy; finally, there were those, often
hailing from older, wealthy families who largely overlapped with the last group mentioned
above, who were Unionist yet southern-sympathetic and pro-slavery in outlook. These men
were politically conservative Democrats. Quite a few could be found concentrated, as regular
army veterans (and ex-veterans), in the higher levels of the Army of the Potomac officers
corps.515
The Army of the Potomac was a microcosm of northern society: Each of the other class-based
social groups described above could be found in this army. Among the regular soldiery, there
were both those young farm boys who had seen enough of war and those, albeit considerably
fewer, who in a burst of patriotism had volunteered, but now under pressure of combat and the
issue of Lincoln's decree began to feel the tug of their "Butternut" roots; among the junior
officers, there were those who, knowing their duty, still felt that the war had been quite costly
enough. (This sentiment would increase markedly after the battle of Fredericksburg.) Among
McClellan's cadre of politically like-minded Democratic officers, especially staff junior officers,
two sentiments predominated, that of those who held the conviction that a compromise
between the "sections" was the best way of reestablishing peace, and that of a much smaller
group who preferred the dissolution of the Union as a lesser evil to a protracted war.
Thus, McClellan's strategy should be seen in the context of the class forces in which he was
embedded. His awareness was an expression of the consciousness of the most stubbornly,
southern-sympathetic of those forces, and his strategic decisions in early autumn 1862,
though variously motivated by his own paranoiac logic, his characteristic compulsion to total
preliminary preparation and by his politics, find their historically significant explanation as a
series of conclusions drawn from those Democratic party politics. Sears notes the generalized
dissatisfaction with Lincoln's preliminary decree among high ranking officers in the Union Army
of the Potomac. (This dissatisfaction was exacerbated by the class-based intense personal
dislike educated, well-bred gentlemen such as McClellan and Porter felt for Lincoln, the "rail
splitter," "original Gorilla" and unseeming statesman who told crude jokes.) Sear cites remarks
by Fitz-John Porter to Manton Marble, editor of the pro-Democratic party and antiAdministration New York World, in which the former stated the preliminary proclamation "was
resented in the army, - caused disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty" Porter
referred to Lincoln as a "political coward" who "holds in his hands the lives of thousands and
trifles with them." Those disgusted were, of course, high ranking officers holding conservative
Democratic party political views.516
have power over him); and finally conflict closure is achieved through resignation over a projected outcome.
515For the peace Democracy, see chapter 5, below.
516Sources for the divisions both over Lincoln's preliminary decree and, especially, McClellan's dismissal are

ultimately to be found in (a detailed study of) the available, Union army regimental histories. For a flavor that suggests
divisions along the lines laid out here, Murfin, The Glean of Bayonets, 320-321, and also Henderson, Ibid, II, 290.

As the "high council" of the eastern army, call it the Democratic party officers' club with
McClellan as its head, was exceedingly well situated to act on its convictions. It had in fact
acted by practically elaborating a strategy designed to wear down both armies. As Sears
relates, Maj. John Key of Halleck's staff had told Levi Turner, a major in Stanton's War
Department, that McClellan hadn't any intent to "bag" the rebel army (specifically on the
morning of 18 September). Instead, that "is not the game. The object is that neither army shall
get much advantage of the other, that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted,
when we will make a compromise and save slavery." Key was brother to Col. Thomas Key,
member of McClellan's staff. The brother, Thomas, reflecting the widespread sentiment of the
Democratic party officers' club, was the source of the remark. McClellan's dilatory
preparations, then, were the visible moment of this policy of mutual attrition. But as an
informally organized political faction within the army, the Democratic party officers' club carried
considerably less weight within the Constitutionally mandated and historically constituted
structure of the American polity. It was only outside that structure that decisive action, say
along the lines closer to those carried out by Cromwell's army, could be undertaken and
achieved. And rumors of a plot to bring down the Administration and effect a "change of
dynasty" did circulate. Lincoln (having gotten wind of John Key's remarks, confronted him and
having them repeated) dismissed Key from service as a warning to this political faction. But
whatever the scruples about violating a Constitution that was otherwise (i.e., in the case of
slavery) held so dear, it was both McClellan's characteristic weakness in a deadly
confrontation (and, though perhaps not always as bloody, overthrowing a government is a
deadly serious matter) and, likely, the calculation that there was an unfavorable division within
army that ultimately checked such a design. Among the western soldiers and regimental
officers there was disquiet with not only the Emancipation decree but also with the army
leadership: These soldiers, though harboring little sympathy and no respect for slaves, were
often free soil advocates and Republican party supporters. They held firmly, even if
contradictorily, to Unionist and constitutionalist convictions. Finally, significant numbers of
soldiers and junior officers from the East, particularly New England, held abolitionist
convictions. Not only would such an army have not offered unified support for a march on
Washington, but a majority of regiments would have in the event thrown up active resistance
to such a design.517
517For Porters remarks see his letter to Marble, 30 September 1862, cited by Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 319.

Porter held a divisional command in the Army of the Potomac. In the same remarks, he declared, "All such bulletins
tend only to prolong the war ... Those who fight the battles of the country are tired of the war and wish to see its
ended soon and honorably - by a restoration of the union - not merely a suppression of the rebellion" (cited in Nevins,
War for the Union, III, 238-239). Porter hated the abolitionists ("our enemies in the rear"), was contemptuous of
Secretary of War Stanton, and thought the war should be fought to draw a line territorially, not to crush Confederate
power and surely not for purpose of interfering with slavery (Ibid, 172, 182, esp. 231 n. 38).
For Key's remarks, Ibid, 320, note, "The sentiment throughout the whole army seems to be in favor of a change of
dynasty. ... There is large promise of a fearful revolution ... that will startle the Country and give us a Military Dictator."
Nathaniel Page, New York Herald correspondent, to his editor, James Gordon Bennett, cited in Sears, Ibid, 319-320.
(The Herald was a pro-Republican paper.) Page's source was again Thomas Key. For a discussion among
McClellan's staff officers of a march on Washington, see Allan Nevins, Ibid, 231 n. 38.
McClellan's consciously dilatory tactics are evident in his refusal to get the army going again after Lee recrossed into
Virginia following the battle of Antietam. Note, in particular, the remarks to Halleck and to Lincoln, WR, Ser. 1, V. 19,
Pt. 1, 16, and Pt. 2, 464, 484-485, and also McClellan's Report, 232, 233. McClellan at first claimed he had to
reconstruct a railway supply line; latter he needed to "shod" his men and reinforce his cavalry; and, finally he claimed
that Bragg would unite with Lee making the latter unassailable. Ibid, 329-330.
McClellan's hostility, and in this as so much else he is representative, toward abolitionists can be gathered from
remarks he made to Barlow. Writing in the fall (1862) during the New York gubernatorial campaign he commented,
"I ... [desire] the defeat of Wadsworth - I have so thorough a contempt for the man & regard him as such a vile
traitorous miscreant that I do not wish to see the great State of N.Y. disgraced by having such a thing at its head"
(Civil War Papers, 500. Emphasis added). Republican James S. Wadsworth, a brigadier in the Army of the Potomac,

McClellan had attempted to place the Union armies as a whole, and had effectively placed the
largest Union army in the East, in the service of the southern cause. While military
transcendent political interventions would recede and then largely disappear after his
departure, his central role in formation of the institutional character of the Union Army of the
Potomac insured proslavery politics would always at least remain submerged but crucial for
the performance of Army of the Potomac commanders.518
The Aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Fate of the Army of the Potomac
The Seven Days of late June - early July 1862 culminating in McClellan's retreat after having
fronted Richmond, the devastating second battle of Bull Run in August, and, then, the terribly
unsatisfactory, incomplete victory at Antietam Creek in mid-September - all were having a
deleterious effect on northern morale. On the heels of this declining morale, Lincoln
recognized the necessity of "desperate" action. He needed to gain the moral high ground in
order to uplift sagging northern morale, and to gain the goodwill of European "public opinion"
in order to stall English or French diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Yet he also
wished not to appear to be acting desperately, i.e., from a position of military weakness. The
partial victory at Antietam provided him with his occasion: It was the basis for his public,
anticipatory declaration of intent to pursue a military emancipation policy.
Announcement of even this limited, war aims-driven commitment to black freedom had placed
Lincoln far in the vanguard of the civilian mass of northern farmers and workers: Democrats,
campaigning on objectively treasonous grounds (resistance to states' conscription efforts,
advocacy of desertion by soldiers in the Union armies, an armistice and negotiations with the
Confederacy - amounting to de facto recognition of the latter's sovereignty and independence)
as well as open, explicit opposition to emancipation, made huge gains in the November 1862
elections. Horatio Seymour was elected governor of New York, legislatures in Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania went Democratic, and the Republican party
lost thirty-five Congressional seats. (In Illinois alone, Lincoln's home state, eleven Democrats
and just three Republicans where elected to Congress, while a Democrat defeated a
Republican in the Chicago mayoral race. In Indiana, where Democrats took control of both
houses of the legislature, an effort was afoot to "withdraw" the state from the Union war effort.)
Central to the Democratic party campaigns, the opposition to emancipation was crucial to this
outcome: It proved that an entire layer of western farmers and the urban middling populations
directly dependent upon them remained committed as ever to the narrowest conception of
"free soil," that is, to western territories and northern states free of plantation slavery and
blacks whether enslaved or no; on the other hand, it also demonstrated the barbaric, white
supremacist and virulently racist common sense of the working classes of New York,
Philadelphia and Boston, the traditional eastern and urban social base of the northern
Democracy, went much deeper than their patriotism. The election outcome also assured that
Lincoln would undertake a centralization of the federal government to insure the peace
Democratic state governments did not successfully inhibit the war effort. Centralization
showed up nowhere more clearly that in the creation of a national draft.519
was put up against Democrat Horatio Seymour, refused to leave his military post to campaign, and was defeated.
A good deal of the loss of affection for the McClellan as commander was based on his performance at Antietam,
especially the failure to pursue Lee and his army, Murfin Ibid, 299-300.
518Ben Butler, writing some thirty years later, noted that by that time McClellan had openly admitted in 1862 he
pursued a defeatist strategy designed to insure the survival of slavery as an institution. Butler's Book, 576. He had
also pointed out to Lincoln, in a personal discussion held in spring 1863, that the bulk of the officers' corps in the Army
of the Potomac were Democrats opposed to Administration policy and holding convictions concerning the necessity of
the restoration of slavery. Ibid, 580-581.

In July 1862, Congress had passed (and the President signed) a confused conscription law
that at once retained elements of past practices, especially authorization of the states to raise
new troops, while pointing to the future national direction of draft legislation. This law,
ambiguous in its wording, did not authorize the President to inaugurate a draft nor the War
Department to issue regulations governing its conduct (which it did). While not formally
drafting anyone, Lincoln's call for 300,000 new three years volunteers parceled out among the
states on the basis of quotas was met with popular opposition. Largely Republicans, state
governors experienced difficulty meeting their quotas. Popular resistance ran high. For
example, in a July open-air mass meeting in Detroit (designed to consider how to raise the
assigned quota) opponents shouted the speakers down and a brawl broke out. In November,
the local populace in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin (just north of Milwaukee) armed and
massed in Port Washington and attacked Governor Edward Salomon's commissioned agents.
A reluctant state militia was called in to suppress the riot.520
Resistance to the draft, embodying opposition to the Lincoln Administration, proved to be a
rallying point not only for Democratic party renewal, but for the growth of southernsympathetic, quasi-secret, allegedly quasi-military organizations. At the end of an era in which
publicly well-known, complexly ritualistic "secret" societies were ubiquitous, the Knights of the
Golden Circle, with roots (on paper at least) dating to the great planter-promoted Central
America expansionist-colonizing schemes of the 1850s, was the oldest of southernsupporting, Civil War-generated sects. Because the declining military fortunes of the Union
army had dovetailed with an 1861 - early 1862 economic recession in the old Northwest,
fertile ground had already been prepared for the emergence of what were numerically small
and politically insignificant societies prior to the militarily disastrous summer and fall of 1862.
As resistance grew, Republican fear over the real prospects of Union (if not military, then
negotiated) defeat spilt over into armed Republican gubernatorial responses. For example, in
Illinois Richard Yates armed the Union Leagues and organized "loyal companies." Military
repression was also intensified. In Illinois again, Ambrose Burnside (transferred and assigned
to Department of Ohio military command in late January 1863), much against Lincoln's wishes
(expressed only after the fact), temporarily closed down the Chicago Times for printing
seditious articles. Henry B. Carrington, commander of the District of Ohio, censored mails and
the telegraph, set up a network of spies and informers, imprisoned a state circuit judge and, in
general, sought to establish summary powers.
Prior to autumn, the existence and extend of secret political societies was often widely
exaggerated, product of both rumor and charges and denials by the state Republican and
Democratic parties. But autumn 1862 conscription efforts by state officials combined with early
1863 repression by Republican governors' and military commanders found opposition to
Lincoln, his Administration's abrogation of civil liberties, the Republican party, the war and
emancipation in part congealing around the extreme peace Democratic party fringes in the
form of tiny, scattered cells of newly instituted secret organizations such as the Order of
American Knights. These secret societies taken together with the true organizational
spearhead of opposition, the northern peace Democracy, and Democratic party-supporting
newspapers made up the Copperhead movement.521
Because military troops could be split off from the main body of actual fighting forces and
utilized temporarily to squelch popular opposition, and because a war-generated, economic
519A good summary of 1862 election results can be found in George Ford Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth

Column, 123-126.
520For Detroit, Catton, Glory Road, 229; for Ozaukee Co., Randell, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 260.
521For separate studies of both of the aforementioned secret societies, Frank Klement, Dark Lanterns, chapters I, III

(and IV).

boom could be anticipated and time was needed to see just how well and in just what ways
Lincoln's military emancipation policy might work out, the morale of troops actually engaged in
combat on Union soil was decisive not only for the obvious reason of winning on the battlefield
but also in order to hold out for a civilian spirit-lifting, turn-around in northern military fortunes.
Though military events on the ground seemed to conspire against Lincoln's Administration,
the, at best, checkered fighting record of the poorly lead, yet crucial Army of the Potomac had
nonetheless not unnerved the rank and file soldiers of this army. Briefly review those events.
In November 1862, McClellan had been relieved a second (and last) time. Ambrose Burnside
had assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, and prepared a militarily respectable
plan to cross the Rappahannock River, route the small Confederate force at Fredericksburg,
and move south splitting Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Incompetency and lack of
coordination had detained pontoons for crossing the river for three weeks, allowing Lee to
mass and then fortify the full force of his army, 70,000 men, atop a mile-long slight ridge west
of and overlooking Fredericksburg. The Confederate positions were impregnable, and
Burnside exhibited absolutely no imagination in generating an alternative plan: If the
commanding general and most of his officers' corps did not seem to realize it, the mass of the
ordinary soldiers intuitively recognized that in assaulting the Marye Heights they were staring
an unjustifiable, perhaps meaningless death in the face. After absorbing some 12,600 losses
in a single full day of fighting (December 12), Burnside's generals recognized the futility of the
assault and finally convinced their commander to call off the attack.
The Union disaster at Fredericksburg was magnified by further, morale lowering news out of
the West. On 20 December (1862), Confederate Gen. Earl Van Dorn led a highly successful
cavalry raid against a supplies depot far in Grant's rear at Holly Springs, Tennessee. Some
1,500 prisoners were taken, and about $1,500,000 in military property was destroyed. Among
those prisoners was Mrs. Grant.
In December, Halleck and Grant decided upon a strategy of simultaneous advances on
Vicksburg. Banks would come up from New Orleans and join forces with Grant south of the
fortress city, and Sherman with 30,000 men would attack from the north along the railroad.
Banks' volunteer forces were so inexperienced, that he could not move north; and on 29
December, Sherman's army, failing to make it through the swamps and bayous on the north,
attempted a frontal assault along the Chickasaw Bluffs where it was repulsed, compelling
Sherman to withdraw.522
The Virginia winter was upon the Army of the Potomac, and the soldiery, logging the
surrounding wooded area and building quasi-permanent structures east of the Rappahannock
River, began to prepare for a cold weather furlough. But Burnside, knowing that the
Administration desperately needed and pushed for a victory (and the sooner, the better),
would have nothing of it: In the latter half of January, he ordered a march upriver, in an
attempt to flank Lee's army northwest of Fredericksburg. The weather which had been good
did not, of course, hold. It was winter, and mid-19th century land armies did not have the
technological means to move through the endemic rains and resultant mud of a central,
eastern Virginia winter. Instead, as the rains continued for days on end, the march bogged
down. Large pieces of artillery and supply wagons could not be pulled by the standard six
horse or mule team, nor even by a double team. Artillery pieces simply sank in the mud, first
to a knee depth, then the full hub was covered; supply wagon axles were shortly buried. The
pontoons had to be detached from animals belly deep in mud. Paltry regiments devastated in
size by the fighting, consisting in hundred-fifty man teams, attached ropes to the pontoons,
heaved mightily and moved them a couple feet only to see them slip back and begin to sink as
522Only Union bright spot was Rosencrans victory (i.e., a stalemate in which rebels withdrew) over the forces of the

Confederate Braxton Bragg at Murfreesboro (Stones River), Tennessee, 31 December 1862-1 January 1863.

they paused for breathe. Hard and cold, the rain kept coming. Mules brayed screaming for
their lives as they disappeared, only their ears visible in the mud. (A reporter for the New York
Times, on the morning of the third day of the march, counted 150 death mules and horses in
the mud as he surveyed the carnage of men, matriel and pack animals.)
Finally, Burnside called off the march and the body of the army began to struggle back to their
old camps east of artillery-attack destroyed Fredericksburg. Men who spent two full days in
the cold rain struggling through waist deep mud had also gone without dry clothing and hot
food for the entire march. Many, too exhausted to walk back, laid down in the swampy fields
and died in the mud. Still others, stragglers, returned to the army encampment over the
course of the next two weeks. The morale of the regular soldiers of the Army of the Potomac
began to nosedive after the battle of Fredericksburg, and its really sunk in the mud of the
Virginia countryside in what has come down to us as Burnside's "mud march." It would sink
still lower. Back in camp, whole regiments argued over whose campsite was whose. While
fresh fruits and vegetables were stored in great quantities among the army's commissaries to
the north, a diet of hardtack, salt pork and coffee, fit for an army actually marching or in a
battle lull, continued to be the only fare. Scurvy, product of massive vitamin deficiency,
became the scourge of the encamped soldiers that winter. Men suffered malnutrition,
constipation, diarrhea, and dysentery. They died of bad diet exacerbated by lack of sanitary
supplies and a complete absence of sanitary procedure.523
So the growing war-weariness of the northern citizenry in the face of numerous Union army
defeats and very few, and at any rate incomplete, victories, was duplicated in the Army of the
Potomac in the winter of early 1863. This moment was the true low point of the northern war
effort: The Union cause was intensely mooted, Lincoln's leadership and the efficacy of his
Administration were doubted, but beyond even these, as the morale of the regular soldiers
sunk and approached defeatism, the desertion rate skyrocketed. The very fate of the Union
now hung by a few threads.
The most important thread was the morale of regular soldiers, particularly those of the Army of
the Potomac. Its restoration was decisive.524 Thus, when Burnside came to Washington to see
the President in late January 1863 with an ultimatum demanding Lincoln either cashier a
number of ranking officers in his army or accept his resignation, Lincoln immediately accepted
the resignation.
Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker was placed in command. Hooker, flamboyant, exceedingly
handsome and a man who knew which political winds were blowing hot, was a general who
523For the battle of Fredericksburg, the "mud march" and the precipitous collapse of the morale among soldiers of the

Army of the Potomac, Catton, Ibid, 241-258, 272-277, 261-262 and 280-282, respectively; for desertions, also see
Edwin Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign, 28-29.
524A noise dive in morale among the soldiery was not only a serious problem with the main army in the East.
Similarly, though not as grave a matter, the main army in the West, Grants Army of the Cumberland, also suffered
from low morale among the soldiery at this time. The problem stemmed from two sources. First, Lincolns shift to a
military emancipation policy (strictly adhered to by Grant) led to the resignation of officers, and though it is not well
documented the desertion of soldiers, both groups of whom, with their racist whites only egalitarian sentiments, could
not accept the shift in policy. Second, between late December 1862 and 22 February 1863 various formations in
Grants command made efforts to penetrate Confederate defenses at Vicksburg from above the city on the Mississippi
River. In this time frame, that of the precipitous decline in the Army of the Potomac morale, four attempts were made.
All four failed. In the balance, though temporary (Grants soldiery did finally penetrate those defenses from the south,
beginning in May, and eventually captured Vicksburg), this may have weighted more in the balance than opposition to
Lincolns emancipation decree. Had Hooker not been the right man at precisely the right moment, and had Grant not
been possessed of sheer determination and genuine insight into the military needs of the moment (traditional military
doctrine be damned) on the basis of a thorough assimilation of politically transcended, objectively necessary grand
strategic demands placed on his campaign, those slender threads would have snapped. For Hooker in relation to the
recovery of Army of the Potomac morale, see this section, immediately below; and, for Grant at Vicksburg, see
chapter 7, "Vicksburg" below.

had earned some respect among the soldiers of this army, but the situation was desperate
and it was likely the not even McClellan could have restored morale strictly on the basis of his
past rapport with the soldiers of this army. Hooker, on the other hand, turned out to be the
right man at the right moment. Contrary to form he was neither showy nor ornate; rather, he
quietly and effectively set about the routine tasks of provisioning and standardizing the
material premises of daily camp life and professionalizing the administration of that life. Orders
for changes in the diet of the soldiers were issued: Fruits, fresh vegetables (onions, cabbage,
potatoes) and desiccated vegetables from which soups and stews could be made were
assigned to be prepared on a regular, specified basis; the commissary system, which saw
many officers engaged in the distribution, sale and trade of army stocks for profit and with
merchants engaged in trafficking with the Confederacy, was overhauled, and accountability
that eliminated many (but hardly all) of these abuses was established; cooks, to insure meals
according to Hooker's schedule, were assigned to each company in most cases from the
enlisted men themselves, and while many lacked kitchen skills the days of the restricted,
encamped diet ended. Hooker also prepared a schedule of regular, even if elementary
sanitary procedures for maintenance of camp life cleanliness (e.g., periodically requiring
removal of tent-covered log hut tops so the sun and clean air could hit the interior, daily airing
of bedding, daily burial of cooking refuse, etc.). New hospitals were built and old ones
renovated, incompetent (e.g., drunken) surgeons were dismissed, and proper sanitary
supplies were provided. Furloughs were generously granted to the men, and an accounting of
those men absent from encampment was instituted for the first time. Regular, in fact constant,
drills, structuring soldiery time and taking the mind of men off their brooding, were established.
By March, the diet-based and sanitary conditions-connected health of the mass of the soldiers
of the Army of the Potomac had definitively revived. Morale had markedly improved, as the
near cessation of desertions attested to. Hooker had provided the wherewithal to begin
restoration of this army as a combat effective fighting force.525
Once elementary needs were met, there was, however, more to morale. It had to do with
leadership. If certain qualities of military command, those most in evidence on the battlefield
under fire, could not be created through administrative fiat, those officers whose attitudes
toward the Union cause, especially in its current military emancipatory incarnation, could be
summarily rectified. Edwin Stanton, a war Democratic radical and Secretary of War, set about
this task. Stanton, in conjunction with the membership of that radical Republican
Congressional institution - the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, undertook a purge
of the military officers' corps.
Officers, not just those of the Army of the Potomac but also those of the armies in the West,
who could not be counted on to loyally and energetically carry out the provisions of the
government's military emancipation policy lost their commands. (Stanton and the radicals had
been assisted in this task in the previous fall when, following issuance of the Emancipation
decree, numerous Democratic party-supporting military officers in the West - particularly the
volunteer regiments from Ohio, Indiana and Missouri - resigned in protest over or disgust with
Lincoln's preliminary proclamation.) Since militarily sound officers such as Fitz-John Porter,
and not only less sound ones such as Don Carlos Buell and William Franklin, were cashiered
or court-marshaled, the criteria for dismissal was not one of competency. Politically
acceptable, yet militarily doubtful commanders such as John Pope, who had been packed off
to fight the Sioux in western Minnesota, had been relieved of command in the decisive fields
of combat, but remained in the army; and men like the politically radical and militarily
525For Hooker's achievements in meeting the elementary needs of his soldiers, and thereby putting his army

effectively on the road to good morale, Catton, Ibid, 306-309, Coddington, Ibid, 26-29, and also Fletcher Pratt,
Stanton. Lincoln's Secretary of War, 277.

incompetent John Frmont, though shuffled about with some regularity, kept their commands
down to the end of the war. If removal of offensive generals was along the lines of a purge of
the officers' corps according to politically radical criteria, questions of corruption and
competency did enter into the equation, especially if the officers in questions had been
hardcore supporters of McClellan. But, in the end the purge was designed to remove officers
with Democratic party pasts or sympathies, particularly now that a much more vigorous, if not
an all-out, war was being pressed against the South. In that context, Democratic support had
undeniable connotations of opposition to emancipation and support for a negotiated
settlement. Such positions now looked increasingly treasonous. If the purge of military officers
was also motivated by an effort to stem the Democratic party tide which washed over the
country in the November 1862 elections, it also was clearly the case that that Democratic
officers were those who as a rule refused to accept the historically American principle of the
subordination of military to civilian leaders. Such opposition, in the event to a Republican
Administration, neatly dovetailed with a Democratic perspective on war aims. Among radicals,
and notably among non-Democratic military officers, there was a real hatred for the southern,
clubbish and (planter) class-based traditions of West Point from which the arrogant officers'
denial of final civilian authority was felt to stem.
Among northern generals, West Pointers were most often distinguished largely by the
doctrinaire if not bookish attitudes to war, by an unenergetic and a non-combative approach to
battle - both of which again neatly dovetailed with pro-Democratic politics. There was among a
few radicals, Ben Wade in the Senate being the most outstanding example, even the romantic
belief that sound, vigorous and determined military leadership sprang from republican virtues
of simplicity, frugality and honesty. The practical realization of this belief was inextricably
entangled with the old militia and volunteer system controlled by state governors. This system,
which allowed each governor to appoint military officers at all levels of the regiments raised
inside the state and which was finally abolished with the Conscription Act of March 1863, was
riddled by patronage and political influence-seeking. Decisive for raising an army in the first
year of the war, it nonetheless contributed to the incompetency within the Union army officer
corps. By 1863, it was simply outdated by the mass character of armies and their weaponry
(especially artillery) confronting each other on the battlefield. These armies required
doctrinally mediated, experienced (and not professionalized), civilian-subordinate leadership.
Nonetheless, beliefs such as Wade's survived, though they were hardly central to the work of
the military purge (largely finished by March 1863). The purge, though hardly comprehensive,
was effective: It put the vast, overwhelming majority of Union officers untouched by the shakeout on notice that grim, determined pursuit of the war was the order of the day, and it
demonstrated to ordinary soldiers that Lincoln's government was finally serious about winning
the war. That demonstration also contributed, as intended, to raising the morale among the
ranks of the northern armies; and, because, morale had been revived by mid-March, Lincoln,
his Administration and its new found policy of military emancipation, the Republican party and
the future reality of a Union once again made whole all got a reprieve.526
Opposition to the war, doubly predicated on popular war-weariness and, of course, resistance
to the draft and Democratic hostility to the party in power, would continue. Because the former,
since defeats still loomed, would rise and fall with Union armies performances in battle, and
because the latter would remain strong until the fall of 1864, the essential centrality of high
526For western officers' resignations, Milton, Ibid, 120; on the purge of the officers' corps, see Benjamin Thomas and

Harold Hyman, Stanton, 259-265, and Catton, Ibid, 299-301; for the radical critique of West Point, Ibid, 121, 300 and
Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade, 195; on the states' pivotal rule in troop recruitment, Catton, Ibid, 226-227,
233, and especially, Randell, Ibid, 241-246.

levels of soldiery morale remained the thread upon which the Union chances of a successful
conclusion to the war hung.

Part V
Historical and Theoretical Structure of the Union Army Command Problematic (II)
General Shape of Officers' Caste and its Purge
Driven by a series of losses and ambiguous victories on the battlefield deriving from a style of
command that informally pursued a strategy oriented toward stalemate in the eastern theatre
of the war, Lincoln turned to the radicals. In his nationalist passion to preserve the integrity of
the Union at any and all costs, Lincoln had come to accept the radicals' position on the
necessity of waging relentless, ruthless war against the enemy and, in particular, against
southern planters. He did everything in his power to mitigate the practical consequences of
this decision, but until the defeat of the Confederacy was a forgone conclusion, it would have
been dangerously counterproductive to attempt to restrain the conduct of Union armies in the
field. Thereafter (i.e., by early autumn 1864), Lincoln would increasingly moderate and soften
the terms under which he, as President, would preside over reunion of North and South.
Having embraced the radicals in fall 1862, he would more and more distance himself from
them. That was, however, still in the future. So in fall 1862, as war became revolution (i.e., an
overturning of southern property in chattel slaves), and however Lincoln attempted to limit its
revolutionary character, it would increasingly develop a logic and weight, a momentum, of its
own, growing more and more ruthless, even savage.
The first indication of this new direction created by Lincoln's rather dramatic policy change
was a purge of the officers corps, particularly that of the eastern army. For radicals, McClellan
had to be jettisoned, and, whatever the costs in leadership, the Union Army of the Potomac
officers' corps had to be purged. (It was in this context that the court-martial of Fitz-John
Porter on charges brought by Pope should be seen.) For not only did the characteristic
attitudes and faults of eastern Union army commanders as military leaders converge in the
personality of McClellan, his character and politics threatened to shape the Union Army of the
Potomac long after his departure. The danger was that his legacy would become part of the
very fabric of this army leadership (institutionalized in the continuing presence of its command
cadre): McClellan not only unified what had been separate at the First Bull Run, namely,
Patterson's extreme caution and McDowell's inability to fully engage the enemy in battle,527 he
put this new unity on the firm foundation of proslavery, Democratic party politics thereby
rendering stable what may have merely been fortuitous. Such was the legacy he might
bequeath to the army.
The task of purging the army, discussed above, was undertaken by Edwin Stanton, in
conjunction with radicals on the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
The purge effected officers in both the western and eastern theatres of the war. The
leadership costs were, in the event, effectively minimal, and it could have been argued, not
just retrospectively, such would have been the outcome. It should always be borne in mind
that, outside a few old soldiers like Winfield Scott, Patterson and Sumner, at the outset of the
war there was simply no one in the northern armies with battlefield experience in a command
position, and only a handful of men with the experience of command of a formation much
larger than a fully manned regiment. (Scott alone had had a larger command. He had a force
of 14,000 men in Mexico.) Recall that the size of U.S. army at outset of war, some 20,000 men
and officers virtually guaranteed that a militarily effective leadership would of necessity have
to be forged in the crucible of war itself. Thus, leadership had not been preconstituted,
preceding the outbreak of war. It was literally formed on the fields of battle, in and through
command decisions under battlefield conditions, in reflection on and assimilation of the tactics
and strategy of battles just engaged in, and in anticipation and planning for campaigns and
battle to come. Lacking such a presence at the outset of the war, Democratic party politically
527See our " Tactical Accounts and Summaries."

informed officers in command capacities (counterposed to deadly-serious, militarily competent

and independence-minded Confederate officers) assured that leadership in the northern
armies committed to victory could not be constructed until those officers were either dismissed
or submerged. As we suggested above, the radicals' purge had a salutary effect: It warned the
vast, overwhelming majority of Union officers untouched by the purge that unyielding,
relentless pursuit of the war now the objective that was to govern their conduct, it made plain
to ordinary soldiers that the government was finally in earnest about winning the war, and,
moreover, it cleared the way for officers such as Grant who relative to their rebel counterparts
lacked nothing in the grim determination to make war.
Still, even after winter 1862-1863, the practice (caution, hesitancy, dilatoriness) of the
Democratic party political faction in the army had not been abandoned. At Gettysburg, (1-3
July 1863), George Meade, a competent but cautious general, was appointed to command as
his army secured high ground against a Confederate assault. Defending from well-fortified
positions against frontal attack played to Meade's strength. (He would show his cautious,
unimaginative character in the four months of desultory skirmishes and inconsequential
fighting that followed Gettysburg.) In the immediate aftermath of Gettysburg, Meade, in fact,
had little interest in carrying battle to Lee's army and winning the war. In his 4 July 1863
General Order No. 68 addressed to the Army of the Potomac soldiery, he wrote, "An enemy
superior in numbers, and flushed with the pride of a successful invasion, attempted to
overcome and destroy this army. Utterly baffled and defeated, he has now withdrawn from the
contest. ... [The] commanding general, looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our
soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." Lee's Pennsylvania Campaign could have
only been considered an "invasion" if Meade the Pennsylvanian already recognized the
Confederate as a sovereign State and accepted a territorial division of the antebellum Union
as given. And Meade, of course, still thought of the war as a "contest," that is, in gentlemanly
terms. Meade was right on one count though. The common soldiery which, in spite of its
rather militarily effete and often incompetent command, had carried the Union Army of the
Potomac at least since the Seven Days.528
At Gettysburg, Lee, in an arrogance borne of a string of victories against a numerically
superior army - but a string of losses engineered by largely incompetent commanders
politically inclined to an essentially defeatist perspective, had grossly misjudged and
underestimated the fighting capacity and courage of the ranks of the Union soldiery. The
common soldiers of the Union Army of the Potomac were already by mid-summer 1862 every
bit as good as those of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. By mid-1863, entire corps
(I, II, XII Corps) of the former were on a par with their counterparts in the rebel army; and the
truly crack formations of the northern army, such as the Iron Brigade, were at least the equal
528Given the opportunity to confront a vastly weakened Confederate army with its back to the Potomac, Meade

refused battle. He merely wished to rid his soil of its invader. He was, as Williams suggests (Lincoln and His
Generals, 266-267), merely "trying to get the Confederates over the Potomac without risking a battle.
"Meade's General Order is cited (emphasis added) from WR, Ser. 1, V. 27, Pt. 3, 519. Williams (Ibid, 261) similarly
evaluates Meade: "He liked to think of war in the old way, as a conflict between [gentle]men in uniform [the context
fully justifies the insertion of gentle]. Of economic warfare against enemy resources he had not the slightest
appreciation and viewed it as brutality. ... He thought that the government ought to conduct the war like an afflicted
parent compelled, with a sad heart, to chastise an erring child." Meade "could not conceive of Lee's army as his
objective" (Ibid, 286).
There is no essential difference in military policy between McClellan in late September 1862 and Meade in mid-July
1863. Compare Meade's remarks, his General Order cited above, to those McClellan wrote Halleck after Lee's army
safely departed Maryland: "Our victory was complete. The enemy is driven back into Virginia. Maryland and
Pennsylvania are now safe" (WR, Ser. 1, V. 19, Pt. II, 330). In his autobiography, he also stated the "purpose of
advancing from Washington was simply to meet the necessities of the moment by frustrating Lee's invasion of the
Northern States" (emphasis added). McClellan, My Own Story, 553.

of the very best of the rebel army, say the Stonewall Brigade in Jackson's old corps. If very
few people at the time or since have noticed this, it is because, in viewing a rigidly hierarchical
organization, the criterion for battlefield excellence generally devolves on an army's
command. At any rate, an adequate command had to await Grant's arrival in March 1864, and
by then the presence of a reliable core of disciplined, battle-hardened soldiers would become
questionable.
Corporate Identity Underlining an Army Political Faction
After the radicals had forced the politics of pro-slavery sympathy and its attendant strategy
(military stalemate) underground, it was only the self-defense of a corporate identity of the
Democratic officers club-West Point coterie that continued to function openly. That identity can
be broadly described by characterizing these men as a group. The leading officers of the Army
of the Potomac (1861-1863) could never be characterized as determined nor innovative and
audacious. They rarely exhibited initiative. Instead, they were by and large unambitious, dull,
non-imaginative and merely cautious. Typically they avoided responsibility, were buck passers
and operated only by the rules. A lived commitment to protocol, regulations and army
procedure was, in their cases, largely the substitute of inferior commanders for solid
generalship. In self-defense of their inferiority, they were committed to advance by seniority
and sensitive to all issues of authority to the point of ruining a command and, infinitely more
importantly, their troops. Underpinned by their character formation, inwardly and consciously
these men were cautious because they tacitly or explicitly opposed the transformation of a
gentleman's war into revolution against planter property in slaves, they correspondingly
accepted as given the territorial division between North and South, and because they
politically opposed Republican hegemony in the national government. Consciously or no, they
also lacked initiative and refused to take calculated risks because they feared rebuke and
dismissal for combat error by "black Republican" scrutinizers in Washington. But both before
and after issuance of the Emancipation decree, each had made his share of military errors on
the ground that more or less grievously hurt the Union cause.
Yet those that kept their pro-Democratic party politics to themselves remained in service with
their commands intact, since the corporate mechanisms for cover-up and self-defense
continued to operate efficiently. (And among them, self-defense was all they did efficiently.)
Thus, what these officers really feared about being discredited was that disrepute could have
ruined their post-war status and career as officers. What operated emotionally was, then, fear
of loss of status, daily livelihood, and future pension. These men were not principled enough
to resign, e.g., upon issuance of Lincoln's decree, but instead with the (emotional-ideological)
wind out of their sails, their caution was intensified. If ever there was a chance that these
officers might fully, creatively, aggressively and grimly make war, that chance had
disappeared. The foremost among them, McClellan, Porter, Franklin, and Sykes, were purged.
Among those that ducked, that is, suppressed their pro-Democratic party and maintained their
positions as commanders in the army - men such as Meade and Hancock, one or two once or
twice demonstrated the ability to transcend their old army formations. The whole lot of them
are best characterized as unimaginative, cautious mediocrities.529
529For elaborations along slightly different axes, see Hennessy, Return to Bull Run, 468-470, and Catton, Mr.

Lincoln's Army, 202-203, 206-207.

In the wars aftermath, Meade and Hancock proved their wartime politics: They militarily acted upon their pro-slavery
sympathies in enforcing, in bourgeois terms, Andrew Johnson's illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of the 1867
Civil Rights and Reconstruction Acts (1867). For their thoroughly reactionary roles they played after replacing John
Pope (Meade) in military commander of the district covering Florida, Alabama and Georgia and Phil Sheridan
(Hancock) as commander of the district covering Louisiana, late 1867 and early 1868, see Michael Benedict, The
Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, 90, 89, respectively.

The Problem of Rank

Most obvious and ubiquitous among command problems inside the Union armies were the
pervasive bickering, bitterly jealous and counterproductive rivalries that riddled army
leaderships. These ranged from minor flaps, such as the well-known dispute between Howard
and Hancock at Gettysburg, to those rivalries and jealousies that were serious enough to have
ruinous consequences (i.e., additional massive casualties among the common soldiers on the
battlefields), such as those between McClellan and Pope. Largely conditional on a lack of
doctrine, and the unanimity of counsel among commanders that flows from shared doctrine,
these instances of conflict among army officers were exacerbated by a structural flaw in
system of officer rank.
Prior to early 1864, only one officer in the history of the armies of the United States had ever
carried the field rank of Lieutenant General, namely, George Washington. Out of respect for
the memory of the nation's "father," and a sentimental attachment to this memory, neither the
army high command (Scott and latter Halleck) had requested nor had Congress seen fit to
(re)create such a rank. Accordingly, all officers commanding formations above that of a
brigade (divisions, corps, armies) held the rank of major general. (By way of contrast, division
commanders in the Confederate army held the rank of major general, corps commanders that
of lieutenant general, commander of army that of general, commanding.) Between two men of
equal rank (especially men from West Point backgrounds), command was customary given to
the senior officer that is, the one who had been commissioned earlier at that rank. By and
large the Union army generalship was fiercely attached to this customary-based form of
advancement: Though informal (albeit rigorous adhered to), it protected all regular army
officers. For, if an officer lived through the war (and, from the behavior of the majority on the
battlefield, they assumed they would, and in contrast to volunteer soldiers, their chances of so
doing were qualitatively better), this system guaranteed he would have his commission and a
position in the army after the war ended, as well as a salary and a pension. Civil war does not,
however, define normalcy in the life of a society; and promotion based on seniority,
contingently tied to battlefield experience, performance and ability, did not reward strategic
insight, tactical competency (not to speak of brilliance), demonstrated leadership ability,
courage under fire, that is, those characteristic of generalship most needed in conditions of
war.530
This system of promotion by seniority protected incompetent army commanders. But in a
hierarchical institution, like the military in bourgeois democratic social formations, those in
command can in the face of disaster be held responsible and accountable for failure. In the
East, incompetency was for the most part protected by solidarity among regular army Democratic party officers who dominated the corps. In those cases where defeat in a major
530The Army and Navy Journal, writing 26 March 1864, warned Grant as he assumed command of the Union armies

of the East, that he must "strike at the tap root of one of the prime evils that have afflicted the Army of the Potomac,"
hoping that he would "put to rest forever all that spirit of jealousy, rivalry and ambition on the part of those in
subordinate command that has been the bane of the Army of the Potomac." Cited by Catton, Grant Takes Command,
165-166.
Following the death of John Reynolds, temporary commander of the left wing of the Army of the Potomac (I, III and XI
Corps) on the first day (1 July 1863) at Gettysburg, command passed to O.O. Howard who, late in the afternoon was
succeeded by Winfield Scott Hancock at the order of George Meade commanding general of the army. Both men
were major generals (in fact, all four were and that was a part of the problem), but since Howard had received his
rank prior to Hancock he by the Union army's curious logic outranked Hancock. A postwar dispute developed as to
whether or no a de facto joint command had been exercised.
"There is much jealousy among the Generals, and each one is anxious for personal glory and not over-anxious to
assist his fellow commanders." Alexander Schimmelpfennig, XI Corps brigade commander, cited in Joseph Taylor
Butts, A Gallant Captain in the Civil War, 30.

battle or campaign brought enormous popular and press pressure to bear on the
Administration, incompetent leadership performance led to command changes: In the nine
and half months between the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac
had four different commander generals (McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade).
Historically different forms of hierarchical military institutions have functioned with varying
kinds of commander-soldier cohesion. Men have fought under military leaders because they
were impressed and feared the consequences of desertion, for money, or to pillage and for
plunder. Modern bourgeois democratic armies inspire men, ostensibly social equals, to fight
for principle, mostly for the "nation." The bond of cohesion is suppose to be trust and
confidence in commanders who, because of training, experience and ability, are fit to lead.
Cementing this bond presupposes, among other things (such as battlefield victories, i.e.,
practical demonstrations of competency), command stability. In other words, the constant
change of command at the very top of the Army of the Potomac obviously could not have and
did not inspire confidence.
Doctrine and its Absence Among Officers of the Army of the Potomac
The structure of regular army life, especially promotion by seniority, highlighted a lack of
military doctrine as the accumulating defeats of the Union armies in the East threw their
command structure(s) into crisis. The absence of doctrine, and with it command unanimity, is
analytically separable from but in wartime practice was inextricably intertwined with the
presence of politically Democratic party officers. It had its origins in the peculiar history and
class structure of the American social formation.
Following 1815, the geographical insularity of the United States in relation to the achieved
levels of technological-military prowess among the colonial powers of the world (all European)
created a relatively unique situation for the US Army: With the exception of desultory Indian
skirmishes, and the aforementioned brief war of territorial aggression against Mexico in 18471848, the nation's armed forces had not had to engage in conventional war against a large,
well-armed and well-drilled opponent in forty-six years. The lack of such history of warfare
stood in stark contrast to emerging national armies on the European continent. With two or
three exceptions (e.g., Winfield Scott), the war with Mexico and disconnected fighting with
Indian nations largely west of the Mississippi provided the upper layers of the officers' corps
with the entirety of their military combat experience. Thus, either very limited or lack of fighting
experience altogether characterized the officers corps of the Union armies. (This much, of
course, could also be say for the Confederate officers' corps.)
Still, it might be reasonably expected that in the bourgeois era a national army no matter how
small (and by European standards the pre-Civil War United States Army was skeletal) would
at least maintain an institution for the formation of an officer cadre. In principle, this was the
case in the United States wherein West Point was so designated. But a generalized cultural
opposition to a strictly military school deprived West Point of the Congressional support
necessity for fulfillment of such a mission. It must be remembered that appropriation of ruling
class republican ideology by masses of white artisan and farming males also meant the
assimilation of classically republican hostility toward standing armies, toward undemocratic,
closed military castes slavishly committed to a great captain, and toward the ever-present
prospects of military dictatorship both had been historically linked to.531 Right on through the
Civil War, outstanding Congressional representatives of an idealized, independent producer531In practice, this hostility was far more characteristic of the northern yeomanry and, for a time even after its

emergence, the capitalist farmer in the West, than eithers southern counterpart. In its "whites only egalitarian" zeal
the latter (along with the northern artisans of New York and Philadelphia), it should be recalled, contradictorily
embraced the personality closest to military despotism in the antebellum era, Andrew Jackson.

citizen, the northern capitalist farmer (such as Ohio Republican Senator Ben Wade), shared
this attitude and openly voiced suspicions of West Point as an institution, attributing an all-toooften exhibited Union army leadership incompetence to training at the military academy.
Typically, this perspective was expressed by pointing out West Point was "aristocratical in its
constitution," that it failed to instill national patriotism (merely state allegiance).532
Radicals also explicitly subscribed to the occasionally romanticized notion that West Point was
superfluous since any hardy, fugal and virtuous citizen of independent yeoman stock could
lead a similar virtuous citizen body into combat and quickly dispense with the rebellion. This
notion was, however, romanticized only to the extent that radicals maintained the rebellion
could be quickly dispensed with. (After the battle of the First Bull Run, radicals began to
recognize the North was in for a long war if for no other reason than flagging civilian and
officer morale. Their efforts were devoted to steeling both the soldiery and patriots against
war-weariness and defeatism, while seeking to purge the army of its objectively treacherous
elements.) But against haughty Democratic party officers such as McClellan, who preferred a
professional army on the old regular army model manned by national conscription, radicals
continued to insist on the necessity of a volunteer army. The classically republican notion of a
virtuous citizen-soldiery was a much maligned concept. Yet once it had undergone training
and lived through battle and fought campaigns, an experienced volunteer soldiery in the East
proved far superior to the draft-based, lumpenproletarian elements that were injected into the
Army of the Potomac beginning in the early months of 1864. It was, as we shall suggest later,
that core of three year men who reenlisted in that fateful spring, together with a massive selfinfusion of volunteer freemen into Union armies in both theatres of the war, who provided the
moral and corporal energies that destroyed the rebel armies and brought the war to its end.
The above citation concerning West Point's "aristocratical constitution" further suggests
radical Republicans identified West Point as a major part of the problem: The institutional,
internal culture of the academy favored the well-to-do, those of higher social standing, in the
sense the officer regime that governed West Point consciously cultivated a cadet personality
that can best be described as an officer-gentleman on the southern model. (Among radicals
this was felt as sentiment but seldom developed and articulated as criticism). In penuriously
532Cited remark from Leonard White, The Jacksonians, 210. White states, "Underlying the hostility to it [West Point]

was an old distrust of a standing army and a democratic resentment at what was alleged to be an aristocratical
institution" (Ibid). For the classical republican tradition in relation to the origins of opposition to a permanent armed
force kept "standing" during times of peace, see Lois Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies!" The AntiArmy Ideology in
Seventeenth-Century England; and, for the assimilation of this tradition and its early presence on American soil,
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, esp., 61-64. Many radicals besides Wade held
similar views (e.g., George Julian). In Lincoln's cabinet, but perhaps for different reasons, Stanton too was
contemptuous of professional soldiers (Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 57).
On this attitude (in the North) toward West Point, James Morrison ("The Best School in the World," 18) notes that
generally, "American society remained largely unaware of and indifferent to the intramural squabbles and everything
else pertaining to the regular army. Civilians seldom saw soldiers and when they did, tended to view them with
contempt." In his memoirs Ulysses S. Grant recalled how, as a new lieutenant atop his horse riding down the streets
of Cincinnati, a small boy, "a little urchin, bareheaded, barefooted, with dirty and ragged pants held up by a single
gallows," had taunted him, an officer outfitted in a brand spanking new uniform, with the jibe, "'Soldier! Will you work?
No siree, I'll sell my shirt first!'" (Memoirs, 30).
Leonard White (The Jacksonians) quotes an 1837 Army and Navy Chronicle editorial bemoaning the fact that, "[The]
military profession in this country has been so poorly encouraged that but little incentive is held out to devote
exclusive attention to it ... The distrust of military men [is] ... prevalent among politicians ... [They] hold out the idea
that [military men] ... are dangerous to the safety of a republican form of government." He states summarily that,
"Congressional parsimony and republican mistrust kept the army and the War Department in a constant state of
frustration from 1829 to 1860...[,]" a contention that is shared by other historians of the US Army, among them Russell
Weigley (The History of the United States Army, 156).
For the accusation that West Pointers had been trained in the principles of "secession," Adams, Our Masters the
Rebels, 189-190.

offering little financial aid to the academy, Congressional radicals (as well as their selfconsciously classically republican predecessors) not only focused on the institutional
formation of cadets, but recognized that the positive cadet response to West Point's internal
culture was problematic. Perhaps many radicals did crudely maintain West Point cadet
selection only favored the wealthy. Such criticism had been an ideal transposition of class
resentment by elements of the western free labor menagerie at the growing, unrepresentative
political power of southern planters. To be sure, entrance to West Point was not secured by
wealth or social standing. The institution was open to and enrolled white males regardless of
class status. In this formal sense, West Point was "egalitarian" (as countless of its celebratory
histories spare no effort in relating). Nonetheless, the academic program took a heavy toll on
those men who, lacking wealth and standing, did not possess prior educational training
(especially in mathematics and languages). The bulk of those who did not remain at and
graduate from West Point were precisely those so disadvantaged. Whether those who did
graduate and were commissioned came largely from well-to-do northern families (such as
McClellan or Meade) or southern planter families (such as Lee), or whether the shake-out of
potential cadets hailing from middling strata of American society merely numerically balanced
the class representation of the academy, is irrelevant. What is important is that in the absence
of the practical formation of an officers' corps committed to self-defense of the nation on the
basis of an assimilated, internalized and developing shared doctrine, the selection process not
only functioned but hegemonized the practice of forming cadets as officers. The social model
for officer behavior that dominated the academy was, as suggested, derived from the
aristocratic comportment of southern gentlemen. Nascent northern capitalism, whether in the
person of the retail businessman, great merchant, big banker or emergent industrialist, could
not provide a fitting model for an educated, worldly and finished young man. The active
acceptance of gentlemanly refinement on the southern model entailed a minimally tacit
commitment to the social foundations of planter civilization, chattel slavery. Among many
officers, this commitment was conscious and took shape in adoption of Democratic party
politics.533
533Radicals during the war, and staunchly anti-militarist republican Congressmen of earlier decades, also felt strongly

that the manner of cadet appointment was weighted to the sons of the wealthy. This charge could be easily refuted
and had been by academy representatives appearing before Congress (White, Ibid, 210-211). However, indicating
West Point had a balanced social composition does nothing to address the issue of the practical-attitudinal formation
of cadets.
During his second year at West Point, McClellan wrote his brother John, "some how or other I take to the
Southerners... almost all my associates - indeed all of them - are Southerners; I am sorry to say that the manners,
feelings, & opinions of the Southerners are far, far preferable to those of the majority of the Northerners at this place."
Cited by Sears, George Brinton McClellan, 6.
Cadets who did graduate and were commissioned as officers (second lieutenants) and who, because of previously
formed and lived moral-political commitments, were consciously opposed to slavery, thus to planter-aristocratic form
of life, refused to comport themselves as officer gentleman on the southern model. Brief sketches of these men, who
were not common in the army, always note their ungentlemanly outward appearance: They lacked the requisite social
grace and neat dress. Abner Doubleday, a political radical, is described thusly: "Slightly rotund, with a heavy
mustache and thick, greasy-looking black hair, Doubleday was deliberate and slothful" (John Hennessy, Return to
Bull Run, 165). Hennessy's own account of Doubleday's initiative-seizing sterling performance in the field at the
Second Manassas (Ibid, 181) betrays a characterization, as "plodding" and unambitious (Ibid, 165), that owes more to
the caste prejudices of other Civil War officers than to judicious assessment. Doubleday was, in fact, an officer who
tactically excelled where all-too-many others failed as Hassler's account (Crisis at the Crossroads) of the first day of
fighting at Gettysburg, an account which sets a standard for tactical accounts of that battle, clearly demonstrates. On
rare occasions, we run into northern Civil War officers who, morally-religiously opposed to slavery, consciously
comported themselves on an alternative behavior model. O.O. Howard, the "Christian gentleman"- an inferior officer
who as a gentleman though of a different sort was committed to the officers corps' corporate identity, comes
immediately to mind.

As we shall discuss below, West Point basically trained military engineers who, on the one
hand, might be very competent in fortifications construction, but who, on the other hand, had
learned very little in the way of the contemporary history and theory of warfare. Outside a
handful of ambitious army officers (Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, George McClellan, Henry
Halleck) who had on their own assimilated the lessons of primarily European warfare as it had
developed since the time of Napoleon's campaigns, almost all "old army" men lacked an
explicit theoretical orientation. The achieved corporate identity as gentlemen-officers masked
this situation because the solidarity formed on the basis of that identity constituted a substitute
for a doctrine-oriented officer training tradition. (During the course of the war, this solidarity
would also neatly function to shield members of the Democratic party officers club from
battlefield failure.) This deficiency was exacerbated by the presence, discussed above, of so
many political (i.e., untrained) officers in the Union ranks. Moreover, the theory of warfare itself
would, in the course of the war, only function at best as a limited guide to understanding the
development of the war since it, and its character as warfare, was itself undergoing drastic
transformation.
West Point was not, then, eine Kriegakadamie for which the inculcation of an officers corps in
a tradition-based doctrine was decisive. The specific problem of the absence of doctrine at
West Point can be stated by broadly, militarily-historically contextualizing it. In military terms,
the great advancements of the Union army like other modern armies over, say, its (their) 18th
century counterparts were twofold. First, its corps structure created resiliency; and, second,
Union nationalism secured for northern armies both the manpower and the resources to
prevail in a lengthy war of attrition. The corps structure provided the Union army with the
organizational prerequisites for flexibility and maneuverability allowing it to overcome the
greatest liability of 18th century-styled armies which, massed as unitary formations, were
vulnerable to destruction in a single decisive battle. Achievement of flexibility and
maneuverability in operations distributed over a broad front or, in the case of the Civil War,
over two fronts or theatres, for purposes of tactical advance of strategic goals, required and
presupposed a body of competent subordinate commanders who were capable and willing to
take initiative. This the Union armies lacked at outset of the war. Subordinate officer
competency was necessary because troop dispersal meant that the army commander simply
could not get a view of the entire theatre of operations, that uncertainty and (especially in
battle) confusion were necessary, constitutive moments of the achievement of flexibility and
maneuverability, and that, accordingly, subordinate commanders would always find
themselves in positions wherein they would have to make independent judgments and take
independent actions. To do this they must have had assimilated a common doctrine, a shared
understanding of the relation of civilian to military power (and, in the specific Civil War context,
of the relations of officers to a volunteer, democratic-inclined soldiery), of how the army
functioned and responded, of its capacities, limitations and the technical features of
maneuver, combat, etc., as well as its goals, and as part of this doctrine they must have
understood the lines of authority and the strategic objectives of, in a general way, a campaign
as well as their role and function in it. Doctrine, then and now, provides a shared theoretical,
operational and battlefield frame of reference, a set of standards for the conduct of military
activity that gives an officers corps cohesion, that minimizes (but obviously does not eliminate)
confusion, misconceptions or misinterpretations of orders and commands under battlefield
conditions, and that permits commanders (especially, at the corps level) to function
independently in the field within the framework of a prescribed (campaign, battle, etc.) plan.
The battlefield and campaign comportment of the "high command" of the Union armies in the
East (the Army of the Potomac especially) in the first years of the war suggests the level of
assimilation by the upper-level commanders of shared doctrine was at best terribly uneven

and at worst altogether lacking, and that, moreover, strategic understanding in particular was
often absent. This unevenness and these absences were deepened by the presence of
political appointments to the Union army officers corps, but the problem, as we have been at
pains to develop, did not originate here. Intertwined with and enormously complicated by a
cadre of officers who tacitly pursued a grand strategic policy in regard to the conduct of the
war largely at odds with that of political representative of the nation, the Lincoln
Administration, the problem was rooted in the historical failure to develop a school that would
train a cadre of officers in the most advanced (Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic) military
doctrine.
Recall, again, that West Point was essentially an engineering school. But the problem was
broader and its roots ran deeper: In the North the diffusion, even ubiquitousness, of
Jacksonian republican egalitarianism and its corollary of hostility to standing armies, to the
military profession, etc., guaranteed that the strictly doctrinal-theoretical aspects of a West
Point education, doctrine that might have been developed along classically republican lines on
assumptions of the use of a mass, volunteer army, would not be elaborated with
Congressional monies, and would not be taken seriously by any northern officer candidates.
(As late as 1861, Congress rejected a proposal presented by McClellan to enlarge the cadet
corps at West Point and to speed up the program of study in order to increase the quantity of
available officers candidates for Union armies in the field.)534
Without an institutional context wherein doctrine can be elaborated, codified, modified and
revised, then elaborated anew, its presence among army commanders is merely a fortuitous
happening, the luck of having an individually gifted officer. But, in America, the development of
a war academy was not, until after the Civil War, a real historical possibility: The development
of such an institution was not "interrupted" nor "arrested"; rather, it was practically unrealizable
in a social order where opposition to planter aristocratic domination of the national political
system, fear of the Slavepower, permitted elements of anti-military, republican self-awareness
to linger among significant layers of farming social classes and strata in the North long after
the class relations these elements originally mediated had disappeared.535
534Congressional rejection of the McClellan proposal is noted by Sears, George Brinton McClellan, 114-115.

The implied comparison of northerners is with their southern officer counterparts. It is all too facile to say, as has
popularly been done, that, given the vastly superior resources of the North, the specifically military difference between
North and South in the war was the superiority of the latter's generals. Regarding the first years of the war, this merely
states a simple fact. Rather, it would be more suggestive, first, to relate this superiority to the social foundations of
southern society in slave labor as we have attempted, and, second, to state this difference in generalship could be
related both to anti-democratic and closed caste character of the northern officers corps, and to the Confederate
nationalism of southern generals as well as to their qualitatively greater assimilation at the highest levels of command
of Napoleonic doctrine. This internalization of Napoleonic doctrine, which, of course, required real effort, had
everything to do with the sentiment that a military career was honorable and highly prized.
Our understanding of the characteristics of a modern army is indebted to Robert Epstein, Napoleon's Last Victory and
the Emergence of Modern War. The contrast between 18th century and modern armies is historically elaborated in
chapter 6, below.
535In the South, this ideological commitment to whites' only egalitarianism, in part transformed by war into
Confederate nationalism, was ridden by a class contradiction: The great planter always maintained an uneasy relation
to his "po white" brethren. The latter fought to preserve the property of the former who by and large did not fight.
(These contradictions are brilliantly explored in Perry Lentzs novelistic treatment, The Falling Hills.) Yet as long as the
rebel volunteer was convinced that morally corrupt "black republicans" disregarded legal and constitutional constrains
by invading the soldier's homeland, that this enemy invader moreover threw abolitionists on him, then to boot
murdered and imprisoned southern citizens and confiscated and destroyed their property, and feared, on the basis of
an imaginary fantasy projection, black reprisals against southern women, the contradictions in his awareness
(between hatred for the "nigger-lord" he nonetheless admired and desire to share in whatever benefits herrenvolk
democracy offered him) could be suppressed and a fighting spirit cultivated. Some of these benefits were
incorporated into the structure of the rebel armies; for example, the election of company and regimental officers by
their soldiers persisted in those armies much longer than in Union armies.

Because they were committed to slavery (in that contradictory unity of hatred for both the
planter and his slaves), the southern yeoman masses did not in a practical sense share that
fear of military despotism that led to the rejection of Andrew Jackson, West Point, etc. In the
North, though, ideological commitments to slavery produced a grand historical and dialectical
ruse. As the war progressed, and unfolded without a quick end in sight, as northerner
casualties mounted, and attitudes on both sides hardened, and as the role and significance of
the slaves in the war became increasingly weighty, McClellan's attempted Democratic party,
pro-slavery politicization of the military more and more shaped his strategic and tactical
military decisions, and more and more appeared to take on the color of treachery. The ruse?
McClellan's politics, as they translated into an operatively effective grand strategy on the
ground in opposition to the national objectives of the Lincoln Administration, more and more
drove the latter to transform a civil war into a revolution against southern property.

In the end in the North, an ideological commitment to "whites' only" egalitarianism could not sustain an interclass
alliance with southern planters. Herrenvolk democracy gave way before the concerns (for cheap land) of a free soil
and bourgeois-meritorious awareness elaborated on the foundations of the practice of emergent class of capitalist
farmers and tenants.

5.
The Copperhead Movement and the Revival of the Northern Democracy, 1861-1864
The Democracy and the Crises of the 1850s
The southern Democracy not only survived the series of crises that had terribly shaken the
northern party during the 1850s; it, in fact, thrived: Beginning with the pre-fifties assumption of
leadership by the party's southern wing (i.e., with the 1844 nomination of Polk over Van
Buren, an act that constituted a forceful repudiation of the Jacksonian heritage by its emergent
southern leadership), this series of crises - the Missouri Compromise (1850), the KansasNebraska Act (1854), the Dred-Scott decision (1857) and the LeCompton fiasco (1857-1858)
over the constitution of Kansas - all exhibited, not merely the sectional viability of the southern
party, but its national efficacy as well. On the other side, the same crises helped built the
Republican party, first, in recruitment after 1854 of Free Soilers and, second, in its opposition
to the Slavepower conspiracy to nationalize slavery (since these primarily legislative events or
crises, as well as the central role of southerners in provoking de facto civil war in Kansas,
were widely considered as elements demonstrating the existence of this conspiracy).
Powerful but beginning to lose its moorings in the North and stable in the South, the
Democracy held the Presidency and as well as Congressional majorities in both Houses
throughout all these events, their aftershocks and their ramifications. New Hampshire's
Franklin Pierce (1853-1856) and Pennsylvania's James Buchanan (1857-1860) were both
northern Democrats beholden to the southern party. It was the struggle over the Kansas state
constitution that created an irreparable schism inside the Democracy.
The Kansas Imbroglio
That struggle pitted slaveholders, who dominated an elected convention that had been
boycotted by the free soil farmer masses of Kansas, against those same farmers. Both sides
were heavily armed, and the pro-slavery forces in particular engaged in terrorist intimidation to
achieve their ends. One of those ends was effective control of the territorial legislative
elections that took place in October 1857. The legislature went Democratic (with a large
minority of Republicans winning seats), yet a Republican was elected as the territorial
representative to Congress. The elections were marred by fraud: In at least two precincts,
Democratic representation had been won by casting Democratic ballots for as much as
twenty-fours times the total population of the precinct.536
Another objective of the slaveholders was to produce a pro-slavery constitution. This
document was to be written by a convention, formally known as the LeCompton Constitutional
Convention. This body was made up a raucous membership, pro-slavery rabble, adventurers
and southern-aligned land speculators, often drunk, attending irregularly and largely
incompetent. The form of ratification of this constitution created a dilemma (resolved by the
small core of Democratic Administration supporters who managed the convention, and who
took it up themselves to write the constitution): On the one side, the almost exclusively proslavery convention membership did not want to submit a constitution to the voters of Kansas
since it knew full well that any pro-slavery document would be voted down. Slaveholders
insisted that any constitution the convention generated should be submitted directly to
Congress for ratification, a tactic that southern newspapers vociferously clamored for. On the
other side, Buchanan's people - like the President himself, his closest advisors (southerners
such as Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury, Jacob Thompson of North
Carolina, Secretary of the Interior, and Senators John Slidell of Louisiana and Jesse Bright of
536For the situation in Kansas surrounding production of the LeCompton constitution, Roy Nichols, The Disruption of

American Democracy, 117- 131, 155f.

Indiana), and the territorial governor William Walker (another southern sympathizer) - all felt
that for the sake of the future of the Democracy it nonetheless was necessary to present a
constitution for popular ratification. While none of these men (including Walker) were actually
involved in writing it, the convention's managers circumvented this dilemma by crafting a
double-faced document: The constitution was submitted for popular approval but in two
versions, one that would allow future admission of more slaves and the other which would
prohibit such admission. In either case, slave property already in the state would be protected
(and, in either case, slaveholders felt confident that at a later date they could either
legislatively or merely de facto enlarge their slaveholdings).
To counter this fait accompli, the elected legislature, largely free soil in orientation (regardless
of the Democratic majority), met in special session in December and arranged a referendum
to vote the LeCompton constitution(s) up or down. Meanwhile, the Administration-sponsored
vote on the LeCompton constitution took place as scheduled on 21 December 1857 with
6,153 votes recorded for the document "with slavery" and 569 for that "without." Once against
there were charges of fraud in the voting. The legislature-initiated referendum, held 4 January
1858, tallied 10,266 votes against the constitution as such and only 162 for it. Buchanan,
mindful of his southern support, decided that the LeCompton constitution, not the legislativelyinitiated referendum, expressed the "legal will" of Kansas residents. He, accordingly, was
determined to push it through Congress.537
Class struggle in Kansas between slaveholders and free soil farmers raised to the level of de
facto civil war, and (as political expressions of this civil war) production of the LeCompton
constitution and the successful Congressional fight to ensure its certification, produced a split
that the Democracy never recovered from. On the side of the farmers stood a group of
western Democrats (up for reelection in the free soil West) headed by Stephen Douglas, U.S.
Senator from Illinois and leader of the northern party. On the other side, stood the vocal,
increasingly well received (in the South), radical secessionists, the "fire-eaters," men such as
Francis Pickes, Edmund Rufflin, Robert Rhett, William Yancy, H.R. Reynolds and James Pugh
many of whom were members of Congress. In the middle was the Administration, headed by
the President and his coterie of southern Democratic conservatives. The party of Buchanan
still held the levers of power, especially the federal patronage and control of committee
assignments in Congress as well as the loyalty of the majority of party membership outside
the West. But economic development and class differentiation in the mass of states north of
the Mason-Dixon line were creating social interests that could not be contained in a party
organization dominated by southern concerns.
Designed to enhance western development, a Pacific road subsidy, a rivers and harbors
improvement bill, land "donations" for agricultural colleges, and a homestead measure were
either defeated during the first session (1858) of the 35th Congress by the southern
Democratically-controlled Senate or vetoed by the President. While planter representatives
claimed these measures excessively taxed the South for northern development, their defeats
angered capitalist farmers in the old West who had agitated for the measures and who these
measures were largely designed to appeal to. In the East, protectionist sentiment - largely in
the heavily populated and electorally important state of Pennsylvania - was strong among an
emergent class of industrialists as well as among layers of the mining and manufacturing
proletariat. Tariff measures aimed at protecting these interests were defeated in the last
537In the previous October, the results of the last election (before statehood) to the territorial legislature provided a

flavor of endemic fraud. In Oxford precinct, on the Missouri border south of Kansas City (i.e., along the slaveholder
dominated Missouri River) with not more than one hundred people in the district, 1,628 ballots were cast. Most of
these were for the Democratic candidate. In McGee precinct (located in the very southeastern most section of the
territory), with no more than 50 residents some 1,200 votes, nearly all Democratic, were cast. Ibid, 120-121.

session (1857) of the 34th Congress, and created in the House a shifting anti-Administration
bloc composed of Republicans, anti-Lecompton Democrats and Americans (a Whiggish and
nativist Know-Nothings residue). The Democracy was fracturing along new class lines that
had not existed in the 1830s, the period of its gestation.538
The Democracy in the 1860 Election
The 1860 national canvass and its preparations were the events that effectively destroyed the
northern Democracy as the regional politically organized power in the North. Moreover, the
politics of the party during the Civil War in the context of the dynamics of that war insured that
the Democracy as a whole would be relegated to the status of a "respectable minority" for the
next half century.
In 1860, the Democracy split largely along sectional lines. The party, openly exhibiting the split
over slavery in the territories that had sundered it, held two nominating conventions. The
different factions were more or less adequately represented by their respective Presidential
candidates: From the free soil and anti-black West, Douglas, leader of the northern party and
supported by the nonparty Democratic masses, was nominated; and in a rump convention, the
pro-slavery faction of the southern party, dominated by southern planters with support among
northern state rights conservatives, businessmen East and West whose trade tied them to the
South and party politicians dependent upon Buchanan Administration patronage for their
offices, nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky. Further still, conservative anti-Democratic
forces led by ex-Whig John Crittenden of Kentucky, strong in the border states and among
nativist supporters of the by-now defunct American party and enormously dissatisfied with a
Republican platform that opposed slavery extension in the territories, designated themselves
the Constitutional Union party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee at Baltimore in May. It
was the ensuing division of the democratic vote at the polls that guaranteed Lincoln's triumph
in November.
Following Lincoln's election (4 November 1860) until the bombing of Fort Sumter (12 April
1861), that is, during the secession crisis of winter 1860-1861, northern Democrats and border
state Unionists stood for "unity," i.e., compromise, and committed themselves to non-coercion
of their southern, planter brethren. In public forums of every sort - both Houses of Congress,
state legislatures, an unprecedented number of out-of-season local and state conventions,
campaign pamphlets, spring elections and referenda, public speeches and newspaper
editorials, they called for repeal of personal liberty laws, and for constitutional amendments
securing the secession decision and the Crittenden Amendments. Self-consciously, the party
of compromise or peaceful separation, northern Democrats were intend on preserving planter
property (chattel slavery) and the entire complex of social relations, institutions, practices and
attitudes, North and South, that rested on it.539
The firing on Fort Sumter, however, forced the bulk of the northern Democracy to reevaluate
and change its prescription for resolution of this new stage of the crisis. War had began, and,
among the popular classes in both the North and South a great sigh of relief, then excitement
and finally what can only be described as war fever, were the immediate responses. In the
North, a massive patriotic outpouring wrecked the party's offensive and compelled the
Democracy to adopt a Unionist stance. Matters were further muddled by Republicans: The
latter astutely proposed to their counterparts that partisan politics be shelved for the duration
of the war. "No-partyism" was to take the form of a Unionist party for which both parties made
538For example, the Administration lost control of the position of House Speaker, and with it the committee structure

of the House, in the second session (1859) of the 35th Congress to a coalition of Republicans, Americans and antiLeCompton Democrats, Ibid, 273-276.
539For Democratic party positions during the secession crisis, Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 34-37.

joint nominations and on whose platform they came together with joint electoral tickets. A long
tradition in which Lincoln's government was considered the mere successor of the abolitionist
wing of eastern Whiggery, a tradition in which Republicans came to be identified as "extremist,
fanatical and a partisan threat" to the Union, Constitution and liberty, a tradition that was
embodied in the political culture of the Democracy (and one that Stephen Douglas himself had
in the previous decade gone a long way to elaborate), guaranteed that Democrats would not
submerge their organizations in a Republican-controlled Unionist party. Thus, "no-partyism"
grated on Democratic sensibilities. Witnessing, however, a rising tide of patriotic sentiment
and with Douglas, the party's nominal northern leader advocating a variation of this position,
at least a semblance of a commitment to it was hard to avoid. For Democrats, the problem
with a Unionist umbrella organization was that it would be dominated by the party in power;
and, in this context, Republicans intended to straightjacket the Democracy into unconditional
support for the new Administration. Democrats had to find a way of walking a tightrope of
critical support, viz., support for necessary war measures and opposition to the Whiggish
centralizing tendencies of a Republican government, to the radical impulses of its abolitionist
wing, etc.540
The Democracy's emerging younger leaders of era just closed - Jefferson Davis, Alexander
Stephens, Howell Cobb - took their stands with the South at different moments during the
secession crisis. The party's longtime leadership also disappeared: Stephen Douglas, old and
experiencing broken health at a mere forty-nine, died 3 June 1861; his Democratic counterpart
in the 1860 election, John Breckinridge, abandoned the northern political arena by taking up a
Confederate command in latter half of summer 1861. Thus, having forged new unity after
Lincoln's election, by summer 1861 the Democracy was once again rent by a leadership
crisis, a crisis exacerbated by the further departure of a number of state level leaders of
national stature - committed war Democrats such as Edwin Stanton (PA), Gideon Welles
(MA), and Montgomery Blair (MD). In this context, indecision over "no-partyism" basically
paralyzed the Democracy until summer 1862 (i.e., until cumulative Union army reversals
generated both an early form of war-weariness and fears that the Confederate armies could
not be beaten), after which the Democracy, especially its peace wing, rapidly revived.
Summits of Power within and Class Composition of the Northern Democracy in the Early War
Years
In spring 1861, then, the northern Democracy was in disarray. No longer majoritarian but still a
mass bourgeois party, the Democracy formally brought together politically un-unified, different
social class strata with professional politicians. Many of the professional Democrats politicians
were opportunists - those who, for example, having built their careers on bullionism, led the
assault in the early Reconstruction era (1867-1870) on "hard" money to refurbish a wartarnished reputation and, of course, in opposition to the Republicans both in order to win at
the polls. These opportunist elements were, nonetheless, intertwined with and largely
inseparable from more scrupulous party regulars, and from the party's organic intelligentsia,
the Democratic newspaper editors. (Importantly, it should be added, throughout the period of
disarray, a plethora of local and national newspapers, remained intact largely preventing a
total collapse of the party.)541
540For "no-partyism" and its problems for the northern Democracy, Ibid, 40-49 (citation, 46).
541It was the Copperhead Democrats in particular who were attracted to currency reform as a means of opposing the

party of radicals that had guided the defeat of the South in the war. Among this treacherous perhaps even revanchist
element, as in the South, repudiation of the public, i.e., Union, debt - had it ever reached legislative bodies - would
have been supported. Unger, The Greenback Era, 78-80; 73.

The party had three centers of power in the North. Review each of these social class
components and their representatives.
[Border States]
The first center of party power were border state planters such as those around Lexington,
Kentucky and in eastern Maryland, and those, in particular, who "breed" slaves for sale in the
South. Their power derived from their wealth, the political weight voting their slave
populations gave them, and, as a consequence, from control over offices in their states (their
governorships, militia leaderships, etc.). The impact on Union politics of this Democratic party
power center should not be underestimated. For example, as late as early September 1862,
Lincoln, concerned about holding the border states within the Union, refused to declare
escaped slaves freemen so as not to offend border state planters who he considered
politically decisive for Union integrity. (Similarly, earlier, he rescinded Gen. John C. Fremonts
militarily emancipatory decree of late August 1861 in Missouri, and, again, that of Gen. David
Hunter of May 1862 in South Carolina.) In the 1860 election, these planters had split their
votes and that of their following between the temporizer Douglas and the secessionist
Breckenridge. Only followers of the latter, of course, were to go over to the Confederacy.
Douglas supporters, on the other hand, were split between loyalist and "peace" or
Copperhead Democrats.542
[New York City (I): Mass Base]
The second center of Democratic party power, and politically the most weighty in the national
arena, was the big-city political machines of Chicago, Philadelphia, etc., exemplified by New
York City's Tammany Hall. Both because of their longevity and the fact that they maintained
their social class bases of party power intact throughout the war and well into the future, these
big city party machines are often retrospectively considered the most important center of
northern Democratic party power. New York City was by far the most weighty.
The social class basis of Democratic power stemmed largely from Irish working class support,
especially that of the laborers. This was so much the case that it was true even in the South,
for example, in New Orleans where John T. Monroe's party machine struggled against the
"Customs House" controlled Republican party-federal government crowd, or in Memphis
where the mayor, John Park, the majority of the city council and the bulk of the local police
force were Irish and Irish working class-supported. (Not surprisingly, these three cities with
their volatile combination of mass party demagoguery, ethnically and not class conscious
laborers, and southern sympathies produced the three major Civil War and postwar race riots
in nineteenth century American history.)
Irish immigrants came from peasant backgrounds in which daily life and work were
communally organized. The intensely competitive, highly individualistic, capitalistically
542Slave "breeding" is discussed by Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 43-45, Bentley, History of the Freedmen's

Bureau, 3, and, peripherally, William Freehling The Road to Disunion, 23-24. As a constitutional "right" individuals
planters, it should be recalled, cast a single ballot for 3/5 of "their" slave populations. Because of these actions taken
at the outset of the war, in its aftermath and in the wake of the shattering defeat of the Confederacy, many of the
former (Douglass Unionist) and virtually all of the latter (secessionist) elements of this party stratum had been
discredited. Yet it was not Confederate defeat but the outright and absolute refusal of border state planters to consider
Lincoln's proposal for a gradual, compensated emancipation (in spring and, again, summer 1862) that doomed the
planter stratum to social, and following the lost of social power to, political oblivion. Though planters in Kentucky, in
particular, fought a rearguard action, Congressional passage (31 January 1865) of the 13th Amendment and its final
ratification by the state legislature eight months later, enforced by Union army bayonets, forever doomed these
slaveholders as a social class. By 1865 the border states and their leading political elements had disappeared in
considerations of the balance of power within the northern Democracy as well as in the calculus of sectional issues of
the North.

organized new world, on the other hand, found these immigrants defending themselves by
creating and then shrinking back inside ethnic enclaves. Work was long and arduous but
irregularly and inconsistently available. Under these conditions, husband, wife and children all
worked; and, under these conditions, ethnic codes governing access to the labor market were
strictly enforced. Jobs, and the prospects for securing them, were, accordingly, fiercely
defended. Within a shared context of ethnicity, family relations (fathers, brothers and cousins)
defined the mediatory relations through which work was secured. Faced with a constant,
ethnically-based discrimination, emancipation implying free black labor came, as Democratic
party politicians tirelessly drummed home, to immigrant consciousness as a singular threat of
job loss from even cheaper labor: As a freeman, the Negro meant job competition and
threatened the fragile foothold of immigrants in America. The Democracy secured the political
allegiance of immigrants by opposing nativists, regularly housed inside Whig and later
Republican parties, by building their city machine organizations among immigrants through
overlaying their ethnic self-organization with party organization and encouraging immigrants to
integrate into those organizations, and by providing a practical perspective, one defining
friends and foes, on life in America.543
Opposition to the Lincoln Administration - especially after mid-July 1862, and later resistance
to the draft, was particularly acute in New York City - home to the paradigmatic Democratic
543For race riot in New York City, Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Become

White, 88-89, 121 ; in Memphis, George Rable, But There was No Peace, 33-42, esp. 35, and in New Orleans, Ibid.,
43-58; for family mediated work, Bernstein, Ibid, 121.
Common laborers were immigrants. In the three port cities of Boston, New York and New Orleans, Irishmen
dominated the piers of Boston and New York, and Germans and Irish worked the docks of New Orleans (Shugg,
Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana, 90-91). Oftentimes an ethnically native middleman arranged the passage to
America and helped the newly arrived immigrant find work in, say, construction. Among the Italians of New York and
Syracuse (albeit at a later date), for example, a pardoni mediated the relations of work to the same immigrants, that
is, provided low waged workers to contractors, organizing a crew and escorting it to the jobsite (David Montgomery,
The Fall of the House of Labor, 76-77). Lacking industrially or artisan formed skill and knowledge, these men were
not, unlike the female factory operatives in the textile industry, subject to what Marx called the "real subsumption of
labor by capital": Common laborers were not, unlike factory operatives, fully proletarianized. Both were the working
class strata least capable of self-definition, that is, of raising themselves to a class-based awareness and acting to reform or trans-form their immediate surrounding worlds. Originally rooted in pre-industrial, peasant backgrounds in
which work was communally organized, immigrants defended themselves against the ravages of capital by viscerally
lashing out at whoever could be defined as a threat. The Democratic party machines provided most of the definition.
Everyday awareness, as family-grounded, did not explicitly rise to a "worldly" consciousness: It remained communitybased rooted in tightly-knit ethnic subcultures. Firmly grounded in these merchant capitalist and pre-industrial
enclaves, the non-class-related, pre-capitalist nature of consciousness was preserved largely by the un-rationalized
character of work and social relations. When the ethnic perimeters of the consciousness of class extended beyond kin
and community, it occurred only in work where, ironically, work-based immediate consciousness of immigrant laborers
assimilated politicians and merchants to its community: In New York City, Irish longshoremen were intensely loyal to
Tammany Hall Democrats and considered employing merchants part of an ideal community of labor and capital that
excluded, from the side of labor, all non-ethnically Irish. Outside work, when awareness transcended community
bounds, consciousness was most often based on race. Action by immigrant, common laborers was rarely class
action; rather it was race riot, as the New York draft riots unambiguously demonstrated (Montgomery, Ibid, 77-78, and
Bernstein, Ibid, 117-119, 121-123).
The practical outcome of racist, ethnic worker consciousness is visible even in the most "advanced" situations: In
1864, recently enfranchised on the bayonets of the occupying Union army, "organized" labor (our term) of New
Orleans, made up of German and Irish immigrants, elected Michael Hahn as governor and briefly put the Free Soil
party in power in those areas (along the Mississippi and in New Orleans) of Louisiana held by the Northern army
(Shugg, Ibid, 199-200).
At a constitutional convention in the same year, the revolutionary and racist platform of this party and the convention
(Ibid, 198-199) was revealed: The white proletarian delegates opposed black suffrage without debate, introduced a
wage minimum, and disenfranchised planters refusing them compensation for expropriated lands (Ibid, 200-201, 203204). The Free Soil regime under Hahn on the back of the New Orleans white proletariat amounted to a revolutionary
dictatorship of the city over the countryside, ultimately resting on the armed force of the Union occupation. It was
quickly ended after President Johnson began to implement his pardons-based restoration policy in June 1865.

party machine of the Civil War era. This resistance was mediately related to the dominant
Democratic presence in the City, which itself was shaped by the conservativism of both its
huge laboring classes working the docks of the largest port in America, and of its cotton
exporting merchants (and related banking interests). In 1863, New York City was, after all, the
center of U.S. financial capital and the nation's most advanced industrial manufacturing center
as well. In the 1860s, the Democratic party machine controlled patronage positions within the
city and its commissions (fire, police, health "departments," etc.). It exercised considerable
control over the tempo of economic development in the City through the control over the Port
and, (in the past when a Democratic held national power) through control of the federal
Customs House patronage, through its ability to get ordinances and city laws legislated in the
City Council, and through its programs of improving docks, wharves, piers in the harbor area,
its promotion and funding of paving and road improvement, its promotion of a mass transit
program, etc.
[New York City (II): Ruling Class Components]
The bulk of the substantial Democratic party ruling class support came from the social group
known as the "Belmont Circle." In it, the most important groups were the largest and richest
merchants, wealthy investment bankers, railroad speculators and railroad lawyers who had
much the same look as a similar, important stratum of the Republican party and who, as
arriviste having relocated to the City in 1830s and 1840s, were New York's "new rich." They
remade their money (i.e., became extraordinarily wealthy) in the mass marketing of railroad
securities, and in Wall Street money markets of the 1850s that were actually a product of that
marketing. These men were comfortable with a Jacksonian mass party of "working" men,
regularly involved in the party's operations, and were often the "captains and lieutenants" of
the Democracy itself.544
In this circle, especially among men such as August Belmont (who would, by 1863, become
national chairman of the Democracy), the ideological commitment to the South was the
strongest. The vision elaborated by men such as Belmont was reactionary, rooted in the
entirety of this merchant-financier experience beginning with its largely rural origins. In this
vision, New York City constituted the financial entrepot mediating transactions between its
own rural hinterlands (primarily the West and the South, but hopefully Mexico, the Caribbean
and beyond) and the industrial center of Britain, skimming in this practice the surpluses
pumped out of tenant farmers and slaves (and therewith furthering the City's and its elite's
wealth, power and standing). In this context, the money markets constructed out of the
railroad security trade of the fifties were central, as were the rails themselves - since they
brought those products of the agricultural hinterlands "to market."545
But the New York Democracy itself was not homogeneous: It had, if you will, an inside and an
outside. The party machine was dominated from the inside by Tammany Hall politicians in
alliance with real estate developers and their organized associations, building and
544With perhaps the splendor of fourteenth century Florence in mind (see the author's The History of Florence and

the Florentine Republic), Robert Albion (The Rise of New York Port, 251-259) refers to the wealthiest traders, whose
emergence he dates from 1849-1855 (Ibid, 259), as "merchant princes."
545Bernstein (Ibid, 133) refers to the "prospects of a free trade empire with New York City as it commercial entrept
and exchange, the American South and West as its agrarian heartland, and Great Britain as it industrial center, and
mainland Europe, South America and the Asian Pacific Rim as its periphery..."
This vision was, in historical context, reactionary because it countenanced, nay, presupposed disguised
proletarianization and slavery as a revolutionary assault was being mounted at least against the latter. In this sense,
the vision reveals its merchant origins as there is nothing about world transformation, i.e., the incessant change in
production, that industrial capitals would shortly usher in. The vision was, and here we refer back to the men who
created it, merely that of country merchants projected onto the plane of a continent. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian
thought would, indeed, be, as it was, congenial to them.

construction contractors and the aforementioned large property owners. This was the
nationalist group was gave grudging support to the Lincoln Administration's war effort. But the
party also had an "outside," that is, the "Mozart Hall" group, led by ex-mayor Fernando Wood
and his brother Benjamin - editor and owner (with Fernando) of the New York News, that also
had solid support among the party's working class base and among those layers of the city's
financial community specifically tied to the southern Democracy. The differences between the
two groups were real, not just one of being in and out of power. (Wood, while a
Representative in the 37th and 39th Congresses, would, in fact, never regain the mayor's
office). The Tammany Hall political machinery grasped the nuances of the Irish laborers'
awareness, at once anti-war, anti-black and chauvinist. Tammany Hall, as nationalist, was not
tainted by southern support. The Mozart Hall group, appealing to discontented workers, was
peace Democratic and pro-southern. The Woods' financial supporters were to be found
among a small, highly concentrated stratum of the Whig descendant, old elite, a stratum of the
financial and export community that had based itself exclusively on its ties to the marketing of
cotton. To the end, Woods' group was at the core of Copperhead activity in the New York
Democracy.
In 1860s, because of Union naval blockades, New York City lost cotton sales that had
originated in New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah.546 More broadly, in the Northeast,
similar losses were felt by shoemakers in Massachusetts, harness-makers and carriagemakers of Connecticut, New Jersey stove makers, and especially Massachusetts and Rhode
Island textile magnates. At the outset of the war, the concentrated financial-export stratum of
New York City and the more dispersed apparel and "durables" manufacturers of New England
formed the basis of southern-sympathizing calls for compromise (1860-1861). But after the
bombing of Fort Sumter, and as a Union military-led war contracts-created boom unfolded, all
but those strata directly related to raw material use, financing, and marketing of southern
cotton suddenly became nationalistic. From autumn 1862 onward, that is, following Lincoln's
announcement (22 September 1862) he would issue his Emancipation decree, the Belmont
Circle based component of the New York Democracy again turned Copperhead. It, like much
of the Democracy in the East outside Tammany Hall, screamed for negotiations and peace
(with or without return of the southern states to the Union). Among large layers of the eastern
Copperhead movement, this shift in position was ideationally rooted in white supremacist
racism, and materially in the decline of the economically-based social power of the textile and
financial-export strata.547
546It is important to be clear on this: The blockades were not designed to prevent the sale of cotton, but rather to

prevent the proceeds from those sales from being returned to the Confederate Treasury. In point of fact, in southern
territories under Grant's control (autumn 1862 onward), and even earlier those under, first, Butler's then Banks' control
(New Orleans and environs), blacks were encouraged to produce cotton (and rice). Cotton and rice sales were made,
but were made under auspices of the Union armies and the United States Treasury. The proceeds went back into that
Treasury to help fund the war effort.
The only effort to disrupt cotton sales was made by the Confederate government. In Louisiana, for example, in
autumn 1862, taking his direction from Jefferson Davis, Gov. Moore encouraged planters to burn their cotton in order
to prevent it from falling into the hands of Union armies, and, more specifically, from being sold abroad. The rebel
hope was that European nations (France, Prussia and England), if deprived of cotton for their manufacturers, would
be drawn into the war, insisting on a prompt negotiated settlement in order to get their textile productions going again.
On the other hand, Confederate blockade runners did transport cotton southward (especially to Cuba) where
proceeds from sales were used to purchase weapons and ammunitions. See Benjamin Butler, Butler Book, 430-431.
547For racism, see Bernstein, Ibid, 142-144, 146-147.
The Belmont Circle, by war's end in the nationalist mainstream, stood opposed to the Union League Club, a Lincoln
Administration-inspired, extreme patriotic, wartime organization led by the emerging industrialists-dominated City and
state Republican party. (In fact, the real core of Union League support was suburban industrialists.)
In an attempt to revive great family fortunes in opposition to the arrivistes, the old, "nativist" aristocracy attached itself
to the industrialists' Union League Club. As a stratum, it consisted in the non-cotton related, old merchant elite - Whig

Among all ruling class social groups in the Northeast opposed to the war, a minimum
consensus was formed around a desire to quickly end the war regardless of the outcome. The
consensus was due to the enormous expense incurred in the wars prosecution, 548 and the
financial burden that expense entailed (including the possibility of a future failure, should those
expenses continue to rise, of the United States Government to meet its obligations to large
Eastern bondholders).
[The Rural North. Butternut Belts and the Northern Democracy]
The third center of northern Democracy power was to be found in those rural areas of the
North outside the Yankee corridor in the Northeast but more significantly in the old Northwest.
In the Northeast, Democratic party politicians articulated in broad terms the concerns of an
immigrant, largely Irish, population of laborers employed in the anthracite coal fields of eastern
Pennsylvania. Born and socialized into an rural, precapitalist, peasant culture, having fled this
miserable famine-ridden formation, now ethnically oppressed and superexploited as mining
labor, while possessed of an understanding of the course of contemporary society mediated
by the social categories of Jacksonian ideology, by fall 1862 these workers had become warweary and fearful of their very good prospects for military service. The enactment of a
conscription law would find them violently and riotously responding.
At home, and, of course, most numerous, in the old Northwest, professional politicians were
Jacksonian, highly attuned to doctrinal nuances but out of step with the times. Prior to the realignment that began to unfold in the mid-1850s, these politicians (and with them, a layer of
agrarian Jeffersonian intellectuals) had provided the Democracy with its ideological
perspectives, lauding the agricultural "producer" as the moral core of society, opposing
centralization of national power, monopoly such as a national banking system, and internal
improvements all in the name of state rights.
In the West, southern sentiment was to found in nearly any rural areas where rapid economic
development had by-passed farmers. Concentrations of Confederate sympathizers were to be
found among poor farming communities in the rural country of southern Indiana and the
southern Illinois counties ("Egypt") along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The less rich soils of
this region, unsuited for the acquisitive, ambitious Yankee farmer who migrated westward from
the Northeast between 1840 and 1860, were originally settled (between 1800 and 1830) by
southern yeomen, anti-black and anti-planter, hailing from the western Virginia, and eastern
portions of Kentucky and Tennessee. Thus, this region was tied to the South by relations of
kin. Reinforcing and underpinning these relations were those of commerce: Economically and
geographically, this region was linked to the upper South through the riverboat traffic that
carried regional agricultural surpluses southward. (The further south commerce moved, the
less economic integration there was. That integration did, though, exist all that way down to
New Orleans.) But this traffic was cut as long as the Confederacy controlled Vicksburg and
areas south, especially the Natchez region. Until Grant took Vicksburg in a siege that ended in
families that had made their money in importing and exporting prior to the emergence of the City as the nation's
leading port, and prior to the development of mass politics and mass political parties, in an era when America was
strictly a commercial republic exchanging its agricultural raw materials for European manufactured goods. Old
aristocratic, Whiggish Union Leaguers were fearful of rapid economic expansion, that is of the social class conflicts
inherent in the latter, and advocated an activist State and mediatory institutions (such as the League itself) to canalize
this conflicts, and to reign in unchecked economic development.
Of course, Union Leaguers generally and industrialists particularly, members of the party of Lincoln, were highly
nationalistic. (They even organized a black, New York regiment after the July 1863 draft riots which was paraded
through the City the following year). Bernstein, Ibid, 206-208; 197; 222; 128-129; 126, 130; 131 (for Union League
fears).For New England manufacturers initially opposed to war and favoring compromise, Wood Gray, The Hidden
Civil War, 212-217.
548Butler's Book, 576.

surrender on 4 July 1863, the blockage of commerce down the Mississippi exacerbated
hostility felt by farmers of the "Butternut" belts toward the national government (as well as that
toward Republican gubernatorially-controlled western state governments), and intensified their
Confederate sympathizing sentiments.549
Another western center of southern sympathy was the "Butternut" belt in central Ohio,
historically a rural farming focus of support for the Democracy. The farmers of this region were
more akin to anthracite miners in that they, opposed to free blacks in the North as well as to
social relations of slavery, were nonetheless strongly Unionist. Their opposition to the war
would, like Irish miners, grow out a sense of war-weariness and the personal fear of
conscription that would place them on battlefields of mass death. In this light, explication of
the term "butternut" is revealing: It was a pejorative, northern designation for a rebel soldier,
especially one wearing brown homespun overalls, originally referring to anyone, especially
poor farmers, so clothed. Used by Yankees to signify other northerners, it was a class-derisive
term, indicating poorer rural producers, self-sufficient farmers with small(er) parcels of lands
(than the prosperous Republican businessman-farmer), who were less rather than more
integrated into the market, historically supporters of Andrew Jackson, violently opposed both
to the freeing of slaves and to implantation of slavery in the free states, and suspicious of
centralized, national power.
In this sense, significant numbers among farmers south of central Ohio (hailing from the
western Ohio Valley) were not just true Butternuts," but also characteristically Copperhead:
Not merely southern sympathizers, these poorer farmers actively supported the Confederacy,
opposing Union recruitment of soldiers (individually hiding from recruiters and, in some
instances, collectively rioting against the draft and murdering provost marshals), and giving
verbal allegiance to, oftentimes lightly participating in, primitively organized, numerically
insignificant and politically ineffective Copperhead secret societies.550
Organization of the Peace Democracy in Response to the Military Crisis of the Union (I)
[Party Leadership]
Bearing in mind its social class composition, the revival of the northern Democracy can be
traced out. After its near collapse in 1860, coalescence during the secession crisis and
disarray set off by the onset of war during spring 1861, a date can be conveniently affixed to
the first beginnings of this revival, to wit, Lincoln's September 1861 countermand of Fremonts
order freeing slaves in Missouri. This is a shorthand way of stating that Lincoln's pursuit of a
border states policy and highly restricted war aims allowed Democrats to reconstitute
themselves as a second summit of power inside the informal party of property in Congress.
Democratic Congressional members, in turn, consciously lent public authority to the activity of
northern Democratic party machine in the large northern cities and rural party politicians in the
Butternut belts. They thereby sanctioned and legitimized that activity outside Congress,
which, dialectically, assisted them in reconstituting themselves as that second summit.
The departure of the old party leadership, either by death or as rebels, allowed younger men,
particularly from the middle West, to emerge. First among these was Clement Laird
Vallandigham, a Congressman from central Ohio first elected in 1856 and re-elected in 1858
and 1860, national chair for the Douglas campaign of the same year, dogmatically Jacksonian
but articulate, outspokenly critical of Lincoln's government and consistent peace Democrat. In
the 37th Congress in which three-quarters of the Democrats were first time representatives,
549For commercial ties of the "Butternut" belt with the South, Gray, Ibid, 116-117.
550For the geological-climatic and geographical basis of southern settlement in the Ohio Valley, Ibid, 15-17. We refer

to the poor farming, southern or Confederate sympathetic, geographical regions as generically Butternut, and those
who actively engaged in subversion as Copperhead.

Vallandigham's longevity gave him a real advantage among them; and, though in a small
minority in his own party, the solidity and intransigence of his position allowed him to function
within a de-centered organization as a pole of attraction around which all those without equally
firm principles - the unsure, the wavering, the habitually reticent, the intimidated and those
simply biding their time - could rally. Attempting to capitalize on the space Lincoln's border
state policy afforded, Vallandigham among others organized several meetings that were held
in late 1861-early 1862 among Congressional Democrats. Still other meetings were
undertaken to bring border state Unionists, non-Republican former Whigs and Democrats
together. The highpoint of these meetings, one signaling emergence of a unified proto-peace
faction among Congressional Democrats, was a March 1862 gathering of representatives in
Washington. Written for and distributed among the party faithful, the meeting produced a
manifesto, issued 8 May and entitled "Address to the Democracy of the United States," that
pointed out the actual Republican-driven purpose of "no-partyism" and harangued the
Lincoln's government for dismantling the Union.551
[Popular Classes. An Overview]
The March 1862 meeting catalyzed interest in revitalizing partisan organization. But it did little
if anything to excite the nonparty Democratic masses. Their arousal had different roots: From
early 1861 into spring 1862 an economic recession, grounded in the cutoff of Mississippi
Valley trade with the South, had descended on the old West. Agricultural produce prices fell
sharply, and the entire rural economy of the Butternut belts with its range of economic
agents - farmers, small town merchants, and bankers - began to totter. Farmers of the Ohio
Valley and those further inland, farmers whose surpluses were shipped down rivers that fed
into the Ohio and the Mississippi, blamed the Republican Administration for the downturn.
Since the infamous rout of Union forces in Virginia at the first battle of Bull Run in mid-July
1861, a sense of uncertainty had come to grip the popular classes of the West. Spring 1862
elections in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, in Chicago and in small cities and towns saw
numerous Democratic victories among mayors, councilmen, and other elected offices. The
downturn, taken together with an unfolding series of more or less calamitous Union army
defeats, had, before summer, begun pushing poorer western farmers and laborers in big
eastern cities toward the peace Democracy. Perhaps most imprortant in this, the latter regard,
in early April 1862, fighting at Shiloh on the Tennessee iver, the first really bloody battle in the
war, resulted in enormous losses on both sides. On the heels of Shiloh, McClellans failed
Peninsula Campaign (May to early July) not only illuminated the real, savage character and
murderous costs of modern warfare all occurring as a matter of course, but put all the
attendant anxieties flowing from this revelation on the front pages of local and national,
bourgeois dailies. The decisive Union defeat at the Second Bull Run in late August was an
unmitigated disaster: By then, if not before, young men, their wives and sweethearts members of the popular classes - were no longer merely wary of, but terrified by, the massive
casualties warring was imposing on both sides, especially that of the Union. The North was
now rift with questions concerning the ability of Union forces to win the war.
From this time forward until the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg (both in early
July 1863), and again in summer 1864, the cumulative effect of Union military reversals
provoked contradictory responses: In the North, those who governed at the summit of national
power and those on the ground who, not having volunteered in the first place, were most likely
to fight (particularly civilians behind friendly lines in the West), pursued opposed courses of
action. These mutually contravening courses of action actually reinforced one another, thereby
551For Vallandigham's role in the early efforts to revive the Democracy, Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 53-55, and,

also, Gray, Ibid, 93.

opening a chasm between Lincoln, his Administration and the Republican party, on the one
side, and especially Irish laborers and the farmers of the Butternut belts in the West. Into this
chasm poured all the emotionally laden and ideally-culturally sensitive grievances that
separated the latter from the former in the first place - the perceived injury to whites' only
egalitarianism, suspicions about centralized national power, anger over eastern monopolistic
control of transportation and money, the superexploitation of ethnic labor, etc., grievances
compounded by the fear of fighting, i.e., of dying a meaningless, likely slow and horribly
painful death alone and far from home.
Organization of the Peace Democracy in Response to the Military Crisis of the Union (II)
On 15 April 1861, Lincoln called on the predominately Republican state governors to provide
75,000 men for defense of the Union. In late July, he called for a half a million more men. The
first smaller group was to be made up three month state militia volunteers, distinct from the
approximately 20,000 men in the regular, national army at the outset of the war. The second
massive call was, however, for three-year volunteers. Quotas were assigned to states by
Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, proportionately on the basis of Congressionally
represented populations. In the first patriotic flush of war, volunteers actually poured in. The
governors insisted, because of the numbers of early volunteers, in providing more regiments
than assigned. After all, the appointment of regimental commanders was a function of
gubernatorial patronage powers, and a good number of wealthy men and well-known northern
politicians sought to enhance their reputations and prestige by raising a regiment. These
volunteers carried the national government into the summer of the new year.
Already by mid-spring of 1862 though, Lincoln, pressured by party radicals, bourgeois opinion
embodied in the great urban dailies and by his own sense of the impatience governing the
national mood, had brought subtle but intense pressure to bear on McClellan to begin his
campaign aimed at capturing Richmond. Misled by Allan Pinkerton's reports of Confederate
strength in northern Virginia (false information which his agents were constantly fed by
dissembling rebel sources), McClellan, in turn, incessantly demanded more troops.552
At roughly the same time reports, slow to filter into Washington and to appear in the
newspapers, about the battle of Shiloh (5-6 April 1862) in the West began to surface. The
Union Army of Tennessee had suffered horrible casualties, 13,047 wounded and dead by
official figures. With a view to these pressures and casualties, Lincoln began to think a
massive infusion of soldiery into the Union armies might provide such an enormous numerical
advantage over Confederate forces on the field of battle that an early close to the war could
be brought about. Thus, on 1 July 1862, he requested 300,000 more men from the governors.
Again this call was for three-year volunteers.
By mid-summer, anxiety had taken some hold among the northern popular classes. The
governors clearly recognized an increasing immunity to patriotic appeals for enlistees. Such
resistance had occurred against a double, military background: First there were the
tremendous losses at Shiloh. Second, there was the early July retreat of the Army of the
Potomac before Richmond to Harrison's Landing on the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula.
The latter events, known collectively as the Seven Days, were popularly understood as a
massive Union army failure. (This was unknown to the soldiers who fought and who felt they
had fought well). Taken together they produced two disheartening insights. On the one hand,
the mass of northern farmers and workers formed an undeveloped insight into the new type of
mass warfare that was unfolding and the destruction it unleashed. Such apprehension
provided an intuition of the fateful, murderous consequence of incompetence or negligence
552McClellan deepened his dependency on Pinkerton's grossly inflated figures by failing to order cavalry

reconnaissance of Confederate troop concentrations.

among commanding officers. On the other hand, these events, particularly the Seven Days,
raised the first doubts about the ability of Union armies to defeat their Confederate
counterparts. From Lincoln's standpoint, one upshot was that enlistments increasingly began
to flag.
Among laborers in the North, blacks were blamed for the pressure the national government
was bringing to bear on its recruit-eligible citizenry: In Toledo, Ohio, in July there was a race
riot. Undeterred, on 4 August, Lincoln ordered a militia draft of another 300,000 men to take
place in fifteen days. Apathy, already having passed over into active opposition, turned into
open resistance: In Wisconsin, the first draft riot occurred shortly thereafter. Draft riots, though
not actually occurring, appeared imminent in Pennsylvania. Governors protested the
President's seemingly incessant appetite for soldiers. The cumulative result was that Edwin
Stanton (Secretary of War since the beginning of the year) ordered a one month
postponement. The month came and went. The draft was put off eventually under pressure of
popular resistance. In the event, it was postponed indefinitely. Having already successfully
encouraged Lincoln and the War Department to provide a bounty for new enlistees, the
governors were not without alternatives: Among them, Andrews (MA), Yates (IL), Kirkwood
(IA), Salomon (WI) and Sprague (RI) - all (with the exception of Sprague) Republicans and to
one degree or another radicals, called on Lincoln to authorize the use of blacks as troops in
the Union armies. Lincoln, outwardly appearing to resist the suggestion, unbeknownst to
anyone except his Cabinet officers, had made up his mind to issue a preliminary emancipation
decree one result of which would, hopefully, be an influx into the armies of black volunteers.553
Democratic party politicians had had their ears to the ground: By mid-summer (1862), they
had grasped that a subterranean resistance, perhaps only recognized by Republicans as a
precipitous fall off in enlistments, was developing to the war. By and large these politicians did
everything they could to heighten the fear and to intensify the animosity of their popular social
class base toward Lincoln's government and his party. Lincoln, on the other hand, was
compelled to alter his limited war aims policy. First, there was the force of events (mounting
war losses, the growing resistance to enlistment and the fear that the European powers'
cynicism toward the perceived moral bankruptcy of the Union cause would culminate in
recognition of the South); second, there was the problem of all those Negroes who, in fleeing
"their" plantations not only in the South but especially in the border states, were upsetting
Lincoln's commitment to status quo antebellum property arrangements; and, third, there was
553For the relation of the Republican governors to the problems of raising troops after Shiloh, William Hesseltine,

Lincoln and the War Governors, 192-203; for the race riot in Toledo, Gray, The Hidden Civil War, 99-100. Volunteer
call-ups are charted below:
Date
15 Apr 1861
3 May 1861
22/25 Jul 1861
May/Jun 1862
2 Jul 1862
4 Aug 1862
15 Jun 1863
17 Oct 1863
1 Feb 1864
13 Mar 1864
23 Apr 1864
18 Jul 1864
19 Dec 1864
Totals

Presidential call
75,000
3 months
82,748
500,000
3 years
15,007
300,000
3 years
300,000
9 months
100,000
6 months
300,000
2 years
200,000
2 years
200,000
3 years
85,000 100 days
500,000
1,2,3 years
300,000
1,2,3 years
2,942,748

Figures given in Kiefer, History of the Hundred and Fifty-third, 7.

Response
93,326
714,231
431,958
87,588
16,361
374,807
284,021
83,652
384,882
204,568
2,690,401

the opportunity presented by the same slave movement: Acknowledging the crucial role of
blacks in the balance (manpower either providing the Confederacy with labor for fortifications
construction and crop production or deprivation of this labor and labor and troops for Union
armies), on 22 September 1862, Lincoln, against his own best judgment, preliminarily
announced a shift in war policy along the lines of military emancipation.
Spirits within the Democratic party, though angered by the decree, soared. Going into the fall
elections, party politicians held county and state conventions as well as local mass meetings
in order to tap into rising resentment and fear of Lincoln's war policy. Together with Democratic
newspaper editorials, they assumed the mass of voters among the popular classes were
conservative socially and economically. Accordingly, taking for granted the fidelity of their own
(in historical terms) considerably narrowed base of support, they were guided by a strategy of
detaching the bulk of the nonparty Republican masses from the radicals: There was still real
confidence that the party could reconstitute its pre-1854 social class alliance. Democrats
offered a politico-theoretically simplified, summary and emotionally charged reduction of their
party platform. Their presentations inseparably contained typical campaign rhetoric,
demagoguery and expression of real Democratic conviction. They argued for a concept of the
Union based on a restricted constitutionalism; they made acrimonious accusations of a
"puritan-inspired social revolution"; and, among western Copperheads, they blamed
Republicans for promoting a sectional antagonism (between New England and the West) that
would ruin the commerce and agriculture of the West. Asserting the Republican leadership
was conducting the war for strictly partisan purposes, they defined the tasks of moment as
ending graft and fraud in the issuance of military contracts as well as the exorbitant profits of
war contractors, and stopping the allegedly radical-inspired surge of arbitrary arrests in noncombat zones behind the lines and sectors of battle. These outcomes were the product, so it
was maintained, of a frenzied effort to destroy the South (i.e., win the war). To pay for the
inflated costs of the war, Democrats accused the Lincoln government of creating a "fiat"
currency: That currency, while benefiting only speculators, raised the cost of living for workers,
lowered the value of fixed investments of producers, and, among western Democrats it was
asserted, would lead to national bankruptcy and ruin the economy of the West. The same
layer of the party argued Republican tariffs and taxes, ostensibly legislated to pay for the
inflated costs of the war, bled the West to the profit of New England manufacturers and
capitalists.554
Another "cost" of the war was emancipation, and central to Democratic canvass efforts were
variations of an argument against emancipation. Call it, if you will, an appeal to racism in the
Jacksonian producer's style. Democrats suggested a triumphant Republican party would
encourage a millions-strong flood of blacks northward, a mass migration the result of which
would find white men underbid in the labor market thereby creating enormous job competition
and placing massive downward pressure on wages. With their standard of living forced down,
and compelled to associate with blacks socially, whites - both urban laborers, poor farmers
and tenants who supplemented their income by wage labor - would be humiliated, shamed, or,
in the language of the day, "degraded." Further fears were raised in the specifically rural areas
of the Ohio Valley interior by recalling that it was from the plantation system of slavery that
many sons of southern yeomen had fled: An aspiring, determined wealthy farmer might
employ ex-slaves (used to "working for nothing") to reproduce depressed-wage, plantation554For the fall off in volunteers and the shortcoming of recruitment drives, note the chart reproduced in fn. 18, above,

and Alan Nevins, The War for the Union, II, 163-164; on the Democratic party line in fall 1862, Silbey, A Respectable
Minority, 72-73, Gray, Ibid, 105-106, Hesseltine Ibid, 238, and 273-274 for the unexaggerated, legitimate nature of
some of the Democratic party criticisms; for War Department incompetency and corruption under Simon Cameron,
Ibid, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175-176, 178, 192.

style agriculture in the region. "Butternut" belt farmers would be driven off their land unable to
compete with such cheaply produced surpluses. Party stumpers decried abolitionist attempts
to destroy a "white man's government," and they accused Republicans of attempting to lift
blacks to a position of equality with whites (as demonstrated by the recruitment of black
troops). Democratic newspapers never missed an opportunity to relate in lurid detail fantasies
of alleged rapes of white women by black men. Suggesting another deep-seated unconscious
fantasy, they railed against black bestiality, Negro "vicious[ness]," declared blacks "indolent
and improvident," and claimed black "stupidity" "violated the law of races [and] ... the law of
nations." Emphasizing their own patriotism and striking an otherwise moderate pose,
Democrats called for an end to the military emancipatory policy and contrasted their position
of legal punishment for Confederate leaders to "black" (i.e., radical, abolitionist) Republicans
whom they characterized in terms of wholesale, vengeful confiscation of the property of the
South. This vengeful and fanatical, in a word, Puritan, policy was the concomitant and other
side of a hidden Republican agenda. A war that consumed blood and treasure, that bled a
people dry by taxes and bled their sons to death on the fields of battle, led to emotional and
moral exhaustion. At the end of the war only a military machine would stand. The genius of the
American people would be dissipated in war and they would be ripe for a military
despotism.555
The 1862 Elections: The First Round.
The results of the elections testified to the depth of anxiety, fear and weariness the war had
engendered. Horatio Seymour, a moderate Democratic was elected governor of the electorally
most important state, New York; legislatures in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New York, New Jersey
and Pennsylvania went Democratic; and, the Republican party lost thirty-five Congressional
seats. Lincoln, and the Republican party, held onto a slender majority in the House (while
retaining their large majority in the Senate), first, because the popular classes in states with
strong Republican parties such as Michigan, and particularly those that had a history of mass
abolitionist sentiment (the New England states, especially Massachusetts and Vermont), had
voted (in September prior to Lincoln's decree) with smaller majorities for party representatives,
and, second, because the Republican party was able to hold onto border states.
The latter outcome had absolutely nothing to do with Lincoln's limited war aims policy (which
had, at any rate, been discarded in favor of military emancipation in September). To the
contrary, the border states of Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky (and also Tennessee under
military governor Andrew Johnson) were all held on the tips of bayonets: Stanton, with
Lincoln's knowledge and approval, had ordered Union army troops as well as provost
marshals stationed at the polls. It should be remembered that in the era of the Civil War and
Reconstruction, a voter did not place his ballot in a closed container, the ballot box, but either
verbally or otherwise made his selection openly in front of others. Intimidation was easy, and
the troops practiced it. In certain locals, particularly in border states where repression was
often most severe, those carrying Democratic ballots were not admitted to the polling places
and soldiers let civilians know that the wrong ballot might bring harmful consequences.
(Different parties had recognizably different ballots since the parties themselves often
prepared those ballots.) Democratic votes were harassed with delays, test oaths, deprived of
ballot, or sometimes forced to cast Republican ballots. Since the summer arbitrary arrests 555For "racism in the Jacksonian producer's style" (our term), Gray, Ibid, 91, 98-99, and Silbey, Ibid, 72, 81 (citations).

Counterposed to the ideologized, old elitist Whig fear of mass politics a la Andrew Jackson (see "Doctrine and its
Absence among Officers of the Army of the Potomac" especially at and inclusive of notes 61, 62, and 64, above), the
assertion that the wars aftermath would bring on a military despotism was the fully ideological Democratic version of
the classically republican fear of tyranny.

arrests without warrants or charges being brought and imprisonment without trial - had been
and continued to be widespread: Democratic politicians were picked up and held without
charges as were known Democratic party regulars.556
In light of the outcome of the fall 1862 elections, the results of the repression were uneven:
While it clearly provided the margin of continued Republican Congressional control, it did
nothing to stop the emerging mass resistance to the war, particularly in the West.
On the one side, unless the northern Democratic party was willing to lead a full scale assault
on the State itself, arbitrary arrests, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and indefinite
imprisonment were effective: Regardless of the margin, Republicans had control of the
Congress (and, of course, the Executive). As long as Republicans held the Congress, and as
long as Union armies did not undergo demoralization, Lincoln could conduct the war pretty
much as he saw fit. For, clearly, to be and to remain a Republican in 1862-1863 (and, even
among party conservatives, there were no defections) meant to support Presidential conduct
of the war, including necessarily the military emancipation policy. And though continuing
reversals on eastern battlefields made it hard to see, that emancipation policy was becoming
more effective. It deprived the South of slave labor, and it vastly enlarged the Union fighting
force (as new black regiments were created, and as black teamsters, cooks, laborers, etc.,
allowed other troops to engage strictly in fighting) while Confederate armies experienced both
attrition of forces due to battle casualties and mounting poor white (draft) resistance to fighting
a "rich man's war." Thus, as the policy unfolded, both Lincoln's, and by and large his party's,
commitment to military emancipation actually deepened. Opposition to this policy, then,
increasingly became opposition to conduct of the war, and the practical, confiscatory
consequences of that policy. That is, on the basis of the fall 1862 Democratic election
victories, there was increasingly no middle ground that Democrats could find: Either support in
the name of Unionism, no matter how unwillingly and grudgingly, Lincoln's government in its
conduct of the war; or, openly contest the Administration in the name of the "Constitution as it
is, and the Union as it was," i.e., in opposition to arbitrary arrests, military emancipation and
the dismantling of planter property in slaves.
The objective outcome of the Democratic electoral victory in fall 1862, that is, of the renewed
strength of the Democracy inside the State, was to heal one split and produce another within
the party. The division between Douglas and Breckinridge Democrats going back to 1860
election had been overcome: Vallandigham assimilated to his perspective those onetime
supporters of Breckinridge who, unlike their leader, had not abandoned the Union for the
Confederacy. Similarly, as the political tendency once represented by Douglas nearly
disappeared in the West, the much larger number of his former party supporters were also
absorbed into the peace Democracy. But as this breach was healed another, largely along
regional lines, appeared: While in the West the party led by Vallandigham engaged in
Copperhead treason, in the East the party led by Horatio Seymour attempted to play the role
of loyal opposition.
On the other side, the Administration's military enforced repression did nothing to stop
opposition on the ground. In fact, because the arbitrary arrests could be used by Democratic
party politicians to whip up resentment, because a national draft began to appear even more
imminent, and particularly because Democrats were successful in fall elections, resistance
among laborers and farmers multiplied. Opposition to the war, no longer to preserve
"Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was" but now in opposition to emancipation of slaves
556For the role of Union troops in the 1862 election Hesseltine, Ibid, 271-272; George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln

and the Fifth Column, 123; Gray, Ibid, 97. Also see the historically accurate, fictional account of Vidal, Lincoln, 375,
381, and, for a summary of illegal and extralegal means used at the polls in both the 1862 and 1864 elections, see
chapter 3, n. 17, above.

and transformation of southern society and culture, became a rallying point for all those
popular elements who, southern sympathizers or no, opposed fighting. (And, to be sure, this
opposition was, seemingly, not so unreasonable since the horrendous newspaper and
rumored accounts of deaths were horrifying as well as numerically stupendous and, more and
more, appeared senseless).
Prior to the fall election in the West resistance to the Lincoln Administration was, if not
sporadic, unorganized and aimed at local embodiments of Republican hegemony. For
example, in Illinois reports of the burning of barns and the thief or slaughter of hogs of
prominent Republicans, often wealthy farmers, was not uncommon. But after the election, the
likelihood of a draft coupled with Democratic electoral victories brought forth open,
"spontaneous" resistance whose targets were the actual agents and symbols of Republican
power. A rash of large and small-scale draft riots and disturbances broke out in November
1862, in Cleveland, Ohio; in Blackford County, Indiana; in Milwaukee, Port Washington, Green
Bay and Kewaunee County, Wisconsin; and, in Rome in Henry County, Iowa.557
The peace Democrats rode these events: They inflamed passions with the not entirely
unsubstantiated claim (since this was one legitimate conclusion the practice of arbitrary,
militarily executed arrests might led to) that Lincoln and the Republican radicals sought to set
up a military dictatorship. Democrats played on race fear and fantasies by proclaiming to
tenants and particularly to poor "Butternut" farmers that with military emancipation the
plantation system of slavery which had crowded them out of decent lands in the South would
now find its way North. At the same time, they duplicitously exclaimed to the largely foreignborn urban laborers that the Union fought a war in order that freed blacks might inundate the
North, compete with them for jobs and depress miserable wages even further. Peace
Democrats sought to exacerbate sectional antagonism by insisting that Congressionally
Republican-engineered tariffs (largely designed to protect the fledgling mining and related
interests of Pennsylvania), and the monopolistic pricing practices of the largely eastern, great
railroad capitalists made possible by the cutoff of Mississippi River trade, were consciously
designed to undermine western agriculture.558
These were not cumulative, yet uncoordinated effects of the war, but consciously planned and
aimed at the poor producer of the West. All these charges daily filled the peace Democratic
newspapers of the West, while among them, especially the great ones - the Chicago Times,
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer and the Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, a shift of position since the fall
elections now became visible: In very early 1863, the peace Democracy began to articulate an
openly defeatist position. Opposition to the war in the form of calls for refusals to enlist and
Union army defections were combined with advocacy of an armistice and negotiations even at
the price of disunion. With the weight of poor rural and urban sentiment in the western states
somewhere between southern sympathy and outright support for the Confederacy, the peace
Democracy was taping into, provoking and riding a wave of fear, disgust and anger among
these popular classes.559
Declining Military Fortunes, the 1863 Conscription Act and Popular Opposition (I)
In winter 1862-1863, the revival of the northern Democracy went hand and glove with the low
point of Union military fortunes. The bloody, disastrous defeat of the Army of the Potomac at
Fredericksburg on 13 December and its "mud march" late the following January, both
described in greater detail in the previous chapter, combined with the Virginia winter, poor
557For draft disturbances, see Wood, Ibid, 111.
558For race baiting, Ibid, 98-100; for sectional antagonisms, Ibid, 125, 127.
559For discussion of the problem of recruitments (as well as desertions) in the fall of 1862, in George Fort Milton,

Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, 128-129, and especially Bruce Catton, Glory Road, 280-286.

food and unsanitary camp conditions to needlessly increase death among, and multiple the
misery of, the rank and file soldiery. Morale among the troops of this crucial eastern army sunk
to its wartime low and, though through the assiduous care of a new commander (Joe Hooker)
it would revive by spring, in mid-winter the fate of Union hung by a thread.
Unwilling to contemplate de jure rupture of the Union, Lincoln increasingly identified with only
those (the most determined Unionists, radicals, and Stanton in his Cabinet) unreservedly
behind his military emancipation policy. At the same time, there was a great deal of bickering
and finger pointing among Republican leaders in and out of Congress as to the causes of the
current malaise. But, true to their largely evangelical Protestant formations, there was also
honest soul searching. So, while large sections of the Republican party in Congress now
doubted the prospects of an ultimately successful conclusion to the war, there was
nonetheless a general recognition that the state militia - regular army system of providing
troops was not able to raise the volunteers necessary to continue the war. Republicandominated, state executives, historically responsible for raising recruits, were incapable of
providing adequate numbers of enlistments in the face of combined popular and Democratic
party resistance. With a long struggle visibly ahead, and casualties in numbers inconceivable
at the outset of fighting, the party found - against the mounting opposition in the country at
large and against the defeatism that was even beginning to creep in its own ranks and into
party newspapers - the courage to pass a sweeping reform of historically sacrosanct method
of troop provision.560
The Conscription Act of 3 March 1863 was legislated against the background of hostile
Democratic party-controlled state legislatures and municipal governments that had not only
dragged their feet in fulfilling enlistment quotas but in many cases actually refused to do so.
The act, with its commutation and exemption provisions heavily biased against the antiRepublican, poorer rural and urban masses, provided Lincoln's government with the
machinery to enforce conscription: The Administration made ready to meet opposition through
creation of the office of the Provost Marshal General, a War Department agency, and the
employment of hundreds of loyal local office and field officials, mostly army officers, as provost
marshals both to enforce the terms of the draft and to circumvent peace party-dominated local
officials' refusal to cooperate with conscription. Setting this enforcement machinery in motion,
including the development of lists of eligible recruits, took several months. By early June,
enrollment lists were completed and the draft in the form of a lottery was ready to proceed.561
With its class-based discriminatory provisions, efforts to carry out the draft evoked an
immediate response from those most effected by it: The infamous New York City riot with its
explicitly racist actions and overtones was echoed by riots in Boston and Troy (New York) in
the East, and in the West by riots or major disturbances in Milwaukee, in Mansfield bringing
together farmers from Morrow, Crawford and Knox counties in Ohio, in Chicago and in
Sullivan County in Indiana, in Johnson, Fulton, Putnam, Owen, Clay, and Boone counties in
Illinois, and in South English (Keokuk County), Iowa. The New York City riot, like those in the
anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, took on an insurrectionary character.562
Neither complicity in and encouragement given to the opposition to conscription, nor the
northern Democracy's high profile in state legislatures and municipal governments - its legally
560For Republican recriminations, Wood, Ibid, 100-103
561Commutation could be purchased for a fee of three hundred dollars, and exemption was granted on condition of

presentation of an "acceptable substitute." In fact, such a "substitute" was generally a poorer individual who could be
bribed to take his chances in the army - a fate, once inducted, that might be and often was avoided by desertion. For
the Conscription Act, and these provisions specifically, WR, Ser. III, V. 3, [3-10 March 1863].
562For discussion of the Conscription Act of 1863 and the responses it aroused, Nevins, Ibid, 462-466 and Irving
Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 8-10.

sanctioned status as a component of the bourgeois State (which helped to legitimize the
popular outbursts against Lincoln's government's draft), could hide the patent fact that these
acts were undertaken in the streets and on the ground by social significant layers of the
popular classes in the North. The Democratic party did not orchestrate nor did it control these
events. They were responses to immediate fears of the real prospects of death at the front
intertwined with and bringing to the surface the equally real grievances of poor farming and
immigrant laboring populations against a system of social relations that at once bypassed and
systemically discriminated against them. The surest indication of the correctness of this
assessment, especially the primacy of the cumulative impact of the course of military events,
was that, after the early July (i.e., following the dual Union victories at Gettysburg in the East
and Vicksburg in the West), the draft disturbances almost altogether disappeared until military
reversals in the following spring (1864) once again generated renewed anxiety.563
Repression
The development of opposition to Lincoln's government dialectically brought forth greater
repressive measures. It was the war, and underneath everything else, the conflict between
opposing societies and the forms of labor organization upon which those societies were
erected, that was driving repression and the resultant centralization. The conflict was
obviously not just between the societies of North and South, but within the North itself - most
intensely between those, who in the name of state rights and civil liberties defended slavery
as a condition of their mastery of the political system, and those who in the name of freedom
and social justice sought to abolish slavery as a condition of their political hegemony over a
revolution in socio-economic relations in the nation. The war, now against slavery as much as
for the Union, compelled responses that, in turn, drove its prosecutors to centralize national
power in order to secure the institutional premise (their continuation in national office) of the
pursuit of their war aims.
As a result, Democrats East and West suffered. They had made much of the suspension of
the writ of habeas corpus. And from the summer of 1862 on, the more outspoken especially in
the West had been increasingly, almost exclusively, and politically targeted: To them, de facto
martial law measures were applied.
The structure and machinery of repression had become elaborate. In fall 1861, the
Administration had established Military Departments with a district for each state in the
entirety of the territory of the North behind friendly lines. In July 1862, Congress, at War
Secretary Stanton's request, had created an office to supervise military trials, examine
decisions of military commissions and, broadly, to regulate the dispensation of military justice.
The office was that of the Bureau of Military Justice within the War Department. It was headed
by a Judge Advocate General with subordinate judge advocates in every military department
and with every army in the field. In September, Stanton instituted the office of a Special
Provost Marshal within the War Department, replete with an elaborate apparatus of provost
marshals stationed across the North, ostensibly to uncover, investigate and punish cases of
disloyalty, treason and espionage. In fact, all these organizations were created to suppress
dissent. And suppress dissent they did. In time, the Provost Marshal's office broke the back of
a more or less spontaneous resistance by enforcing the terms of the draft, rounding up
deserters and, where they existed (especially in the old West) by arresting the latter's
supporters. This repression was often severe; but under conditions of a military emancipation
policy to which southern blacks rallied (by enlisting, performing labor in or for the Union
armies, deserting planter estates, etc.) and thereby tipping the balance of forces in the war
563Wood (Ibid, 164-165) notes only one disturbance, in this case open warfare between Unionists and the peace

Democratic faction known as the "Shunk River War" in South English (Iowa), occurred in 1863 after July 4.

toward the Union, and to which, accordingly, Administration officials from the President on
down became increasingly more committed, the problem was that dissent become
increasingly difficult to distinguish from treason. The problem was real: From an emancipatory
standpoint, the actual forms of dissent carried out on the ground were objectively treacherous.
Most of the agencies of repression attached to the War Department were created in 1862.
Their creation left little in the way of prospects for the resumption of normal legality in the
following year. After Burnside's dismissal (25 January 1863) as commander of the Army of the
Potomac, Stanton shipped him off to the West to take charge of the Department of the Ohio a region that included the states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. (Having suddenly
become an abolitionist demanding the purge of conservative influences from the army, he had
been saved from a deservedly ignoble retirement by the radicals on the Joint Committee on
the Conduct of the War.) Burnside immediately issued a number of general orders of dubious
legality, including a prohibition against citizen criticism of the Lincoln government's military
policy, a ban on citizen possession or use of arms and, perhaps the most well-known (General
Order No. 38), a series of proscriptions aimed at governing citizen conduct and, among other
things, forbidding the expression of sympathy for the enemy.
Clement Vallandigham had recently returned to Ohio after having narrowly lost his three-term
House seat in the November 1862 election. He immediately undertook a campaign among
primarily rural supporters protesting and challenging Burnside's orders. On 2 May, Burnside
instructed subordinates to arrest Vallandigham who the previous day had made an
inflammatory speech at a large, well-attended anti-Administration rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
Refused entry, that evening a company of soldiers broke into Vallandigham's home in Dayton,
arrested him and put him on a special train for Cincinnati where he was held in a military
prison. The following day Vallandigham was brought before a Military Commission, a politically
"balanced" panel of military officers specially chosen by Burnside as part of the machinery of
enforcement of his orders. To no one's surprise, Vallandigham was found guilty, on the
testimony of a military officer who had been present at the speech, of charges of violating
General Order No. 38. He was sentenced to confinement at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.564
News of this piece of summary military justice was greeted with outrage (not just by the
Democratic but) by presses representing most political tendencies across the nation. Monster
Democratic-inspired protest rallies were organized such as one in Albany where New York
Gov. Seymour spoke, condemned the arrest, trial and verdict. Since Lincoln, as President,
was the only authority who could review, affirm or overturn this judgment and since,
constitutionally, as Commander in Chief he was nominally head of Union armies anyway, the
bulk of the criticism came down on him. It was now early May and Lincoln had other, far more
pressing problems of his own.
The Continuing Dialectic of Declining Military Fortunes and Popular Opposition (II)
The Army of the Potomac had recently been engaged in yet another ruinous battle. Encamped
north of Fredericksburg across the Rappahannock River from the entrenched Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia under Lee, Hooker had ordered a night movement west
northwesterly upriver. Successfully crossing the river, Unions forces moved southeasterly and
sought to catch Lee's army in a flanking movement. Having gotten word of the desertion of the
Union army camp and scouting reports as to the general direction of the advance, Lee split his
army, leaving some in Fredericksburg and sent a division and Thomas Jackson's corps
northwest to meet the Union forces. Having established a position in front of the advanced
forces of the Union army, Jackson's corps, some 26,000 men, marched all night the following
night, in an arch south to northeast flanking the Union right. Between the not-too-well
564A short account of the Vallandigham affair came be found in Milton, Ibid, 160-173.

reinforced decoy division and Jackson's corps, the idea was to roll up and crumble the Union
right sending a panic into the northern forces. In turn, it was expected that, reinforced along
the decoy line, rebels could do enough damage to the Union center to force a retreat back
across the Rappahannock. Ignoring a host of warnings about the impending flank action, this
Union army's leadership witnessed one of the most crushing defeats of a detached Union
formation (IX Corps) in the war. The Union army regrouped in the early hours of the next
morning. Later that morning at a country crossroads called Chancellorsville, the two great
armies fought amid heavy losses on both sides in a forest of brambles and thickets that one
year later would become renowned as the "Wilderness." The battle raged back and forth for
most of 3 May and the next day. During the struggle, an opportunity (requiring a bloody push
at dangerously thin lines in the rebel center) to destroy the Confederate army had developed
but was foregone by Hooker. Instead the commander ordered a general retreat. Union
casualties were put at in excess of 17,000 men.565
Atop enormous losses, the retreat at Chancellorsville did not hearten northern popular opinion
to Lincoln. And among the mass of tenants, poor farmers and urban workingmen, his
government was becoming more unpopular. Patently, the problem was the war, i.e., the draft,
the new status of a freepeople, and, above all, the increasingly hopeless prospects for victory.
Yet hardly visible, a host of issues directly bearing on the dignity and status of laboring men in
society were intertwined with and inseparable from the problems posed by the war. Events of
spring 1863 give a flavor of this increasing unpopularity (of the Lincoln Administration) and the
ugly turn it was taking.
Attempting to prevent a lynching, a provost marshal had been involved in death and injury to
"good white citizens" whose anger sparked a serious race riot in Detroit in which homes in a
Negro neighborhood were burned and blacks beaten. Nearby troops had to be called in to
suppress the riot. In several locales in central and southern Illinois and Indiana, a series of
incidents involving armed marches, gatherings to oppose the arrest of deserters and rallies
against the war had resulted in violent confrontation with state or military authorities. During
the same spring, draft disturbances in which provost marshals were threatened, injured or
murdered occurred in Milwaukee and Dodge County, Wisconsin. Desertion itself had been a
major problem beginning in fall 1862. By the end of the year alone, provost marshals arrested
more than 6,000 deserters and some two hundred civilians, the latter on charges of aiding
deserters, destruction of federal property, rioting and espionage.566
Originating in autumn 1862 and continuing into and culminating in spring 1863, largely Irish
coal in the anthracite coal fields in eastern Pennsylvania were in open revolt against the most
degrading and depressingly inhuman working conditions. Mine workers' anger was manifested
primarily in draft resistance not only because conscription threatened their lives with
subjectively meaningless death but, because the obvious target of their revolt, nascently
trustified mine owners, enforced the government draft policy and were reinforced by the State
(Pennsylvania militia, Union troops). Mine workers established de facto control over the
minefields and the towns within them. They forced the state of Pennsylvania and Lincoln's
government to largely forego conscription in the region.567
565Mind you, Hookers army consisted in well over 70,000 men (excluding non-combatants such as teamsters)

fielded for the flanking movement. Jacksons counter-flanking maneuver, suggested to Lee by Jackson and agreed on
by both, was a paradigmatic instance of military audacity. Lee was with McLaws lone division at Chancellorsville. See
Appendix II, below.
566For desertions, see the reference at n. 24, above; for riots, Gray, Ibid, 135-138; on the special provost marshal
and the arrests, OR, Ser. III, V.2, 936-941.
567See Grace Palladino, Another Civil War. Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania,
1848-68.

In early June announcement was made of the imminent commencement of a draft lottery.
Popular anger among poorer laborers in New York City and Boston, and poor farmers
throughout the West exploded. Among poorer farming and laboring populations in the North
resistance to the draft was inextricably and inseparably bound up with opposition to
monopolistic pricing of food and for transportation of agricultural produce, to superexploitation
of wage labor and to racist responses to the emancipation. Each and every upsurge of
popular discontent was seized on by Democratic politicians in order to pursue their seditious
opposition to the war. Lincoln's government, on the other side, acted as if it was utterly,
perhaps objectively, incapable of seeing in these popular explosions anything other than
designs to permanently fraction the Union. Union officials did not relent in their repression.
The 1863 Elections: The Second Round
As we noted earlier, if nearly simultaneous Union victories in the East and West did not go a
long way toward suppressing anger among these strata (and in a way in which army
repression could not do), then they at least gave Lincoln's government a breathing space. The
surrender of besieged Vicksburg was particularly important since, militarily, it cut the
Confederacy in two severing it from its food producing and troop supplying southwestern
hinterland. It also suggested, and not just retrospectively, that the rebels could no longer
outright win the war, or alternatively, that the Union forces were capable of just that. From here
on out Lincoln became increasingly conscious that the war would be one of attrition. Bitter
experience was teaching him attrition was the best he could hope for: Lincoln was left with a
strategy of bleeding the Confederacy to the last man and the last dollar (to employ a
common contemporary colloquial phrase) because with his generalship all that could be
accomplished was a slow, prodding and methodical sapping of the southern will to endure
increasingly unfavorable ratios of troops in the field vis--vis the North as combat casualties
mounted, as surviving poorly fed, clothed and provisioned Confederate soldiers became
increasingly more poorly fed, clothed, and provisioned. But the surrender of Vicksburg was
important for one other major reason, namely, since Grant's armies now controlled almost the
entire Mississippi Valley south of the Ohio River down to New Orleans, trade between the
Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, southeastern Missouri) and the interior of the Ohio Valley
states was reopened. Restoring steamboat trade would and did go a way toward ameliorating
some of the "Butternut" belt hostilities toward Lincoln's government.568
The fall 1863 gubernatorial results testify to this pacification. Significantly, local elections in
Michigan, Indiana and Illinois demonstrated the tide was once again turning in favor of
Republicans. All of the gubernatorial elections that year produced pro-Administration results.
In Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, Republican governors and legislatures were elected. In
Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Republican governors were re-elected. In Kentucky,
a Union Democrat and in Maryland a Republican governor were elected.
The canvass and election day in Kentucky demonstrated that Lincoln's government was still
unable to do without extralegal force to generate a favorable outcome. The outgoing governor
disenfranchised all expatriates. Union military authorities declared martial law. Prominent
southern sympathizing citizens and Democratic candidates were arrested without charge and
imprisoned to prevent them from campaigning, agitating, and voting. Names were taken off
the ballot and, in some counties, the entire peace Democratic slate was removed.569
568For an opposing view holding the capture of Vicksburg entailed little loss of food and manpower supply because

between the Confederate West and East there was little strategic coordination, Archer Jones, Civil War Command
and Strategy, 122-123.
569For extralegal coercion in the 1863 election in Kentucky, Hesseltine, Ibid, 321-322.

The outcome in Ohio was of special interest and import. Because the various western state
parties had since summer 1862 made opposition to arbitrary arrests, military emancipation,
and war profiteering by the well-to-do Republican faithful central to their critique of Lincoln's
government as well as their major campaign issues, the peace Democracy had come to
dominate the Ohio state party largely on the strength of its ability to capitalize on the arrest of
Vallandigham. Ohio Copperheads had put up him in his newly acquired role of martyr to civil
liberties as the party candidate for governor. Thus, the issue of war or peace was unavoidably
and directly posed in the Ohio gubernatorial campaign.
Vallandigham himself had been banished to the South by Lincoln. While chastising Burnside
for political insensitivity, Lincoln had nonetheless found a passage in his general's Order No.
38 that allowed him to scrupulously adhere to its terms and avoid the imprisonment of
Vallandigham. In the South, the martyr had spoken with several Confederate leaders, perhaps
even Jefferson Davis while in Richmond. What was significant was that Vallandigham was no
more welcomed among rebels than among Yankees. (He left the South and took up exile in
Toronto, Canada.) Vallandigham had rightfully warned Confederate leaders against a thrust
into the North, a strategy that Davis and Lee were actually implementing. The point of the
Army of Northern Virginia's Pennsylvania Campaign was, of course, to gain a major victory on
northern soil, one which would compel Lincoln to run the risk of a social explosion over a war
policy in ruins or to enter European powers-mediated negotiations with the South. In either
case, his government would fall and the national independence of the Confederacy would be
assured. Vallandigham, on the other hand, did not understand this strategy because he could
not even see it as a possibility. For him, a Confederate attack into, say, Pennsylvania would
polarize northern popular opinion against the South (which it did), and go a long run way
toward ruining (peace) Democratic chances of achieving electoral majority party status in the
North and winning the Presidency in 1864. Vallandigham, like all but the extreme and
militantly pro-Confederate fringe of the peace Democracy, still took it for granted that the
Union "as it was" could be restored. It was merely a matter of the right party in power. Thus,
his efforts were exclusively directed toward achieving power on the terrain of the actually
existing American State. Confederate leaders, though, wanted nothing to do with the northern
bourgeois democracy, nor with a restoration of the status quo antebellum. They wanted
national independence, a separate nation-state erected over a society whose foundations lay
in slavery. Vallandigham was, however, correct in his assessment of the drift of popular
sentiment in the North in the case of a southern military thrust into a northern state. The
thrust, followed by the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the re-opening of trade up
and down the Mississippi Valley and the war prosperity that had now reached the old West,
only further if temporarily consolidated support behind Lincoln. Vallandigham lost the Ohio
gubernatorial contest to John Brough, a Republican party-supported war Democrat and
president of a major railroad company.
Military Developments on the Ground, 1864570
In early March 1864, Lincoln appointed Ulysses Samuel Grant general of the Union armies,
the first man since Washington to hold the formal rank of Lieutenant General. Having
supervised the Union victory at Chattanooga in November, Grant immediately came east. He
met George Meade at his camp in east central Virginia to review the armies in the East. The
new commander of the Union armies asked Meade to continue to direct the Army of the
Potomac (of which he had been appointed commander by Lincoln shortly before Gettysburg
and which had been inactive since Gettysburg).
570For elaboration of the following, see the "Two Campaigns - Virginia (Overland Campaign), 1864" in chapter 7,

below.

Forthwith Grant laid out his strategy for the upcoming campaign, a multi-pronged, multitheatre plan, the intention of which was to decisively end the war. Four coordinated blows
aimed at destroying the Confederate armed forces were to be simultaneously struck. First,
Ben Butler would lead his army up the James River to come at Richmond and pressure Lee
from the south; second, Franz Sigel was to advance up the Shenandoah Valley to cut off Lee's
army from a major source of food and provisions; third, Sherman's army was to advance to
Atlanta from Chattanooga with the intent of engaging and destroying Joe Johnston's
Confederate Army of Tennessee; and, lastly, Meade, and the 92,000 man Army of the
Potomac, would from the north follow, engage, and crush Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
On 5 May, the Army of the Potomac moved toward the Rapidan River engaging 78,000
Confederate soldiers in tangled thicket known as the "Wilderness" just east of Fredericksburg.
Brambles and shrub-sized trees were so densely packed that in the first day of fighting Union
forces got lost in the thicket and ended up firing on their own men. The next day Grant
ordered a bloody assault on the Confederate center. That center held. The rebel army
counterattacked and smashed the Union right seizing over 600 prisoners. In two days of
fighting the Army of the Potomac had lost nearly 15,400 in wounded, dead, missing and
captured. Yet, instead of following the well-trodden path of his predecessors and retreating, on
7 May Grant ordered his forces to move in pursuit of Lee's army. Days later, the two armies
once again engaged at a place know as the Spotsylvania Courthouse. Grant moved the forces
of one of corps commanders, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, against the Confederate center. It
was a well fortified, but nonetheless vulnerable position. The battle over Confederate
breastworks waged back and forth for days. Combined losses totaled over 12,000 men. Lee
ordered his commanders to have their men fall back.
For three weeks the two armies move southeasterly in lockstep, each attempting to destroy
other. Lee was able to place his forces nearly due east of Richmond, between the city and the
Army of the Potomac at a crossroads known as Cold Harbor. Here, just north of the
Chickahomany River, the Army of Northern Virginia dug in. On 3 June, Grant ordered an early
morning assault by 60,000 Union soldiers on a heavily fortified, crisscrossing series of
earthworks. The northern army was riddled to pieces: That morning, 5,600-7,000 Union men
fell mostly in the first two hours of fighting. For three and a half days, the two armies lay still
confronting each other in an eerie death-laden stillness as the dead rotted and the wounded
died in a no man's land. The Union alone had lost more than fifty thousand men since the
campaign had began. Screaming about Grant the "butcher," the Northern press, called for his
dismissal. On 7 June, the Union army slipped away from Cold Harbor in a dangerous but wellexecuted movement that exposed its entire flank to the entrenched Confederate forces. The
Army of the Potomac marched due south for Petersburg.
For the first time Lee, who believed the next move by the Union army would be a strike at
Richmond, misjudged this movement. Petersburg was a communications and resupply center
for central Virginia and Richmond. Crossing the James River, an excellent opportunity to seize
Petersburg was loss by the oldest nemesis of the Army of the Potomac, namely, slowing
moving and non-aggressive generals. Delays in getting men into action created the time for
Lee's forces to regroup and entrench themselves on the eastern side of Petersburg between
the city and Meade's forces.
In mid-May, northeast in the Shenandoah Valley, Sigel's army had been first beaten, then
routed by a much small Confederate army at a town called New Market. Sigel, a political
general with little in the way of battlefield skills, had been replaced by David Hunter. By midJune, an enlarged force under Hunter, soon to be joined by two divisions under Phil Sheridan,
was beginning to employ the tactics in the Valley that Sherman would use on his march east
from Atlanta.

Sherman himself, with his 98,000 man force, began the move on Atlanta around 6 May.
Joseph Johnston, leading a Confederate force outnumbered nearly two to one, attempted to
stop the two Union armies under Sherman's command. Unsuccessfully, the rebels engaged in
hit and run tactics, burning bridges and tearing up rails, trying to slow down the advance and
while attempting to inflict losses. The rebel army was, however, in danger of becoming
demoralized by attrition and by Sherman's flanking strategy. Sherman did not risk a head-on
assault wherever to date the Confederates, retreating southeasterly in front of Union advance,
were able to achieve fortified positions. Johnston's army was forced to abandon Dalton,
Resaca, Cassville, Allatoona and New Hope Church. In mid-June, the rebel army dug in at
Kennesaw Mountain. Sherman, in an attempt to win a decisive battle, changed tactics and, on
27 June, a 13,000 man corps under Hooker's leadership made a head-on attack. Assaulting
well-entrenched positions, the Union soldiers were beaten back badly.
Thus, by mid-June 1864, with losses totaling over 60,000 men in two months of fighting, Grant
was forced to lay siege to Petersburg. Butler was stalemated by sections of the Richmond
defense force and Lee's army in the Bermuda Hundred, the Union army in the Shenandoah
Valley had been decisively defeated and was completing reorganization, and Sherman had
been stopped in front of Atlanta. The Democratic chances in the coming fall elections,
elections that included the Presidency, began once again to look very good.
Dialectic of Declining Military Fortunes and Popular Opposition (III):
The Peace Democracy in 1864
Between 17 October 1863 and 15 March 1864, Lincoln's government made several calls for
volunteers. The calls sought to raise 700,000 men. Draft lottery dates were specified for each
call in the case where enlistments fell short of the call. The intent was to provide enough
manpower to put muscle into Grant's multi-theatre strategy designed to conclusively end the
war.
Following Gettysburg and Vicksburg, leading Administration officials hoped the 24-25
November 1863 Chattanooga victories would rekindle a fury of patriotic motivated enlistments.
Militarily, the victories in the battles for Chattanooga had opened up the heartland of
Confederate southeast to Union assault.571
Politically, since these victories appeared to have confirmed rising expectations in the North
that in fact Grant was a general who, finally, could led Union armies to decisive victory over
the rebels, the Administration's hope was not unfounded. Additionally, patriotic fervor was
materially supplemented: Local government appropriated, voluntary enlistment bounties ran
up to $400.00-500.00 - higher than ever before, and contributions from patriotic citizens to aid
enlistee families were utilized as added inducements.
Yet enlistments flagged. (For Lincoln's government, the only bright spot was the surge of
Negro volunteers.) Draft lotteries were staged, the first on 5 January 1864 and the response at
least in the West demonstrated that hostility to Lincoln's government and the war had not
abated. With Union soldiers in the field to pacify potential unrest, poorer farmers and
Democratic party members engaged in clashes with troops. In March, confrontations and
disturbances occurred in Canton, Ohio, Charleston, Illinois and the Illinois counties of
Calhoun, Edgar, Hardin and Paris, and in May in Lewistown, Illinois.
The draft disturbances encouraged and rallied peace Democrats, who since their setbacks in
the 1863 elections, had been preparing for their summer Presidential nominating convention.
571The battle for Chattanooga had two primary moments. Joe Hooker's forces defeated Confederate forces under

James Longstreet at Lookout Mountain. This was followed by George Thomas' army action that scattered Braxton
Bragg's forces after an enthusiastic, unauthorized charge in which Union soldiers took Missionary Ridge (and with it
some 4,000 Confederate prisoners).

They had refused to modify their positions, and, in fact, had hardened in their opposition to
Lincoln's government: Since early 1863, they had refused to support the war calling instead
for an armistice and negotiations between Union and Confederacy. It was now largely their
view that only unconditional peace, even at the cost of disunion, could end the war. Though
suffering further internal organizational defeats in early spring (e.g., as, on 23 March, Ohio
Democrats refused to elect an unequivocally Copperhead slate of at-large delegates to the
national convention), resistance on the ground rallied them and they remained undeterred.
Throughout the spring they took their position to the "people" with county and municipal
meetings. By mid-June, the reversal in the course of military events on the fields of battle
provided peace Democrats with the impetus they needed to catapult them into the foreground
of Democratic party activity. The Copperhead press took up the military reversals, particularly
the probe toward Washington by Shenandoah Valley-stationed Confederate forces under
Jubal Early in the second week of July and the Crater disaster on the lines around Petersburg
at the end of the month. It rejoiced in Union setbacks, defeats and casualties, presented
lengthy descriptions of alleged Yankee atrocities, and spread rumors of impending
catastrophe. The entire course of military events had, in fact, enormously strengthened the
hand of the peace faction inside the northern Democracy. Riding the wave of popular warweariness that had again begun to be diffused throughout bourgeois public opinion, peace
Democrats were able, even as a compromiser Democratic George McClellan was nominated,
to write the platform for the party national convention held in Chicago at the end of August.572
Rising Military Fortunes and the 1864 Election: The Last Round
By this time even Lincoln had succumbed to the latest sharp swing in northern popular moods.
The Republican President was, as is often recounted, resigned to a Democratic victory in
November. But in a populace subject to a long, bloody and costly war on the battlefield and
the real sacrifices at home (unrelenting pressures by employers to ratchet up the rate of
exploitation squeezing every ounce of effort from workers, harsh enforcement of tenant lease
terms and exorbitant charges for transportation of agricultural surpluses, skyrocketing food
and rental prices, new and rising taxes), sharp swings in mood could move in either direction
assuming the fulcrum upon which mood changes turned swung just as sharply. In the North,
the fulcrum was the battlefield behavior of the Union armies.
Since 20 July, Sherman's army had stood in front of Atlanta, having beaten back three
counterthrusts by the newly appointed Confederate commander, John Bell Hood, in which
rebels lost nearly one-third of their forces. After a month long artillery siege of the city, on 31
August a corps of Sherman's forces advancing from the east attacked railroad lines south of
Atlanta and broke the hold of Hood's forces on the city. On 1 September, Confederates were
compelled to evacuate Atlanta. Sherman prepared his troops for a march east on Savannah.
In the North, a 45,000 man Union army in the Shenandoah Valley, now under the command of
Phil Sheridan razed crops, tore up rails, burned the barns and fields of farmers and drove off
their herds in pursuit of Jubal Early's Confederate army. Union and Confederates forces
clashed at Winchester on 19 September forcing the rebels to withdraw. Then, on 18 October,
the Confederate army engaged Union forces at Cedar Creek. Early had decided on this
contest to drive the Yankees from the Valley. His forces' attack appeared initially successful,
but Sheridan himself rallied his troops, re-formed their lines, his soldiery held those lines, and
then began to push Confederates back. Early's troops were forced to flee. They left the Valley
for good.
Since Sherman's capture of Atlanta, sentiment among the popular classes in the North had
once again swung sharply. By the time of the departure of Early's forces from the Shenandoah
572For the actions of peace Democrats in spring 1864, Gray, Ibid, 170f.

Valley, a powerful sense of impending victory was sweeping the North. And while Lincoln's reelection chances looked better and better, divisions over the war largely along class lines
remained and his re-election prospects were not assured.
To help insure that re-election, the state level Republican parties had been working overtime.
In the old West, seditious peace Democrats were brought up in what amounted to show trials.
In Governor Oliver Morton's Indiana, the pro-Confederate fringe of the peace Democracy was
indicted on charges of instigating an uprising the purpose of which was to establish a
Northwestern Confederacy. The Indianapolis treason trial began 22 September 1864 while
revelations, some concocted, leading up to the trial and aimed at discrediting the Indiana
Democracy, had been made public throughout the summer. Late in the year, similar scattered
and numerically and politically insignificant Copperhead forces in Ohio were charged with
attempting an attack on Camp Douglas outside Chicago in order to free the 9,000 rebel
prisoners held there. The Cincinnati treason trial, preceded by election eve (7 November
1864) newspaper exposs and two month long series of arrests, opened 11 January 1865.573
It was clearly, though, the battlefield victories of Union soldiers that made a Republican victory
in the electoral arena possible; and their behavior at the polls would secure it. In the first
place, the 1864 Presidential election did not so much witness massive repression, as it had
been practiced particularly in fall 1862. In the second place, unlike 1862, when over 100,000
soldiers had been unable to vote because they were stationed in battle zones and could not
be present in their native counties, Republicans had legislatively reformed state laws to allow
soldiers to vote in the field. Among the troops, only Republican campaign literature was
distributed. Democratic materials and ballots were seized, thrown away or sent back to the
points of origin. Republican canvasses among troops outnumbered Democratic two to one.
And when soldiers voted, they did so overwhelmingly for Lincoln. Soldiers, in fact, were sent
to specific states such Pennsylvania, by way of requests by Stanton to field commanders (for
instance, Sherman), in order to insure that these states went for Lincoln. Similar actions were
taken in Illinois. In the event, Lincoln had won the election and, on at least one account, the
soldiers' vote was the difference.574
Union Military Victory and the Fate of the Peace Democracy
After evacuating Atlanta, Hood's rag-tag Confederate army moved north to join Bedford
Forrest's forces in order to invade Tennessee in hope of diverting Sherman. On 30 November
in Franklin, Tennessee, Confederate forces loss 6,250 men in thirteen unsuccessful charges
at Union soldiers. Six days latter outside Nashville, George Thomas' Union forces crushed, in
a battle in which black regiments played a role, the balance of Hood's army in the most
decisive victory in the entire war. In defeat, the southern army began to disintegrate. In a
series of battles played out in a retreat southward, at East Point, Rough and Ready,
Jonesboro, Bear Creek and Griswaddle, residue Confederate forces were demolished. Then
on Christmas Day word reached Washington that Sherman's forces had taken Savannah and
was preparing to turn north into the Carolinas. By the end of the year, northern victory was
assured. In the East it was just a matter of time before Lee's army, devastated by desertion
and lack of food and provisions, would be forced to break out or surrender. Those events,
which need not be traced here, were to occur three months later.
At war's end Republicans, as the party of the Union, enjoyed enormous prestige and
heightened moral advantage; peace Democrats in particular had been largely discredited as
the party of disunion. Although individual Copperheads such as Vallandigham would remain
573For the treason trials of 1864-1865, see Klement, Dark Lanterns, chapters VI, VII.
574Hesseltine, Ibid, 379-384, provides an account of the role of soldiers in the November 1864 election. For the

argument that the Union soldiers' vote provided Lincoln's margin of victory, Ibid, 384, n. 50.

actively politically, as an organized faction of the northern Democracy in the West the peace
Democracy did not survive the war.
In the East, the urban peace Democracy or its leadership, on the other hand, had wanted to
end the war on terms that would insure the survival of the South as a viable economicproductive entity in order to get on with business. In this respect, peace Democratic
representatives of cotton production-related capitalists were no different from other elements
in the northern party of property. Yet, the peace Democratic group as a whole also wanted the
South to rejoin the Union on terms that included non-subordinate political viability as well. On
this issue, peace Democrats simply lost: In New York, for example, Fernando Wood's group
split after the draft riots, undergoing turmoil in the aftermath of Confederate defeat and
collapse. That defeat had secured the destruction of planter property in slaves, assuring
planter demise as a dominant social class. Once slavery on the continent had been
dismantled, the peace Democracy could not survive anywhere. Thus, destined to disappear
as a social force, the demise of the peace Democracy left the groups like the Democratic
Tammany Hall party machine in control of the Democracy's future. Having taken the winning
side in the conflict, as economically free traders, committed to a decentralized polity and to
rapid economic development nationally as well as locally, internationally republican and white
supremacist, big city Democratic party machines survived the war intact.575

575For export- and finance-based, peace Democratic views toward "reconstruction" see McFeely, Yankee Stepfather,

54, 58, Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 246-247, 320-321 (the latter cites peace Democratic business
journals, e.g., in New York, which exhibit the attitude "let's get this thing settled at once and get on with business").

6.
Problems of Army Leadership (II)
Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia
"Give them a gun and a uniform and teach them to drill a little, and you dont make a good
soldier," Tarkenton was saying, "but you are certainly ruining a good field hand."
"That is right. Niggers have no sense of proportion, nor of right or wrong in our sense of the
word. You cannot tell what they will do if they have the upper hand. They might be as meek
as dogs, or as merciless as savages. The Yankees are upsetting the order of things by
arming the Negroes, and mark my words we will have to pay the price of their
experimentation in changing nature's pattern."
Tarkenton was nodding somberly, and Wheelock emphasized his points with his pipe-stem.
"They may well touch off a racial blood bath such as western man has not seen. Given the
chance, they will bring into our society and our home their tribal heritage of blood and
cannibalism and destruction."576

Part I
Problems of Lee's Army and Leadership
Matriel Problems in Lee's Army (I). Political Dimensions.
The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was the rebel counterpart to and nemesis of the
Union Army of the Potomac in the eastern theatre of the war. This army was established by
Robert E. Lee, who on 1 June 1862, in the defense of Richmond, took command of the forces
that came to make it up. Given all its well-documented limitations, the Army of Northern
Virginia is reputed to be one of the finest military machines to grace battlefield soils in the
entirety of the bourgeois era.
Throughout the war, this army saw all of its action in Virginia with two very significant
exceptions, the September 1862 Maryland campaign and the June-July 1863 Pennsylvania
Campaign which culminated in two great battles, Antietam and Gettysburg respectively.
Infantry forces never exceeded more than 82,000 men, and under Lee's command battlefield
losses, dead and permanently injured and unfit for a return to service, were horrendous.
Midway in the war (by the time of Gettysburg), Virginians made up nearly twenty-five percent
of this army's infantry regiments (excluding artillery companies), and together with the North
Carolinians and Georgians they composed nearly two-thirds of those same infantry regiments.
Alabamans, Mississippians, South Carolinians and Louisianans rounded out these regiments.
Together men from these seven states accorded for nearly ninety-five percent of the Army of
Northern Virginia's infantry. Attached to this army was also a very effective, large (10,00012,000 man) cavalry force headed by Jeb Stuart, seventy percent of which was made up of
Virginians.577
In the post-Civil War era, Lee's military genius was not only unquestioned but the relation
between those severe limitations the Army of Northern Virginia operated under and Lee's
leadership was rarely systematically explored and it was largely obfuscated. Those limitations
576Discussion between two Confederate officers, Captains Tarkenton and Wheelock, in Bedford Forrests cavalry

division operating in southwest Tennessee, circa late winter-early spring 1864. Citing from Perry Lenz's historical
novel, The Falling Hills.
Whatever patriotic, idealized notions of defense of home and homeland motivated the rebel soldier at the war's
outset, in the western theatre of the war after the siege and fall of Vicksburg (June-July 1863), it was only the double
fear of black "savagery" and the penalty for desertion that kept him fighting. Though it makes an instructive contrast
for the eastern theatre and Lee's army we are about to examine, here too, though only later (after November 1864),
the same motivation held sway.
577State by state contributions to the Army of Northern Virginia circa June 1863 (the moment at which this army's
military progress waxed) based on order of battle at Gettysburg in Harry Pfanz, Gettysburg. Culp's Hill and Cemetery
Hill, Appendix C, 398-403.

included lack of adequate armaments (relative to the Union armies), of shoes and winter
clothing for soldiers, horses for the cavalry, in other words, the matriel of warfare; a shortage
of rations for soldiers in the field; and manpower attrition rooted in massive battlefield
casualties conjoined to a vastly inferior population in the numerical sense relative to the
society of the North, to a popular unwillingness (after 1862) to volunteer for service, to a fierce
popular resistance to a class-biased conscription law and practice, and to high rates of
desertions and "straggling" (again, after 1862). The lack of the matriel of warfare was largely
a problem that confronted an agrarian plantation society fighting a conventional war in the
immediate post-Napoleonic era of the bourgeois epoch (viz., a war that featured mass armies
engaged in offensive operations) against a capitalist opponent whose industrial-economic
might was rapidly becoming the most advanced in the world. Some of those shortages (e.g.,
horses) were made good by raiding the enemy countryside and expropriating the objective
substance of the underlying population that supported this enemy. Others were made good as
the spoils (e.g., cannon, rifled muskets) of battlefield victory.
There is, however, some evidence that the lack of matriel was not merely a product of the
difference in societal forms and absolute "levels of development," but was the outcome of the
inner contradictions of the Confederate regime. It appears that, for example, lack of shoes and
adequate rations may have been imposed on this particular Confederate army because its
commander, Lee, was too closely identified with the rebel President, Jefferson Davis, who, as
a dictatorial centralizer, was fiercely resisted by the body of state rights representatives in the
Confederate Congress.578
Davis himself faced resistance from an axis of influence families. Those families included the
Johnstons and Prestons of Abingdon (VA) and Columbia (SC) that counted among its near kin
Davis' governments chief conscription officer John Smith Preston (SC), Confederate Sen.
William Ballard Preston (VA), Gen. William Preston (KY), Gen. Wade Hampton (SC) and Gen.
John B. Floyd (VA). Opposition, albeit for long stretches largely latent, stemmed further from
two specific groups of military officers, those in Kentucky around Gen. Preston and an antiBragg bloc of high-ranking officers in the Army of Tennessee. Finally, there was resistance
from among the highest-ranking military leaders in the Confederate army, i.e., Joseph
Johnston and G.T. Beauregard, and opposition from political leaders such as Sen. Louis
Wigfall of Texas. What these groups had in common was a pronounced disagreement with
Davis' emphasis on Virginia in Confederate strategy, a shared belief in the centrality of the
mid-South for Confederate survival, and a desire to concentrate rebel forces against
Rosecrans in the West, i.e., in middle Tennessee.579
Matriel Problems in Lee's Army (II). Plantation Agricultural Foundations580
In a 30 Jan. 1864 letter from Lee to Quartermaster General Alexander Lawton, Lee, likely
unknowingly, perfectly described one absolute limit, but a central one, of the agrarianplantation South, namely, the absence of materially embedded, developed industrial skill,
relative to capitalist North. In reviewing the quality of a pair of shoes produced by southern
578For shortages that affected the Army of Northern Virginia and did not affect other rebel forces in the field, see

Lee's letter (undated) to Confederate Commissary General Col. Lucius Northrop, in Dowdey and Manarin (ed), The
Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, 648.
579For the groups making up a bloc agitating for concentration in the West, Archer Jones, Civil War Command and
Strategy, 118-119, 172, 173-174.
580Differences in industrial productive capacities should not, of course, be underrated. For a flavor of these difference
merely note the following figures: In 1860, those states that remained Unionist produced $15,560,575,000 worth of
manufactured goods; those that would become that Confederacy generated a mere 10% of this total, $155,575,000 in
said goods, and the bulk of that in Virginia to boot. Massachusetts alone produced $19,656,000 worth of woolen
goods, the Confederacy as a whole $1,995,000 worth; and so on. Richard McMurray, Two Great Rebel Armies, 20-21.

labor, he noted, "They were intended to be fair samples of a lot and were selected with that
view. In the Richmond shoe, the face of the leather was turned in. That is, the side of the skin
next to the animal was turned out, which is contrary to the practice of the best makers and
contrary to the arrangement of nature. The leather of the Columbus shoe was not half tanned
and the shoe was badly made. The soles of both were slight and would not stand a week's
march in the mud and water."581
The backwardness of southern industrial labor, its diminutiveness and irrelevance to plantation
agriculture, is further revealed in the extent to which the Confederacy suffered from defective
southern manufactured artillery ammunition. The proportion of "duds," which ran to half, was
high by contemporary standards. Shells wobbled in mid-flight; due to inferior design and
manufacture the 12-pound Napoleon (standard cannon) weighed 300-400 pounds more than
the Union model - making it less mobile.582
In his Memoirs, Grant developed an incisive analysis of the differences between societies of
the North and South with respect to industrial capacity. He stated, "The arts of peace were
carried on in the North. Towns and cities grew during the war. Inventions were made in all
kinds of machinery to increase the products of a day's labor in the shop, and in the field. ... In
the North, the country, the towns and the cities presented about the same appearance they do
in time of peace. The furnace was in blast, the shops were filled with workmen, the fields were
cultivated ... [On the other hand, the] whole South was a military camp. [Unlike the South,]
women did not work in the field in the North, and children attended schools. ... The ablebodied white men were at the front fighting for a cause destined to defeat. The conscription
took all of them ... those between fourteen and eighteen years of age as junior reserves, and
those between forty-five and sixty as senior reserves. ... The slaves, the noncombatants, onethird of the whole, were required to work in the field without regard to sex, and almost without
regard to age." In other words, the industrial might of the North made it possible to fight a war
without interrupting the normal daily rhythms of any capitalist society. The South, on the other,
subordinated its entire population and their activity to the conduct of the war.583
The South, as we argued,584 was not capitalist. Stated in terms of this discussion, the noncapitalist character of the South meant that, while Confederate leaders might import, e.g.,
rifles, southern plantation agriculture by itself could not generate the industrially-based
resources to sustain a modern war. This fundamental fact of the Civil War was expressed in
every facet of Confederate activity. Such was particularly visible in the simple fact that the
Army of Northern Virginia lacked draft animals for tasks of all sorts, such as pulling medical
wagons, ambulances and munitions wagons, but particularly for use of the cavalry. The same
fact was exhibited in the Confederate State's very policy regarding cavalry troopers.
In contradistinction to provision by the Union armies of their cavalries with horses, rebel
soldiers were required to provide their own horses, and loss of those horses in any other
manner than in combat, would find the same soldiers required to replace the horses
themselves. Confederate armies took responsibility for shoeing and feeding horses, but by
mid-1863 fodder had become a major logistics problem since inadequate rail transport made it
581For Lee's remarks in the letter to Lawton, Dowdey and Manarin, Ibid, 664-665.
582For the figure for fifty percent effectiveness of shells, Jac Weller, "Confederate Use of British Cannon," cited in

Edwin Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign, 677 n. 30; for the construction of the Confederate cannon, Albert
Castel, Decision in the West, 108-109, 249.
583Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 636-638. A brief comparison of railroad tracks laid by mid-century will drive
home the difference: In the North, on average 442 miles of track per state had been laid, while in the South the
corresponding figure was 112 miles per state (Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 392). The latter figure, it
should be added, largely represented the major trunk lines such as those between Nashville and Chattanooga, or
Jackson and Vicksburg.
584See the Introduction, above.

difficult to bring the horse and its feed together. Moreover, horseshoes and portable forges for
smiths were also in such short supply that every rebel raid (or campaign) into Union or Unionheld territory invariably found cavalry units engaged in re-supplying and in foraging.585
Thus, in multiples areas of production (i.e., textiles and shoes, munitions production, horses,
horse feed, rail production) the South betrayed its utter lack of the means of production,
industrial skill and productivity pivotal to conduct of a conventional war in the bourgeois era.
The non-industrial character of southern production was a huge constraint but not in and of
itself decisive. Had, counterfactually and counterhistorically, the Confederacy achieved British
(and with it, French) diplomatic recognition, and right up until the battle of Gettysburg this
remained a very real possibility, then the South could have conducted the war with foreign
materials, including not only rifles but shoes, clothing, and cannon. To be sure, such conduct
would have been undertaken at the risk of becoming a de facto British colonial dependency.
But, then, the South was only a short step (elimination of the northern middle man) from being
a raw material producer for English manufacturers anyway. The symbiotic dependency of
(southern) plantation agriculture on (English) capitalist industry would have in no way effected
the wealth, power and standing of planters in North America. Instead, it was Lee's pursuit of
(heavy losses producing) offensive warfare taken together with both a relatively small fighting
population and plantation agriculture that doomed the Army of Northern Virginia.586
In the following we shall largely forgo further discussion of the materials problem confronting
the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead we shall examine the Confederate problem of attrition in
the East because it was the direct outcome of offensive form of warfare that Lee, as
commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, consistently practiced. Attrition was a
true dilemma not amendable to resolution as, for example, the straightforward cavalry
shortages of horse in principle were.587
Offensive Warfare and Attrition
The twenty-three months between the Seven Days (June-July 1862) and Spotsylvania (11-23
May 1864) formed the period in which the eastern army under Lee was able to openly
maneuver and assume the offensive. During that period, rebel casualties totaled some
103,000 men. Losses inflicted on Union forces in the same period (approximately 145,000)
were much greater, but in relation to the numbers the Confederacy was able to field rebel
casualties were higher and more costly. Perhaps not seriously until 1864, in one way or
another the problem of attrition plagued the Army of Northern Virginia from the onset of actual
585George A. Bruce, an officer volunteer (with the rank of lieutenant colonel) during the war, writing a half-century

later, cited an unidentified southern writer who penned these words before the war: "See him [the southern planter] at
the breakfast table saying grace over a Northern plate, eating with Northern cutlery and drinking from Northern
utensils; see him charmed with a Northern piano, or musing over the pages of a Northern novel; see him riding to his
neighbors in a Northern carriage or furrowing his land with a Northern plough; see him lighting his cigar with a
Northern match and flogging his negroes with a Northern lash.'" "The Strategy of the Civil War," 403.
586However, without material aid of an advanced capitalist nation, matriel problems only got worse as the war
progressed. For instance, Confederate cavalry were armed "with only pistols, revolvers, and sabers ... [and] had
difficulty coping with Yankees armed with breech-loading carbines. By 1863, a few of these carbines had become
available ... but there were never enough to arm more than one, or at the most, two squadrons in a regiments."
Coddington, Ibid, 16-17, 23, and 259 (citation).
That fighting, because socially and politically enfranchised, population was made of "white" males engaged in largely
precapitalist, self-sufficient agriculture. Small populations of free men are characteristic of modern plantation
agriculture.
587A rough estimate of populations clearly describes the contours of the attrition problem. In 1860, the United States
had roughly a population of 31,000,000 people, 9,500,000 of which lived in the South. Nearly 4,000,000 of the
southern population were slaves. With allowances for noncombatants (children, elderly and women), the absolute and
unsurpassable demographic superiority of the North is patently obvious.

fighting down to the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. The vast manpower reserves of
the North - assuming that the popular classes had not succumbed to war-weariness, that
veteran soldiers would largely re-enlist when their terms expired, and that the draft was
relatively successful - would overwhelm those human resources available to the South. The
problem can be quickly illuminated by considering force levels on both sides during the nine
month siege of Petersburg.588
When Grant launched the 1864 campaign against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia
beginning in spring of that year, the Army of the Potomac stood at about 110,000 men (a
figure which includes approximately twenty percent noncombatants such as teamsters, cooks,
officers' servants, etc.), while the rival Army of Northern Virginia, already grievous reduced by
losses the previous summer (Gettysburg), numbered some 80,000 combat soldiers. Two
months of horrendous fighting including the bloodiest battles in the Wilderness, at
Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor had resulted in over 50,000 Union casualties - nearly two-thirds
the size of the entire opposing rebel army at the outset of the campaign. Confederate losses
totaled nearly 35,000. Yet in late March 1865 when, after a nine month siege, a desperate Lee
finally ordered his army to attempt a breakout of the fortifications surrounding Petersburg, the
Confederate army numbered as little as 35,000 tired, hungry and physically weak men while
the well-fed, well-clothed Union forces had swollen to more than 100,000.
Against the background of absolute limits of the agrarian plantation South, its lack of
materially embedded, developed industrial skill, the problems of numerical inferiority coupled
with that of attrition, leads to the intuition that Confederacy could not sustain a fight as and
against a mass army in the bourgeois era, at least not on its own foundations, that is, on the
basis of pre-industrial slave agriculture. In this context, Lee's consistent commitment to the
offensive warfare against Union forces, warfare which necessarily resulted in such heavy
casualties (even though those inflicted on the enemy were greater), retrospectively appears
counterproductive.

588Jones (Ibid, 226-228) portrays Lee as the master of the tactical defensive in contradistinction to the view put forth

here. As we hope to demonstrate, to make this view stick, Jones must postulate a number of psychological
aberrations imputed to be characteristic of Lee, including "bizarre" behavior, cognitive dissonance, regular yet
inexplicable departures from "the essence of his own and Napoleon's strategy," aggressivity, etc. Ibid, 123-124, 134135, 226.
In 1913, George A. Bruce presented the first sustained critique of Lee's generalship in terms of the latter's
commitment to offensive war. For summary analyses of the various campaigns especially with a view to attrition,
"Ibid," 452-453, 446-450 (Seven Days), 451-451, 454 (Antietam), 464-465, 468 (Gettysburg). Bruce censors Lee, in
particular, for an aggressivity that in part stemmed from an unexamined confidence in his army's fighting capacity, for
his utter lack of insight into the will to resistance of the Northern popular classes and for a limited, if not nonexistent
vision of the strategical requirements of the Confederacy as a whole (on this see, "Lee as a Napoleonic General"
below). "Ibid," 461-464, 471, 467-468.
It is retrospectively easy, and mistaken, to read back into the whole course of the war, the Confederate problem of
manpower shortages. It is conceivable that in engaging in campaigns from every three to six months (as commanders
in the East prior to Grant pursued), and assuming foreign provisions of the matriel of war, the Confederacy could
have fought indefinitely or at least until the war-weary northern popular classes elected a government that would sue
for peace. To have done so, however, would have required a different commanding general in the East, one not
committed to offensive warfare. Given Jefferson Davis' disposition, that was not in the cards. See "Lee as a
Napoleonic General," below.
Attrition was cumulative, and, for Lee, it did not really become problematic until after several months into the 1864
Virginia Campaign. In the East, it was an objective outcome of the confrontation with the Army of the Potomac under
Grant. Clearly, after 18 June 1864, that is, after the initial failure to breakthrough the Petersburg defenses, Grant
undertook an active siege and, in doing so, aimed at wearing the Army of Northern Virginia down through attrition.
The entire problematic is taken up, this time from a Union perspective, in chapter 7, "Losses and Failed Work," below.

Ideological Function of Lee's Mythologization

Lee has been criticized, in recent years roundly criticized, for an all-too-rigid commitment to
the military doctrine of the strategic offensive. Such criticism reverses the reverential
treatment of Lee that was already well underway during the war itself. Grant, for example,
notes that, "General Lee ... was a very highly estimated man in the Confederate army and
states, and press of the Northern States. His praise was sounded throughout the entire North
after every action he was engaged in: the number of his forces was always lowered and that
of the National forces exaggerated." This review of opinion exhibited the divided nature of the
North, and suggests, as was obvious to contemporaries of Lee (if not to us), said acclamation
constituted tacit support for southern slavery. In other words, it reveals that whatever
historians claim to the contrary, praise of Lee has historically been inextricably tied to the
defense of slavery.589
While we cannot read Lee's wartime communications without being struck by the solidity of
the aforementioned criticism, it is one thing to suggest the two great albeit partial Union army
victories against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Antietam and Gettysburg, can be
laid to strategic blindness of a commanding general whose audacity led him to order a fight
instead of a withdrawal. It is, however, something quite different to imply that Lee operated
with an offensive "grand strategy" that as such fundamentally prejudiced the very prospects
for Confederate independence. This assumes that as a matter of counterhistorical fact the
South could have "won" the war. It smacks of a disembodied, unengaged summation based
on the whole history of warfare following the Civil War (especially localized struggles following
the last imperialist world war wherein a prolonged defensive strategy aimed at national
liberation was practically worked out). In fact, this abstract, retrospective attempt to
demonstrate the South did not have to lose the war is actually part of an effort to debunk the
myth of the "Lost Cause" as well as to critically evaluate the mythological figure of Lee.
The demystification of the figure of Lee - gentleman warrior, aloof yet loving commander for
whom his soldiers would and did (in extraordinary numbers) die, beloved family patriarch,
pure, transparent without ulterior motivation - it a step in the right direction. But it is a derailed
step all the same since it merely incarnates an academic interest in correcting traditional
historiography. This correction, however, misses the import of Lee's mystifying
mythologization; namely, beyond recognizing in Lee an excessively tradition-bound military
genius, his exalted status at once constitutes a justification for the rarefaction of the brutal,
backward regime of the planter aristocracy and obfuscates the postwar, "redemptionist"
political settlement, the institution of Bourbon democracy, that straightaway led to racial
apartheid and legal segregation.590
Basing analysis on abstract, because decontextualized, even if historical categories (a tiny,
state-sponsored industrial base linked to imports able to maintain field forces, given the rifled
musket the superiority of the tactical defensive, a vast hinterland beyond Richmond that
because of its geographical expanse appeared unconquerable, etc), does not excuse the bald
assertion that the South did not need have lost the war, because to do so is to forgo the ideal
causation of subjectively assimilated and sedimented military tradition. Moreover, it fails to
recognize that the Confederate regime itself was internally divided, that a "defensive grand
strategy" would had to have been formulated by (either) Jefferson Davis, as rebel President,
or by Lee (who was closely identified with, because sponsored by, Davis); and that Davis
589Grant, Memoirs, 514. Grant goes on to say, "to be extolled by the entire press of the South after every

engagement, and by a portion of the press [of the] North with equal vehemence, was calculated to give him the entire
confidence of his troops and to make him feared by his antagonists" (Ibid). Such is the work of a fifth column.
590The term "racial apartheid and legal segregation" as opposed to "Jim Crow segregation" is taken over from bell
hooks, Killing Rage, passim.

could not have gotten the necessary (Confederate) Congressional support to carry a major
war policy shift (that, since a grand strategy did not at any rate exist, would have actually been
a policy development) because his actions, like those of Lincoln, were increasingly and,
tendentially, correctly identified as those of a dictatorial centralizer. Finally, it (the assertion
that the South need not have lost the war) fails to note the equally "speculatively real," viz.,
counterfactual, counterhistorical possibility that Grant, staying in the West (between the fall of
Vicksburg 4 July 1863, and the November 1864 election) could have moved south from
Vicksburg, and, by concentrating forces and starting with a movement on Mobile, could have
historically telescoped Sherman's Chattanooga-Atlanta-Savannah-Carolinas campaigns,
allowing Lincoln to win re-election and isolating Virginia in a pincer's movement, thereby
defeating the Confederacy in a war of attrition.591

591For the critique of Lee's inflexible commitment to the Napoleonic military doctrine of the offensive, see Connelly

and Jones, The Politics of Command (1973), McMurray, Two Great Rebel Armies (1989), and, in particular, two works
by Nolan, Lee Considered (1991) and "R.E. Lee and July 1 at Gettysburg" (1992).
Two excellent historical novels also deal with Lee's compulsion to take the offensive. Savage, The Court Martial of
Robert E. Lee (1993), though excessively maudlin, directly confronts the problem in the broadest of plantersympathetic manners (i.e., with regard to the way in which it needlessly sacrificed rebel soldiers' lives and affected the
prospects for Confederate independence), and Michael Shara, The Killer Angels (1974). The latter, though, concerned
specifically with the battle of Gettysburg, nonetheless exhibits the conflict between Lee and Longstreet which
centered on offensive warfare: Longstreet had advocated retiring from the field after the first day and taking up a
strong defensive position between the Union army and Washington in the essentially correct belief that Meade's
forces would have been compelled to follow and launch a likely disastrous attack. Inevitably the discussion of Lee's
military strategic predilections leads to a consideration of his immediately subordinate corps commanders, specifically
James Longstreet. The opposing positions can be found in the history of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia
(Lee's Lieutenants, 3 Volumes, 1942-1944) by Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, the great champion of the
mystifying and deifying view of the Confederate commander, and Piston, Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant (1987), who
undertakes a vindication of Longstreet.
Finally, there are a number of often neglected, solid early works that also explicitly tackle the question. E. Porter
Alexander's Fighting for the Confederacy (1877) is a famous narrative history of the Civil War, embodying a good deal
of thoroughgoing criticism of Lee's offensive strategy, as told by a Confederate artillery officer. Further, two military
historians should be consulted, Bruce, "The Strategy of the Civil War," (1913) and two works by Fuller, Grant and Lee
(1933) and especially his The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929). For the abstract categories (tiny but adequate
industrial base, superiority of the tactical defensive, vast unconquerable hinterland), Beringer, Hattaway, Jones and
Still, Why the South Lost the Civil War, 9, 16.In our experience with nonprofessional historians, civil war enthusiasts
and retired military officers trained at one of the schools of the U.S. Army College, Lee remains an ideologized figure
whose influence as such is to this day still felt.

Part II
Warfare in the Bourgeois Epoch Prior to the American Civil War
The Ancient Regime and its Armies
Most successfully elaborated by Antoine Henri Jomini, the mid-nineteenth century military
doctrine of the offensive was a theoretically interpretative schematization of Napoleonic battle.
Novel, historical and, inseparably, new military-organizational conditions underpinned
Napoleon's practical synthesis and its schematization. These conditions lay at the foundations
of "modern," bourgeois warfare. Though the historical conditions are more difficult to pin
down, they are clearly a presupposition for realization of the organizational ones, so let us
begin with a rather broad characterization of those historical conditions that both made
Napoleon's art of war possible and his synthesis, including its articulated formulation, vastly
superior.
Taking France as the paradigmatic historical instance, the most important military-based
feature of society prior to the Napoleonic synthesis was the subordination of military
operations to the class power of the feudal nobility. This formulation arises retrospectively, on
the historical ground of the destruction of the feudal nobility as a hegemonic class. In historical
fact, the permanent element of the seventeenth and eighteenth century French military was
the armed force of the French aristocracy organized politically in a hierarchical form, that is, as
the central institution of a monarchical State. This State had been formed in France and
throughout Europe in the seventeenth century as an aristocratic response (structured to push
peasants back into their traditional social places) to peasant gains such as the commutation of
dues (rents in kind) that had severely restricted peasant exploitation by the nobility.
The army, developing under aristocratic tutelage and reinforcing the enlargement as well as
centralization of the State, was created at once to wage dynastic war on the continent and to
suppress peasant rebellion. Thus, the absolutist armies could have hardly been based upon
(given their raison for creation and social function) a "national" conscription. According to Jean
Bodin, the first great political philosopher of the absolutist era, "It is virtually impossible to train
all the subjects of a commonwealth in the arts of war, and at the same time keep them
obedient to the laws and magistrates."592
As evolving separate bodies, the military organizations of seventeenth and eighteenth century
European absolutism exhibited some independence, that is, quasi-professionalism among
exclusively aristocratic officers corps. But even this quasi-professionalism was limited by class
aims of an internally divided aristocracy. In France, both the country or minor nobility and
great lords of the court reproduced themselves socially through military service. But the life
trajectories of each were qualitatively different. As a social stratum, the country nobility was
impoverished. It lived among the peasantry and experienced similar hardships. It was
compelled to engage in military service in order to make its living, filling lower level regimental
posts. The great nobles lived extravagantly, plundering the royal treasury as the beneficiaries
of hunting pensions, lands, donations and appointments, monopolizing the highest positions
within the State, the Church and, of course, the military. Positions in the officers corps above
sub-lieutenancy were largely achieved by purchase, and while the country noble suffered long
years in a low rank, expecting at the end of the road to purchase a captaincy from an elderly
officer (assisting his retirement), the son of a great lord (all four thousand of them) could jump
right over him by purchasing a colonelcy before he reached twenty. Whatever professionalism
there was a potential for was wrecked by the simple fact that great aristocrats held highranking positions. Elevated to such a position without regard to military skill and capacities,
constantly seeking boons, pensions and promotions outside the normal framework of military
592For the European, especially French, feudal aristocracies control of military organizations, Perry Anderson,

Lineages of the Absolutist State, 17-18, 30 (citation from Bodin); and John Elting, Swords Around the Throne, 9-12.

awards and advance, the presence of the great nobles introduced court-based favoritism and
intrigue into the corps. These men spent little time among their troops, leaving troop training to
their non-commissioned officers. Taking extended leaves, they, of course, preferred the
machinating milieu of Versailles to the field. When in the field (and this was generally the case
among all the great nobility-based higher ranks of ancient regime militaries), they were
addicted to wealth display. This meant that field armies were accompanied by another army, a
host of domestics that included servants, cooks, hairdressers and others, along with actors,
actresses, occasionally wives but much more frequently mistresses. Sutler wagons (private
contractors supplying the armies), ladies carriages, and the paraphernalia of wealth also
accompanied the army in the field. Under these conditions as well as for internal organizations
reasons (as we shall see below), actually fighting was commonly avoided.593
Aristocratic control, then, dictated the size of the armies of the absolutist era and that of the
eighteenth century French army in particular. Rarely exceeding sixty thousand men in the
field, bloated by the, relatively speaking, massive size of the officers corps, and unable to
pursue a broadly-based conscription policy, they were decidedly smaller than Napoleon's
Grande Arme, grounded as it was on a revolutionary transformation that laid the foundations
for the early bourgeois era. Instead, these armies were organized through a recruitment of
marginal social groups, the unemployed, vagrants, poorly waged workers and even criminals,
and the employment of mercenaries, the mass of the latter being foreign born. It was largely in
times of war that ancient regime armies, especially in France, engaged in the militia
recruitment of peasant-serfs. In periods of normality, the presence of social marginals, and
foreign mercenary-based linguistic barriers (and the corresponding cultural strangeness of
peasants to the soldiery), made these armies ideal for the suppression of domestic rebellion;
but, in a strictly military sense, their presence made harsh discipline a central feature of the
armies themselves, and also severely limited their flexibility, mobility and maneuverability.
Such troop components exhibited little loyalty to the States they served; compensation of
marginal social recruits was paltry; and, though battles were infrequent and seldom decisive,
the fear of death in combat was ever present (especially since the aristocratic officer cared
nothing for the individual safety of "his" socially inferior troops, and) since combat when it did
occur generally resulted in heavy casualties. Accordingly, desertion was a problem of the first
order for these armies. Harsh discipline was the method of choice to hold ancient regime
armies together. It was the preferred method of the aristocratic officer for dealing with his
military and social subordinates, while the noncommissioned officer made violence a recurrent
feature of these armies. Use of the lash and sword were common, beating (sometimes to the
death) with gunstocks occurred with regularity, and the drill manuals of the era cover the
problem of desertion in detail. Since, tactically, the problem of desertion severely cramped
mobility and maneuverability, night marches were, for example, commonly forbidden.594
593For the class structure of aristocracy in the military and its decadence, Albert Soboul, The French Revolution,

1787-1799, 36-37, Gunther Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, 28-29, Elting, Ibid, 8-9, 10-11,
Steve Ross, From Flintlock to Rifle, 18.
The French country nobility engaged in manual labor only at the risk of social disgrace and loss of status. Accordingly,
it had to rely for its meager income on feudal dues exacted from peasants. But these extractions were fixed, based
upon rates determined centuries earlier. When collected in cash, they bore no relation to the costs of living that had
undergone a steady rise over the previous century. Thus, the minor nobility, hating the great aristocrats for their
extravagance (as well as the commercial bourgeoisie for its wealth), found its way into the king's service. (Soboul,
Ibid).
For other strata of officers within the French military (including those who were bourgeois and/or noncommissioned),
Etling, Ibid, 10; for the aristocratic entourage, Rothenberg, Ibid, 13-14.
594For the overall size of ancient regime armies as well as their sizes in the field, Ross, Ibid, 21-23; for the social
group composition of recruitment in the aristocratic armies of the ancient regime, Ibid, 19-20; for militia-based
recruitment in France as well as an account of foreign mercenary component of the French Royal Army, Etling, Ibid,

The largest fixed unit of armies of eighteenth century absolutist regimes was the regiment
composed generally of two battalions made up of several companies (or squadrons). Any
larger formations were organized temporarily on an ad hoc basis. Among field armies, the
larger units that were formed had little internal cohesion since their temporary, ad hoc
character did not allow for the constitution of a coherent identity. Lacking permanency and
identity, with regiments composed of culturally and linguistically different groups often newly
formed specifically for purposes of fighting the season's battles of the war at hand, these
armies could not have been expected to be capable of much in the way of maneuver. This
was reflected in the order of march: The position of regiments, and battalions and companies
within regiments, in a given field army during fighting was generally decided by position
assumed in the line or column as the army marched into battle. Limited flexibility and
maneuverability was also visible in the fact, first, that armies in this era were by and large
dependent on a single supply depot, usually a garrisoned town (which, in turn, further
restricted their mobility); and, second and more importantly, that once assembled, these field
armies fought as a single mass formation, a practice that in a decisive confrontation made the
destruction of the entire army possible. Field armies nonetheless had some internal
articulation: For limited tactical purposes, they were organized into columns or "wings," usually
with a center composed of infantry and artillery and a right and left usually composed of
cavalry. Still, since they were largely inflexible, the initial deployment of field armies was
crucial: In an actual confrontation wherein both armies as single unitary bodies "agreed" to
battle (or one was compelled to fight), poor initial deployment could lead straightaway to
defeat - a case in point being the French disaster experienced at Rossbach.595
Because the regiment as the largest stable unit in eighteenth century armies was rooted in the
hegemonic needs of the feudal nobility as a class, and because the aristocratic character of
the officers corps set real limitations on the professionalism of the eighteenth century military,
there were no permanent staffs above regimental level. When they came into being, field army
staffs were members, often relatives or foreign professionals, of the personal entourage of a
given aristocratic commander. Accordingly, levels of staff training and competency among
temporarily formed field armies varied enormously. Within an assembled field army, the
different staffs attached to different regimental commanders generally shared little in the way
of a detailed, developed conception about waging war. Thus, coordination of regiments within
a field army was restricted by the lack of shared military doctrine. Flexibility and maneuver
were restricted to what was intuitively inferred from broad cultural assumptions about war
common to the soldiers of the absolutist era, and field commanders were forced to spend a
good deal of their time merely attempting to coordinate movement among regiments that
were, thus, very slow in executing maneuvers.596
Summarily, then, the heterogeneous composition of field armies, the potential consequences
involved in fighting as a single mass formation, and the lack of a detailed, shared military
14, 20, 18-19, John Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic, 45, 62, and Ross, Ibid, 20-21.
Even peasant-soldiers could be deployed to put down domestic revolt: Peasants from different regions of 18 th century
France, for example, often spoke different, mutually incomprehensible dialects, exhibited different customary forms of
behavior, etc. For the French military use of peasant-serfs and their resistance to monarchical policy, Alexis de
Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 22, 101, esp. 128-129.
For the problem of desertion and harsh discipline, Ross, Ibid, 24. In suggesting the severity of this problem, Ross
(Ibid, 47, n. 50) notes, "The Austrians at Hochkirch did launch a night attack and lost 2,000 men by desertion on the
approach march. They never repeated their performance."
For examples of extraordinarily high casualties in eighteenth century battle, Ibid, 31.
595For eighteenth century military formations, Robert Epstein, Napoleon's Last Victory, 9-10, Rothenberg, Ibid, 14-16,
and Russell Weigley, The Age of Battles, 264-265; Ross, Ibid, 30-31.
596For the lack of supra-regimental staffs, Epstein, Ibid, 10, Etling, Ibid, 23. The consequences of this lack developed
here are our elaboration.

understanding among regimental staffs (not to mention the lack of a permanent staff above
the regimental level), and the corresponding ponderousness, immobility and inflexibility in
battle were all features of military formations as crucial moments of specifically aristocratic
power. Operating with at worst a precognitive understanding of these features, army
commanders in the absolutist era grasped their cumulative impact: Battle itself always carried
the enormous risk of an unqualified, convincing outcome either resounding victory or ruinous
defeat that impinged on the very existence of the State that had organized the army in
question in the first place. It led commanders to engage in a great deal of slow, cumbersome
and protracted positioning of their forces rather than risk battle on terms other than those that
heavily favored their forces. It also leads us to characterize the entire era as one in which,
generally speaking, warfare was protracted and indecisive.
The French Revolutionary Armies as the Foundation of the Napoleonic Synthesis
During the reign (1715-1774) of Louis XV, the French military underwent real decline:
Beginning with the inattention, inefficiency and incompetency of the Versailles-controlled
command, decline was a further consequence of an increasingly caste-like, nobility-based
character of the officers' corps, and a concealed depletion of regimental strength due to under
financing of the army - a lack of funds exacerbated by the inflated size and decadent
consumption of the highest layers of the army's aristocratic officers' corps and a parasitic
provisioning system of private contractors. Reforms, however, did not come easy, since the
structure and aspects of the financing of the French military reproduced and enhanced
aristocratic power. Like so many essential conservative fighting establishments, it was the
shock of military defeat and the enormous cost of the restoration of the status quo antebellum
that provided the initial impetus for reforms: The Seven Years War (1757-1763), especially the
(5 November 1857) battle of Rossbach (one of the few decisive battles of eighteenth century
warfare) in which Prussian forces under Frederick the Great convincingly defeated a vastly,
numerically superior alliance of French and Austrian forces, provided that impetus.597
Cumulative military setbacks had revealed weaknesses in regimental organization. In 1763,
the division as a military formation consisting of four enlarged regiments was introduced into
the French infantry and cavalry. This reform was initially instituted by Victor-Franois, duc de
Broglie, while its concept was explored and elaborated by Jacque Antoine Hippolyte, comte de
Guibert. In principle, the division once embedded in military practice, i.e., once it achieved the
permanence involved in functioning as a regular unit in the army, could provide stability, hence
a cohesive identity, allowing an army to operate at a higher level of military activity; that is, it
could qualitatively enhance the flexibility and mobility of a field army. It could, so to speak,
reproduce a field army in miniature: On the battlefield, it could be reasonably expected that a
single division meeting the enemy head on might hold this opponent in place, while other
divisions could maneuver against the enemy's flanks or rear. It could also lead to the
expansion of opportunities for a diversionary maneuvers, allowing a commander to more
adequately chose a battlefield with a view to advantageous terrain. It would lessen the
597For the decline of the eighteenth century French military establishment, Weigley, Ibid, 257-262; on the battle of

Rossbach, Ibid, 182-185. Against a combined English-Hanoverian-Prussian force, the French lost again at Mnden, 1
August 1759, and once again in 1760 to a Prussian-English force while achieving minor victories at Braunschweig
and Wolfenbttel in 1761. (The losses were compounded by the loss of the French North American stronghold,
Quebec, to the British in September 1759.) Having gained nothing, territorially or in the anticipated destruction of
Prussia as a great power, the French monarchy agreed to a peace, the Treaty of Paris signed 10 February 1763, with
Frederick. Ibid, 191-193.
The bloated character of the aristocratic officers corps of the French Royal Army is statistically evident. In 1787, the
French army totaled some 180,000 men of which 9,355 were officers and 781 generals. By way of contrast, the most
professional of eighteenth century armies, Frederick's Prussian force, had 103 generals for 195,000 men. Etling, Ibid,
12.

dependency upon a single supply depot, thereby again increasing flexibility. And, it would
decrease the chances of a disaster in defeat in the case where a single division was isolated
and destroyed, since the rest of the field army would still remain intact. (Off the battlefield, it
would free the commander of many of his preoccupations with the minute details of field army
organization.) In principle, the breakup of mass armies as unitary bodies into divisions (that,
spatially and temporally, were in principle capable of diverse movements across a geographic
area) also suggested the possible development of different missions assigned to each
division, missions that made up a larger plan of operations, a campaign. These, however,
were all possibilities of a military practice (inherent in the concept of a division) that largely
were undeveloped prior to the French Revolution.598
The elaboration of the concept of the division led to a debate over tactics, since the flexibility
of a field army would now depend upon the utilization of adaptable and supple tactics at the
divisional level, flexibility itself dependent upon the development of such tactics for military
formations (regiments, battalions, companies) below those of the division. Questions inside
France aristocratic military circles arose over the use of rigid linear formations as opposed to
the use of bayoneted columns, the role of light infantry, etc. But the extend of these reforms
was conditional upon more basic transformations which ran up against the French military's
essential limitations, namely, its character as an organ of aristocratic military power. Those
needed yet unrealized (and inseparable) reforms were threefold; first, a redistribution of
revenue within the military had to be effected; second, the officers corps had to be opened up
at least to the extent of allowing for the development within itself of competent officers; and,
third, the ordinary soldier had to be treated with some dignity and respect. The first opened
onto the far dicer question of the entire system of taxation upon which military financing
rested, the second presupposed a professionalization of the officers corps, and the third a
revolutionization of social relations. None of these three reforms could be accomplished short
of the destruction of the class power of aristocracy.599
The problem of any reform that touched on the class power of aristocracy can be briefly
illustrated by reference to Guibert's mature reflections. To realize, for example, those
possibilities (such as a qualitatively enlarged army coordinated in its movements, possibilities
created by the establishment of the division) for forming an army so advanced over others that
it was readily capable of achieving decisive victory in battle, it would be necessary to realize
the concept of a citizens' army in line with the Enlightenment ideals that Guibert among other
reformers had assimilated. Yet a citizens' army entailed arming the entire population of the
kingdom, a prospect that repelled Guibert's aristocratic sensibilities and from which he
recoiled. In the end aristocratic power began to flounder over the problem of military financing.
Precipitated by the cumulative costs of bankrolling the American War of Independence atop
the debt incurred in the Seven Years War, the new king, Louis XVI, was compelled to summon
the provincial parlements of France in 1787. When the parlements refused to comply with the
king's request for funding, an edict ordering troops to shut them down was meet by popular
resistance. That resistance was successful. The sequence of events that followed led to the
summoning of the Estates General of France, a body that had not assembled in over one
hundred years. If the French Revolution is dated, as popularly is the case, from 14 July 1789
(Bastille day), these events formed the opening into which it erupted. Shortly after the Louis
XVI summoned the Estates General (initially for late December 1787), a military reformer-

598For French military reforms, Epstein, Ibid, 5-6, 10-13, Ross, Ibid, 33-40, Rothenberg, Ibid, 22-24, and Weigley,

Ibid, 263-273.
599For the debate on tactics, Epstein, Ibid, 12-13.

organized War Council, sitting with Guibert as its head, codified and broadened the reforms
that had been initially instituted in the 1760s.600
In the most sweeping sense, then, the single most important "event" on which Napoleon's
achievement was premised was the destruction of the aristocratic power of the Ancien
Rgime with its noble of nobles, the king, at its summit. In the intertwined struggles against
internal counterrevolution and foreign intervention, the Jacobin dictatorship (1793-1794)
largely destroyed aristocratic power and thereby achieved the realization of two of the
conditions necessary to reformation of the military.
First, noble control of the army's officers corps was broken (resolving the problem of decadent
consumption within the upper layer of the officers corps while leaving overall financing a
largely intractable problem). Soldiers as citizens of France were social peers with officers, no
longer their inferiors. (During the early days of Jacobin ascendancy, a full two-thirds of the
officers were chosen to regimental commands by their soldiers.) Revolutionary enthusiasm,
reinforced by the wartime emergency (as well as the emigration of some sixty percent of old
regime officers), insured that merit played a new, far greater role in officer selection. Sound
officers, not the least of which was Napoleon himself and his future marshals Ney, Massena
and Lannes, characterized most of all by a comparatively novel bravery, initiative and
exemplary leadership, in a word, lan, pushed their way up through the officers corps in short
time.
The second reform was shaped by the emergence of French nationalism: The equality of
Frenchmen made it no longer possible for the (now largely unaristocratic) officers corps to
train a soldiery on the basis of brutal discipline and inhuman drill on the assumption that such
a formation would automatically lead to the desired performance on the field of battle. While
drill remained (though it lost its centrality during the first years of the existence of the new
armies of the Republic), it had been tempered by, and the officers corps as a whole had to,
first, respect republican social and political institutions and, second, inspire a nationalist fervor
which would provide the inner source of soldiery strength. Thus, from out of the Revolution
emerged the living reality of the French Republic dialectically a condition and product of the
early mobilizations of 1793-1794. Faced with war abroad and counterrevolutionary activities at
home, on 23 August 1793 the revolutionary government in Paris issued the leve en masse.
The declaration proclaimed the entire adult French population "in a state of permanent
requisition," i.e., subject to service, for the duration of war. Single males between ages
eighteen and twenty-five were to be conscripted; married men were to "forge weapons and
transport foodstuffs," older men were to publicly prod local populations to acts of national
sacrifice; and, broadly, women were to assist the wounded in hospitals, and makes tents and
clothes. No one would escape the levy, no one would be allowed to find a substitute for his
service. Before 1798, in the interests of a equality-based camaraderie newly levied conscripts
were twice assimilated to the older regular soldiery (amalgame).601
The leve en masse was the practical embodiment of the concept of the nation of citizens in
arms. As citizens of the nation, men felt themselves to be social and political equals. The
outward forms of aristocratic privilege disappeared. (Thus, Louis XVI, after 9 August 1792 and
prior to his execution, 23 Jan. 1793, was called "citizen Capet.") Those previously
characterized as "rabble," the "lower orders" and "dangerous classes" found their humanity as
men affirmed in the concept of the citizen of the nation. This raising up released an enormous
600For Guibert and the concept of a citizens' army, Weigley, Ibid, 265-266, Ross, Ibid, 35, 39, and Rothenberg, Ibid,

22-23; for a sketch of the events leading up to the Revolution in relation to military reform, Weigley, Ibid, 273-275.
601For the leve en masse, the new status of the French soldier and the novel characteristic of the officers corps,
Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 328-330, 531-532, 592 (quotations from Bertrand Barre de Vieuzac's report
to the Committee of Public Safety cited on 329); and, also Epstein, Ibid, 13-14.

socially latent dynamism and generated a profound emotional attachment to the nation, the
proof which was found in military service: This concept, subjectively assimilated, internalized
and then externalized in the practice of individuals under compulsion of the leve (a leve
which at its origins the sans culottes assemblies of Paris had demanded be instituted),
unleashed the extraordinary energies that underlay the formation of a national army. (The
Jacobin leadership was able to mobilize more than a million men before August 1794, a figure
which was unprecedented by all earlier standards and far exceeded the numbers of men in
arms of all the emerging counterrevolutionary Coalition partners combined.) A subjectively
enthusiastic conscript army of essentially citizen-soldiers, embedded in the series of
institutional reforms alluded to above, constituted a real advance, and advantage, over the
Austrian, Prussian, Russian and English enemies of the French. Basing itself on the
accumulated experience won in years of actual fighting, together citizen ardor wedded to
those reforms by the lan of newly constituted officers corps made La Grande Arme circa
1805 the finest fighting force in the western world.602
Napoleonic Warfare. Jomini
For the following discussion, reference to Antoine Henri Jomini is taken to be synonymous
with a specific military doctrine, a theoretically interpretative reduction of Napoleonic
operational practice. Such reference does not with any necessity entail a commitment to the
specific strategic, highly geometricized prescriptions formulated by Jomini in, say, his
Summary. Rather, it simply refers to a body of strategic doctrine that is rigorously Napoleonic
and which, moreover, it should be added, Jomini in fact did more than anyone else in the early
and mid-nineteenth century to elaborate and disseminate.
Jomini elaborated his theoretically interpretative schematization of Napoleonic battle in his
Trait des grand oprations militaires published in three editions between 1804 and 1818
(translated into English and published in two volumes as Treatise on Grand Military
Operations in 1865), a massive (fifteen volume) Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la
rvolution (1820-1824), his four volume Vie politique et militaire de Napolon (published in
1827 and translated by the Union "general in chief" Henry Halleck in 1864 as The Life of
Napoleon), and finally a summation that distilled the doctrine, Prcis de l'art de la guerre
(published in 1837 and successive editions, and translated into English in 1854 and 1862 as
Summary of the Art of War).
Jomini was in an excellent position to develop a theory of Napoleonic warfare. In 1803, at the
age of twenty-four, having published a book of military maxims based upon his experience as
a secretary to the Helvetic Republic - a Swiss dependency of Napoleonic France, he managed
to receive an invitation to join Marshal Ney's staff without official appointment. He took part in
the campaigns of 1805, 1806-1807 (in Poland and Prussia) and the Russian campaign of
1812-1813, obtaining an official position with the rank of colonel, becoming Ney's chief of staff,
and rising to the rank of brigadier-general. After a falling out with Napoleon's chief of staff,
Marshal Louis-Alexander Berthier, he left the French army and, not unlike other Napoleonic
generals, joined the Russian headquarters staff of Tsar Alexander I in 1813.603
In his work, Jomini achieved a synthesis of the Enlightenment perspective on military theory
and Napoleonic practice. On the one hand, he maintained, as did other authors up to the
602For the pre-revolutionary officer treatment of the soldiery, Elting, Ibid, 12-13, and Gat, The Development of Military

Thought: The Nineteenth Century, 13.

603A brief biographical account of Jomini can be found in Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought, 107-108, and
John Shy, "Jomini," 146-147, 152, 155-157.
Michel Ney, divisional commander (gnral de division) and after May 1804 corps commander (marshal) of the
Grande Arme, was one of Napoleon's outstanding field generals.

emergence of a distinctive German military school - whose greatest representative was Carl
von Clausewitz and which was romantic, illiberal, deeply nationalist and for that reason
abhorred the cosmopolitan Enlightenment (Aufklrung), that true military science constituted
an universalist theory valid for all times and places. On the other hand, Jomini was able to
grasp the essential features of Napoleonic warfare and, in a highly technical, unfortunately
narrow because geometricized and specifically military language, summarize Bonaparte's
operational art. But he only achieved this summarization by way of detaching those features of
Napoleonic warfare from their socio-historically and politically specific context. Thus, the
historically specific, doctrinal contents of this theorization were what Jomini took to be
fundamental, universally valid principles of war.
Jomini stressed formational mobility, initiative and aggressive action by commanders, and the
famed concentration of forces to achieve, what Napoleon had regarded as the chief aim of
military operations, the destruction of the enemy army. This style of warfare, of course,
entailed a certain command recklessness and (logistical) disregard for the constraints of
supply that rested on new reality of a truly massive manpower resources made available by
nationalistic appeal and achieved (by the French) through the leve en masse. The emphasis
on flexibility, mobility and maneuverability - and the tactical practices (maneuver along interior
lines) that achieved these, was a function of the shift from the ponderous movement of a
single unitary army (characteristic of eighteenth century warfare) to the campaign
(characteristic of Napoleonic warfare), that is, to a series of operations conducted by
dispersed military formations (divisions, corps and armies) spread out over a broad front that,
bringing those forces together (concentration), culminated in the decisive battle. Successful
campaigns, moreover, presupposed a decentralized command structure in the field, wherein
corps and divisional commanders demonstrated a basic competency (manifested as initiative,
aggressive conduct, and internally well coordinated and well done staff work) to cope with fast
moving events and the uncertainty and confusion due a lack of detailed knowledge of the
enemy's and all of one's own positions in the field.
The shift from the eighteenth century positioning ("defensive positional war") to the
Napoleonic battle and decision via concentration of forces ("war of annihilation") had two,
broadly speaking, central "grand tactical" elements. The first, preferred maneuver was a form
of classical envelopment that entailed a dispersal of forces against a mass enemy formation
with a view to a flanking movement around an enemy "wing" aimed at either rolling up the
wing or getting in the enemy rear and disrupting communications. This compelled the enemy
to turn disadvantageously or to disperse to regain lines of communication. Once dispersed
enemy forces could be destroyed one by one. It was known as the justly famous maneouvre
sur les derriies. The second grand tactical maneuver, used less frequently but employed
especially when an enemy was spread out, entailed, when concentrated, hitting at the enemy
center and using the achieved central position, thereby maneuvering between formations of
the divided enemy army in order to one by one destroy detached units. In either case, the aim
was to capture and hold the initiative, and to throw the mass of one's army against a portion of
the enemy's army at a decisive point, that is, at that point (e.g., an open flank, a supply line,
etc.) that threatened the viability of the enemy force.604
Napoleon's 1796-1797 Italian campaign, and his great 1805-1806 victories at Austerlitz and
Jena had been fought against armies of the Ancien Rgime. Napoleon's very achievement
had rendered those armies historically obsolete. Thus, the emphasis on speed, mobility,
decentralized field command, leadership initiative, etc., all presupposed the organizational
reforms carried through on basis of the French Revolution. These features also, it might be
604Antoine Henri Jomini, Summary of the Art of War, passim; also Azar Gat, The Development of Military Thought,

21-22, Shy, "Jomini," 152, 154, 169-170.

noted, had a geographical premise in the relatively constricted spaces of western and central
Europe, as the disastrous Campaign of 1812 in Russia was to demonstrate. (Even these
achievements, however, would not be able to cope with irregular or, if you prefer, guerrilla
warfare in which partisans might be everywhere and nowhere, farmers engaged in an ambush
this evening and tilling their fields the next morning. Where, under these conditions, was a
commander to divine a "decisive" point? And, in fact, Napoleonic France discovered further
limitations of its new style of warfare in its Peninsula Campaigns.) But once the organizational
breakthrough had been made, it could be formalized and copied relatively intact by prenational social formations, multi-national empires such as Austria and Russia, and by
militarized states such as Prussia through a series of reforms from above (such as
rationalizing recruitment, creating staff systems, opening up officers corps for promotion and
advancement, etc). The lan of officers corps might even be formalized and reproduced as
professionalism through creation of and training in war colleges; and, while the vulgar
nationalism of an appeal to the ethnic hostility of captive peoples (within, say, the Austrian
empire) toward the Napoleonic French, was no substitute for revolutionary enthusiasm of a
nation of citizens in arms, with adequate training the reorganized armies engaged on the
European continent might be able to foreclose on the possibilities of a victory through decisive
battle. Instead, with both armies (the French and, say, the Third Coalition) no longer massed
in unitary formations (thereby easily destroyed) and made more resilient by the corps
structure, emphasis on the ground would shift to a protracted struggle, a series of sequential
and (at once) simultaneous campaigns and battles, in which the outcome would be cumulative
and would be decided by attrition, that is, victory would be achieved by the side who over the
long haul and in the end had superior resources.
Jomini, for one, rooted in the universalist traditions of the Enlightenment, would not have been
able to grasp these developments (nor for that matter did Clausewitz). Rather, he extracted
the essential features of Napoleonic warfare as it had developed and been practiced,
consciously convinced that the theory of this practice represented the highest accomplishment
realizable in warfare. As long as he failed to recognize the significance of the French
Revolution, was subject neither to constant technological innovations nor, more broadly, to the
experience of rapid change that transformed economies, societies and polities with regularity,
Jomini could uphold the universal validity of his insights.
It was Napoleonic doctrine, best represented by Jomini's masterly summation - a relatively
compact, clear theory, that was to be assimilated and internalized by and governed the
military conduct of those very few theoretically sound commanders of both Union and
Confederate armies in the American Civil War.605

605Brief, stimulating and incisive, Robert Epstein's Napoleon's Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern Warfare

achieves a rare theoretically mediated and sophisticated, historical narrative of one phase of Napoleonic warfare.
See, in particular, his final chapter, "The Emergence of Modern Warfare," 171-183.

Part III
The Civil War and General Lee
Technological Change and the American Civil War
A historically new arrangement between the contending parties and technological innovations
underpinned the American Civil War. Together these novelties tended to undermine
Napoleon's practical synthesis (at least its retrospectively discernible first phase up to 1807)
and the doctrinal schematization best represented by Jomini.
Historically, the Union largely and the Confederacy tendentially were nation-states in the
modern sense of the word, and their respective armies were for the most part organized along
modern, bourgeois lines. Based upon the breakthrough created by the Revolution (i.e., by the
destruction of aristocratic class power), Napoleonic France had, on the other hand, at least
until (the campaign of) 1809, the historical advantage of being the first truly modern army.
That is, it was an army characterized both by organizational reforms that had strengthened it
rendering more resilient as a fighting body and by the nationalism that animated its conscript
soldiery. Since both of these advantages more or less accrued to Civil War armies, North and
South, the distinctive historical condition that had underpinned Napoleon's practical synthesis
was no longer unique but had largely become a condition of warfare of the era itself.
Beginning with the very end of the Napoleonic wars and right down through the Civil War,
there were a number of technically-based, armaments innovations the full utilization of which
dramatically transformed the nature and deadliness of fighting. The first innovation was the
percussion cap and the second was the cylindrically shaped, conically tipped bullet. Invented
in 1814, the percussion cap allowed for all-weather consistency in usage, since the flintlockbased musket hitherto used on the battlefield would regularly misfire in rainy weather. A
projectile-shaped bullet, appearing in 1824 and superceding a round iron ball used with a
smoothbore musket, permitted the use of a rifled musket (which was first issued to the British
infantry in 1851). The rifle(d musket) taken together with this bullet at once greatly increased
the range and the accuracy of this firearm. The range of a smoothbore musket using solid
shot was approximately 300 yards, and accuracy was not much better than 100 yards. The
rifled musket, on the other hand, had a range of close to a thousand yards, while its accuracy
ran anywhere from 300 to 400 yards depending on whose weapon was employed. That does
not mean that if hit by shot from over a 100 (or 300-400 respectively) yards, the impact would
not be lethal - to the contrary. But as anyone who has spend time attempting to find the range
of a contemporary rifle knows, once beyond its range the shot from a weapon begins to fall
below the line describing its normal trajectory. The larger the caliber of the barrel (that is, the
greater the diameter, expressed decimally as a percentage of an inch, and the weight of the
shot), the more rapidly the shot falls as its traverses distance beyond the range of the weapon
fired.
The calibers in use at the outset of the Civil War were extremely large, particularly by today's
standards. For example, in 1861 Confederate soldiers were issued .69 caliber smoothbore
muskets. (Shortly after Gettysburg the muskets used by rebel troops were replaced by .58 and
.54 caliber rifled muskets.) In contrast, contemporary military issues are in two basic calibers, .
223 and .308. (Outside the United States, these calibers are expressed metrically, 5.56mm
and 7.62mm respectively.) The smaller contemporary calibers have lost nothing in firepower,
that is, in impact, since the latter is a mathematical function of the relation of velocity to
weight, and since the velocity of today's smaller calibers using modern firing mechanisms is
qualitatively greater than those of the Civil War era. Now, the advantages of the rifled over the
smoothbore musket had nothing to do with overall weight. The former might weigh from 8
lbs to 9 lbs, while the Mississippi rifle model 1841 rebuilt by the Union Army to
accommodate the .58 Mini bullet weighed 9 lbs. (Compare these with a contemporary

Heckler & Koch 7.62, 30 round fully automatic that when loaded weighs approximately 12
lbs., 2 lbs. of which is ammunition and clip.) Nor, in contrast to contemporary weapons with
their varying magazine sizes, were either smoothbore or rifled musket anything other than
single shot. There were, though, two significant advantages. The first, less well-known one
derived from size. Smoothbore muskets generally had barrels ranging from 42-45" long
making the overall length of the weapon about 59," nearly five feet. The rifled musket (in the
example just cited), however, had a 33" barrel and an overall length of 48," that is, a full
twenty percent shorter. That foot shorter made the rifled musket much less wieldy and
cumbersome on the battlefield - especially in wooded areas, corn fields (Antietam) or tangled
underbrush (Chancellorsville and the Wilderness); it made reloading easier; and, because of
its accuracy at 3-4 times the distance of the smoothbore (and this is the second advantage), it
increased the range at which soldiers could be expected to inflict casualties on enemy troops.
This advantage was so decided that it demanded a major transformation in battlefield infantry
tactics that, in turn, changed the nature of warfare.606
Whenever maneuver of armies, corps or divisions preceded an actual attack, the model of
infantry movement at the moment of attack, extracted largely from French practice - especially
Napoleon's earlier campaigns (which themselves were based upon tactics developed by the
revolutionary armies of the First Republic), took the form of a frontal assault. Assault tactics
based upon the French "Regulations of 1791" entailed two forms of attack, either in deep
columns (l'ordre profund) in which eight company battalions deployed in two columns of four
companies each, with each companies deploying three men deep in close order formation; or
in lines (l'ordre mince) in which battalions assumed the shape of a continuous line of
companies. The soldiers of the first armies of the new Republic, sensitive to their newly
achieved status as citizens and social equals of their officers found both extensive drill and
regular army discipline anathema. Whole brigades deployed mostly in skirmishing order, en
dbandade or, as opponents preferred, in "hordes." The brigades massed as they charged
using bayonets to finish the assault. This tactic, emphasizing "shock" over firepower, was
consciously adapted by the armies' organizers (especially Carnot, also Saint-Just) with a view
to the sans-culotte equation of military discipline with aristocratic officer control.607
Napoleon's armies, the core of which consisted in veterans of the revolutionary armies of
1793-1794, evolved a tactical order that synthesized these earlier forms. The ordre mixte, a
variation which in practice would be utilized by Civil War armies, deployed skirmishers out
front, lines of battalions (regiments) in the main body and columns of battalion-based
companies to the rear. Individual commanders from the company level on up displayed and
were encouraged to display tactical initiative. Consequently, formations would, when terrain or
the character of the immediately opposing enemy force dictated, shift, say from lines to
columns and vis-a-vis. Napoleon instituted fairly constant, regular drill during those periods in
which his armies were encamped (and unengaged in a campaign).
The French armies developed impressive skills in making tactical formational changes under
battlefield conditions. Commanders would throw new forces into battle as they hit the field of
606For the percussion cap, the cylindrical bullet and the rifled musket, Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant,

51-53, 57-61. For the specific manner in which these weapons innovations changed warfare, Catton, A Stillness at
Appomattox, 154-155 and Humphreys, The Virginia Campaign, 75-76.
Though this change in the nature of warfare occurred as a result of qualitatively increased firepower, that infantry
tactics requisite to adequately coping with this change were not adequately and never thematically developed in the
American Civil War (nor were they developed, for that matter, even as late as the first imperialist world war, the "Great
War.")
By 1864, adequate, here open order infantry tactics were elaborated, literally, on the ground by the common soldiery
when left to their own devises. See the next section, immediately below, in particular the text at fn. 37.
607For French tactics, Ross, Ibid, 70-78, 93-108, and Rothenberg, Ibid, 114-118.

engagement, unlike their ancient regime counterparts that had to wait upon the entirety of the
soldiery to come up before additional deployment could be undertaken. In each moment of
this tactical evolution, the French armies of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods stressed
a massed concentration at the designed point of attack. Troops would mass together and fire
a single or two volleys in order to maximum the effect of erratic and inaccurate musket fire.
Aimed fire was consciously discouraged. Two features conditioned this tactic allowing it to
make good sense. First, with manpower supplied by national conscription, the French armies
had the resources to absorb (and inflict) losses that commanders of ancient regime armies
opposing them could not match. Second, facing weapons whose test-established accuracy
entailed hitting a ten foot wide by six foot high target about sixty out of one hundred times at
hundred paces, a massed charge had a reasonably good change, if resolutely carried, of
succeeding.608
Technological improvements had, however, far outstripped tactical developments by the time
of the American Civil War. Thus, even the model detailed in Hardee's Tactics used by both
sides at the outset of the war emphasized the following: Two lines (as opposed to columns) of
soldiers, as few as two deep in close-order formation (i.e., shoulder to shoulder) would fire a
round or two and then charge the enemy defensive line with fixed bayonets. The rationale was
that, using smoothbore muskets (and not distinguishing them from rifled muskets), the
defenders would get off one at most two rounds prior to the assault force hitting the defensive
line - assuming the defenders did not retire, or retreat and attempt to reform their line.
Penetrating the line in this way would create a breech in which further troops could be poured
in widening the opening and eventually getting in the enemy's rear. Because it had been
successfully employed in the Napoleonic past, it was assumed an unyielding front assault
would always spelt defeat for the defensive force. Accordingly, the drills that were taught
infantry were also modeled on this practice. The rifled musket, however, had qualitatively
increased the casualties of assaulting forces by a factor of four to five. Such attrition would
virtually destroy the lines making up a frontal assault force, and should any of the attackers
reach the defensive line their numbers would be inadequate to breach that line; rather, they
too would be killed or wounded and left to die.609
New Outcome of Frontal Assaults during the American Civil War
As exemplary instances of this change in assault outcomes wrought by weapons
improvement, consider briefly the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg.
Between roughly 9:30 am and 1 pm on 17 September 1862 two divisions (French's and
Richardson's) of Sumner's II Corps assaulted Confederate defenses in the center of the
battlefield held largely by remnant brigades of Garland, Colquitt, Rodes and Anderson,
brigades under the divisional commander, D.H. Hill, Jackson's corps (though under the overall
command of Longstreet since he held command responsibility for the Confederate center).
The rebel forces held this line, a portion of a road, known alternatively as the "Sunken Road"
or "Bloody Lane" that ran roughly west-east. That portion of the road had been eroded and
consequently the road bed lay several feet beneath its shoulder. This was particularly the case
on the north side of the road at which Union forces on a ridge mounted their assaults. Once
within a hundred yards of the road, bayonet charges in the Napoleonic style were attempted
608For Napoleonic tactics, Ross, Ibid (who emphasizes the continuity between revolutionary and Napoleonic armies),

and Rothenberg, Ibid; for weapons accuracy, Ibid, 65.

609In the era of Napoleonic wars, bayonet charges apparently rarely ended in hand-to-hand combat. Rather, it was
the threat of the use of the bayonet that was decisive. Engaging in a fixed bayonet charge, should a massed attack
have gotten to the point of a breakthrough, the defenders were either demoralized and withdrew or, terrified, turned
and ran. Ibid, 69.

first with Weber's, Morris' and Kimbell's brigades (French's divisions), latter by Meagher's Irish
brigade (Richardson's division). Interspersed with these charges were similar rebels
countercharges. (Contrary to received opinion, bayonet charges were not uncommon in the
first year and a half of the war.) The battle sea-sawed back and forth for over three and a half
hours with certain brigades (e.g., Meagher's regiments) taking over 60% casualties.
As fighting in this part of the battlefield wound down, Union forces largely held the road, the
Confederate center had been shattered. Neither command, however, was able to further
engage lacking heavy reinforcements. Union casualties in that short space of time were put at
approximately 3,000 men, Confederate casualties at roughly 2,700. During the course of the
fighting at Bloody Lane, six brigade level Union charges of which at least three were fixed
bayonet charges and three Confederate countercharges were attempted. The casualty figures
were extraordinarily high by mid-century standards largely because of the short-distance
bayonet charges. Why? The theory of battlefield tactics had been completely overtaken by
technological developments: Massed charges were no match for improved weapons fire
accuracy at greater distances.610
On the 2nd and 3rd days at Gettysburg, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum, commander of XII Corps
and until 2 July temporary commander of the entire right wing of the Union army (positioned
on Cemetery and Culp's Hills), had XII Corps occupy Culp's Hill where it heavily entrenched.
Two divisions of the Confederate II Corps, commanded by Major Generals Edward Johnson
and Jubal Early respectively, stood opposed and generally downhill of these defenses. While
the strategically main action was away from Culp's Hill on the second day (on the Union left)
and third day (at the Union center), diversionary movement by the Richard Ewell's II Corps
aimed at seizing Culp's Hill provoked heavy fighting. In this context, rebel units repeatedly
charged Union defenses. Confederate infantry, assaulting men armed with rifled muskets
behind fortified trenches, experienced enormous causalities while, relatively speaking, Union
losses in the same part of the battlefield were light. Brig. Gen. John W. Geary, commander
2nd division (XII Corps), noting that Union forces under his command were attacked in "four
separate and furious charges" by "vastly superior numbers," estimated his troops killed 1,200
rebels, wounded 4,800 and took about 1,000 prisoners, while experiencing smaller losses that
in no way corresponded to those of the Confederates. For the record, actual Union casualties
for 3rd brigade, 2nd division (commanded by Brig. Gen. George S. Greene) that bore the blunt
of the attack, were 67 killed, 212 wounded and 24 missing or captured. Casualties for entire
XII Corps over all three days of fighting totaled 204 killed, 812 wounded and 66 missing or
captured.611
Geary attributed this outcome to the utmost unflenching gallantry of troops and to the
efficiency of our intrenchments. He stated, Our men were afforded by them [the
breastworks] a shelter which rendered our casualties surprisingly incompatible with so terrible
and prolonged an engagement." While Geary exhibited "a sort of dazed bewilderment"
(Catton) with the enormous disparity in casualties on the two sides, he thus indicated that
gallantry and fortified entrenchments produced this outcome. In this single respect, other field
commanded submitted similar reports in the aftermath of the battle. That is, while not all
surprised, there were various attributions all of which taken together did not so much as
suggest a matter of dazed bewilderment as one of mystified understanding of what had
happened. Slocum himself noted the disparity in casualties, but was very matter-of-fact like,
610For Antietam, Stephen Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 237-252, and James Murfin, The Glean of Bayonets, 245-

262; for the view that bayonet charges were not only uncommon but rare, Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army, 188.
For battlefield locales, see the Antietam map accompanying chapter 4, above.
611For Gettysburg, Geary's estimates and remarks appear in WR, Ser, I, V. 27, Pt, 1, 831-832; for actual Union
casualties, Ibid, 184, 185.

professional, attributing Union success to breastworks in manner of what is to be expected.

Brig. Gen. A.S. Williams, temporary command of XII Corps, noted on a couple of occasions
the relative small loses of Union forces aligned against rebels. He (like Geary) was also
surprised, but in relating that Union positions held well attributed success to the skill and
judgment of officers. And Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Ruger, commander 1st division (XII Corps),
noted that Confederates suffered severely and that Union losses were comparatively light,
while without surprise or amazement attributing the outcome to an enemy advance through
terrain of large rocks that slowed advance against fortified position in conjunction with a crossfiring enfilade. While Ruger came close to grasping what had happened, and while there is a
clear understanding of the significance of a fortified position under Civil War conditions, there
is no recognition in anyone of the reports of the role of weaponry itself.612
After Fredericksburg (12 December 1862), if not before, defensively engaged men who
actually used rifled muskets in combat immediately grasped their newly acquired advantage
and began to dig trenches from which they could stand up and fire (see Map (Sketch) 6). A
simple division of labor (specified in the era's tactical manuals) was utilized: As others posted
in a "line" behind those firing would do the reloading, handing the shooter the reloader's
loaded weapon, in order to increase the efficiency of the defense. The trenches were dug
deep, often times in an existing road rut or behind a stone fence, and over the course of the
war these trenches became increasingly sophisticated. As we have seen, at Gettysburg, XII
Corps forces on the Union right re-enforced Culp's Hill with earth and logs (from trees cut
down in the immediate vicinity). Tree slashings and entire felled trees or large limbs fully
branched and leaved, called abattis, were commonly dragged and placed to the front of
fortified trenches in order to slow down an assault and increase the number of shots that could
be gotten off from within the trench(es). At Cold Harbor, the entire Confederate Army of
Northern Virginia entrenched itself in a elaborate, complex and labyrinthine series of
crisscrossing trenches that took the fullest advantage of all the swells and dips in the terrain in
order to maximize enfilade, cross-fire and entrapment of the assaulting Union forces.
Needless to say, the troops on the ground grasped the frontal assault had under conditions of
the use of new weaponry become suicidal, and whenever they had any choice at all this form
of assault was dispensed with. Instead, soldiers on the ground began to steadily and
practically assert the primary of open order tactics. These tactics dispensed with mass
formations and stressed skirmishing, entailing movements in small dispersed groups of
soldiers who sought whatever cover the terrain offered (a tree, stump, brush clump, rock,
ditch, etc.) fired, and advanced to the next naturally available cover, etc., thereby in effect
slowing building up a firing line against enemy's defense. Nonetheless, at command levels
recognition of inherent dangers of the frontal assault under conditions of improved weaponry
was very slow in developing.613
612For Catton's analysis ("a sort of dazed bewilderment that the men had been able to wreck a whole Rebel army

corps at comparatively small cost"), Ibid, 155; for Slocum's remarks, WR, Ser. 1, V. 1, P. 1, 760-761; for Williams'
report, Ibid, 778; for Ruger's remarks, Ibid, 780-781.
In 1883, Andrew A. Humphreys (in 1864, major general and Chief of Staff to Meade commanding the Army of the
Potomac and, in 1865, commander II Corps in the Virginia Campaign replacing Winfield Scott Hancock) published his
The Virginia Campaign of 1864-1865. By that time he also understood the changes the rifled musket had wrought in
warfare. Describing the heavily fortified entrenchments at Spotsylvania he stated, "With such intrenchments as these,
having artillery throughout, with flank fire along their [the rebel] lines whenever practicable, and with the rifled
muskets then in use, which were as effective at three hundred yards as smooth-bore muskets at sixty, the strength of
the army sustaining attack was more than quadrupled, provided they had force enough to man the intrenchments
well. In fact there is scarcely any measure by which to gauge the increased strength thereby gained" (emphasis
added). And in a footnote, he noted that effectiveness was a matter of accuracy, not range. Humphreys, Ibid, 75-76.
613For the evolution of open order tactics, Ross, Ibid, 158f. Catton (Ibid, 191-193) gives an excellent description of
the new tactics as developed by the soldiery in the American Civil War.

Nearly all Civil War commanders, in fact, were slow in understanding the dangers inherent in
a frontal assault against heavily fortified infantry employing rifled muskets. This technicallybased, armaments innovation, together with the nationalism of armies on both sides, had
rendered the early Napoleonic model of offensive warfare largely obsolete and dangerously
counterproductive. Yet on neither side was a theorization of an alternative to offensive warfare
generated, much less elaborated, during the whole course of the war.
Lee as a Napoleonic General
If there was a single general whose, more than anyone else's, generalship was shaped by the
prevailing, theoretically mediated conception of Napoleonic warfare, it was Robert E. Lee. It is
well-known that Lee had his own copy of a French edition of Jomini's Prcis. The strategies
realized in Confederate maneuver at the Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville exhibited a
masterful grasp of the maneouvre sur les derriies. While Antietam was fought defensively
(and could have been refused), the entire Maryland Campaign of 1862 was strategically
offensive. And, similarly, so was the Pennsylvania Campaign of 1863. That campaign
culminated in a Confederate disaster on the third day at Gettysburg, Pickett's Charge, in
which execution of a variation on the strategy of the central position was undertaken. In fact,
for the nearly two years from the Seven Days (May-June 1862) until the battle of Spotsylvania
(May 1864), under Lee's command the Army of Northern Virginia, able to maneuver, assumed
the offensive.
Lee's adherence to the military doctrine of the offensive was bound up with his selfunderstanding of the limitations of a Confederate defensive strategy. Efforts to defend,
geographically, the outer perimeters of the South, efforts along Atlantic coastal Georgia and
South Carolina Lee personally oversaw early in the war, and the losses of Forts Henry and
Donelson which spelled the loss of Kentucky and Tennessee in February 1862, all
demonstrated to Lee the porousness of a passive defense of Confederate boundaries. With
extensive borders and limited manpower, any such defense could be easily engulfed and
overcome by a concentration of Union forces at any given point on the perimeter, thus
opening the way into the Confederate heartland.
Lee's initial response was strategically "offensive-defensive," viz., an attempt to deprive the
Union enemy of the advantages a passive defense presented by assaulting a chosen point,
seizing the initiative and thus determining where the focus of military operations would lie.
This was, for example, the strategy he followed in taking command of Confederate forces in
Virginia (May 1862): As McClellan brought the Army of the Potomac up the Virginia Peninsula
toward York, Lee had rebel forces in the western part of the state placed under Thomas
Jackson and instructed them to concentrate in the Shenandoah Valley. At Winchester,
Kernstown, Front Royal, Woodstock, New Market, Cross Keys and Port Republic, these
forces confronted, harassed and did battle with Union troops under Frmont, Banks and
McDowell, captured huge quantities of arms and supplies, and prevented them from
reinforcing McClellan. Yet as the Seven Days were quickly to suggest, especially the attack at
Malvern Hill against a heavily fortified and a numerically far superior enemy who occupied the
high ground, Lee immediately and aggressively went over to the offensive.
On the face of it, this may have strategically justified at least in the short-term. But with
mounting Confederate casualties relative to potential manpower reserves, by Fredericksburg
some seven months later the counterproductive nature of this strategy should have become
increasingly clear. Why Fredericksburg? On 13 December 1862 at Fredericksburg, wave after
wave of Union forces assaulted a mile and a half long line of Confederate soldiers. The latter
stood in shallow trenches behind a stone fence on slightly higher ground than the assaulting
Union forces that had to cross an open area some seven hundred feet wide. In a single

afternoon some 12,700 Union soldiers fell. It was from this battle that Longstreet dated his
explicit understanding of the extraordinary casualties soldiers employing rifled muskets in an
entrenched defense could inflict. The question is why Lee, fully conscious of the debilitating
losses the strategic offensive was imposing on his own forces, could not come to the same
conclusion.614
Lee's understanding of the military value of the offensive was trebly mediated. First, he
recognized that losses in the West, especially those in the Mississippi Valley (of which
Vicksburg was the last Confederate stronghold), and the slow but strangling effect of the
Union naval blockade, would eventually at least in the cumulative sense render Union
advances and successes irreversible. Second, his immediate soldier's intuition, mediated by
the entirety of his military formation, told him that a climatic battle could still be fought and
having been fought render victory decisive: If fought and won on northern soil, "those people"
would experience such fear and demoralization, they would compel their political leaders to
sue for peace. Against the background of growing troop losses (to combat casualties, disease
and desertion), it was the dogged effort to make this insight real that leads us to characterize
that effort as an attempt to out-Napoleon Napoleon himself. Third, the entire force of Lee's
personality came down on the side of the military theory of the offensive.615
From this perspective it is neither trite nor redundant to say Lee pursued the strategic
offensive because he was the man he had become. The validity and forcefulness of this
assertion rests on several considerations. In the first place, the theory of Napoleonic warfare,
as formulated by, say, Jomini, accorded a large role to personal genius. Genius mediated the
eternal verities of the proper conduct of war to specific, concrete battlefield situations. Thus,
battlefield victory was only possible for those commanders possessed of military genius. Such
a theory had intrinsic appeal to pride in achievement and ambition that appear to have
characterized not just Lee but most of the leading generals of the Civil War (in particular,
those whose military formation suggests they took theory seriously). In the second place,
there was further emotionally satisfying psychological appeal to a gentlemen planter in the
structural homology between an Enlightenment-grounded, universalist theory of Napoleonic
warfare and the ideologically projected, essentially moral, stable and unchanging world of
614Because the Confederates fought the battle of Antietam defensively, it should not be forgotten, as we noted in the

text, that the entire 1862 Maryland Campaign (of which Antietam was the climax) was undertaken by Lee as an
offensive operation. James Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets (196-197) wrote:
"Should the impending battle bring defeat, there was only one retreat route; one river ford that was usable. The
speculation of a rout - the prisoners, the loss of lives - was a grim thought. It would surely be catastrophic. Why then
did Lee risk the future of the Confederacy; the future of his beloved Virginia? The fervent hopes of foreign intervention
were, most assuredly, on his mind. But such thoughts were remote in view of more immediate probabilities. Lee was
in Maryland. He had committed himself to this campaign merely by crossing the Potomac River. The division of his
army and the subsequent discovery by McClellan further committed Lee to battle. The victory would, of necessity,
have to be a decisive one. Failure to offer battle to McClellan would be open admission that the entire campaign was
based on faulty [offensive] strategy. This Lee could not afford to do.
"[Furthermore, Lee ] ... honestly believed that he could beat McClellan.
"Lee continued to entertain thoughts that the Army of the Potomac was in a 'demoralized' condition. His
underestimation of its 'recovery power' was his greatest mistake. Neither the Seven Days nor Second Manassas
offered any substantial proof that the Federal army was incapable of fighting. [John] Ropes [The Story of the Civil
War, II: 352] states that Lee was 'unable to discriminate between successes obtained against poor troops, and
successes obtained against good troops - poorly led.' It would seem too that Lee was unable to discriminate between
the human limit of his own army and the spirit with which his men fought. This combined miscalculation would spell
the end to the Maryland Campaign."
Note the sketched line drawings reproduced here from John Bigelows The Campaign of Chancellorsville that
diagrammatically illustrate the entrenchments at Fredericksburg allowing the viewer to easily grasp their excellent
defensive.
615For the Lee's recognition of the logic of developments in the West, Weigley, The American Way of War, 112.
"Those people" was the term Lee consistently used to identify northerners.

patriarchal master and his dependencies. This theory would have, it might be suggested,
reinforced Lee's sense of proper order in the world. In the third place, Lee was a Virginia
patriot to an extent that today is difficult to understand (especially in an era in which patria
means nation and in which those American territorial unities called states are largely
governmentally administrative bodies to which there is, even among chauvinists, little
emotional allegiance). Commitment, albeit a commitment that for all the other reasons
discussed above had already long been formed, to a theory that logically demanded an
aggressive defense of that homeland would only have been deepened by the belligerent
intrusion of Union forces into Virginia. Such a commitment would have been intensely felt by
any honorable southern gentlemen. These motives, specifically his state patriotism, created in
Lee an ideational blindness to the twofold consequences of his longer term practical
commitment to the Napoleonic theory of warfare. His myopic focus on Virginia led him at once
to fail to volunteer his genius to the service of the Confederacy as a whole and to continue to
drain off the thin manpower reserves of the South in a war of attrition against the Union Army
of the Potomac. Lee, in fact, was so blinded that analytically he could not even coherently
grasp the connection between the practical pursuit of the strategic offensive and the attrition
that was grinding down the Army of Northern Virginia. (He consistently blamed desertion and
unpatriotic sentiment on the home front for the depletion of manpower reserves.) Thus, Robert
E. Lee, reflexively comprehending and explaining his own motives in terms of the theory of
Napoleonic warfare, pursued the strategic offensive because the entire force of his personality
and his own provincial understanding of the centrality of a decisive victory on northern soil to
Confederate independence compelled him to do so.616
Real Possibilities of Confederate Strategy
At the outset of the war "British observers" thought that it would be difficult for the
Confederacy to lose the war. This view was predicated on adoption of a "defensive grand
strategy," that is, a refusal of a policy oriented toward outright military victory on the basis of a
conventional army fielded for the purpose of waging a decisive battle (or series of battles).
Instead, on this view, the South with its vast geographical expanse would let the Union armies
carry the war to it, fielding an army and fighting conventional battles when necessary and, in
this context, taking the offensive when advantageous. The design would be to fight a war of
attrition, but not one based on Lee's aggressive pursuit of battle, one in which men and
matriel would be extravagantly consumed as was the case with the Army of Northern Virginia
616George A. Bruce ("The Strategy of the Civil War," 465, 470-471) sees in Lee a provincial general who simply did

not think beyond Virginia. " ... Lee never looked at the war in a broad, general way, his mind being absorbed upon a
single campaign with slight reference to it bearings upon or relation to other operations" ("Ibid," 471). T. Harry
Williams (Lincoln and his Generals, 313) remarks that Lee was uninterested in "global" strategy with little aptitude for
grand planning and even less interest in theatres outside Virginia - and this marked him inferior to Grant. John
Keegan (The Mask of Command, 197) bluntly states, "For all their operational expertise, Lee and Jackson proved
men of limited imagination. Neither found means of forcing the North to fight on their terms, as they might have done
had they tempted the Northern armies to enter the vast spaces of the South and manoeuvre out of touch with their
railroad and river lines of supply. Both thought in terms of defending the South's frontiers rather than exhausting the
enemy. The defeat of the Confederacy was in part the consequence of their essentially conventional outlook"
(emphasis added).
For Lee's criticism of desertion (including "straggling") and the unpatriotic avoidance of military service (draft evasion
and payment of "substitutes") which amounted to his understanding of attrition to the virtual exclusive of its strategical
offensive root, Dowdey, Wartime Papers, 307 (13 Sept. 1860 letter to J. Davis), 322 (19 Aug. 1863 letter to Adj. Gen.
Samuel Cooper), 389 (10 Jan. 1863 letter to Sec. of War James Seddon), 591 (17 Aug. 1863 letter to J. Davis), and
659-660 (22 Jan. 1864 letter to J. Seldon). For Lee's parochialism, see Weigley's assessment, Ibid, 125 and 497, n.
63. Documentary evidence can be found in Dowdey, Ibid, 505 (8 June 1863 letter to J. Seddon) and 527-528 (23
June 1863 letter to J. Davis) where Lee defends the Pennsylvania Campaign he was undertaking in terms of the
necessity of protecting Richmond from siege. See also the June 1864 (day unspecified) letter to A.P. Hill in Ibid, 760.

as the war actually unfolded. The minimization of losses, especially of southern men, would
have then allowed the resources poor South to effectively compete with the material wealth of
the North. Attrition would be not so much a matter of destruction of property and lives, but a
slow process of sapping the will to fight of the northern popular classes. Under these
conditions, sooner or later European recognition of southern national independence would
have been forthcoming, and the federal Union would be forced into negotiations to terminate
the conflict.617
This line of argumentation is consistent and, abstractly considered, coherent. The question is
whether there was ever a real possibility that it could have been embodied in Confederate
military practice. There never, not even partially or inconsistently, was. In our view, the
Confederate government not only never developed a "defensive grand strategy" but altogether
lacked a grand strategy in the first place. In the literature, there is a silence regarding the
motives for this failure. Whether or not it is conscious (it is surely not explicitly stated), there is
a reason for this agnosticism: A defensive grand strategy was never a possibility for the South,
and the reason is that the assimilation, internalization and practical pursuit of the military
doctrine of the offensive by the Confederate command in one theatre of the war, and tacit if
not full support of southern political leaders for this practice (especially President Davis),
precluded, on the one hand, practical, militarily coherent elaboration of this option on the
ground and, on the other, systematic reflective consideration of such a strategy at the highest
level of government.618
Now, in making this type of argument timing is the essential element of a coherent account.
So, from the Confederate side itself it was only retrospectively, some twenty-two years after
the end of the war, that Porter Alexander was able to mount a thoroughgoing critique of Lee's
offensive strategy. There was a reason for the delay: The categories in which rebel military
thought during the Civil War were enveloped, and in which that thought was so ensconced
that it was unable to break out of, were those that theoretically elaborated Napoleonic
practice. There were several reasons that this envelopment was so complete that a
breakthrough was not forthcoming. First, the principles of military science (largely Jomini's)
were at once "scientific," that is, universalist, and clear, systematic and hitherto unassailed;
second, this universalist character was, as argued earlier, congruent with the planter vision of
the world as it ought to be, stable and unchanging; and, third, the cumulative weight of
technological innovation of military armaments was not so great as yet to demand a rethinking
of principles of war. Moltke was, at least initially in his military practice the first to grasp the
historically specific character of Napoleonic warfare. But, then, Moltke was also operating in
an intellectual milieu that was distinctively historicist, one also shaped by Clausewitz's
polemics against Jomini. With weaponry advances (e.g., repeating rifles, gattling guns) having
proceeded so far that the old Napoleonic-based tactical system had visibly been rendered
obsolete, and with proof of this obsolescence given by the wars of German Unification (18701871) which was now behind him, by the time Porter Alexander wrote the hegemony of the
doctrine of the strategic offensive (best schematized in the works of Jomini) had also already
617For the British observers and Confederate defensive grand strategy, see James McPherson, The Ordeal by Fire,

184; and, also Nolan, Lee Considered, 70-71. The term "observers" is Nolan's, McPherson refers to "military experts."
618See Nolan, Lee Considered, 69-75.
In fact, the assessment that a defensive grand strategy was never, not even partially or inconsistently, undertaken is
not entirely correct. Between 6 May and 17 July 1864, Joseph Johnston in the West pursued such a strategy against
the Sherman-led, Union Army of the Cumberland as it moved on Atlanta. The strategy was largely ineffective and
Jefferson Davis, who had a longstanding animus toward Johnston, sacked the Confederate commander and replaced
him with John Bell Hood, like Lee another (in this case, theoretically unsophisticated) exponent of Napoleonic
warfare. The results were similar to those in Virginia: Inside two weeks, in front of Atlanta Hood the slugger lost
20,000 men, a full third of his army, in three unsuccessful attacks on the Sherman's forces.

begun to dissolve. By 1887, he was, accordingly, able to rise to a relatively systematical

critique of Lee's practice. But during the Civil War itself, he was merely struck by the
wrongheadedness, say, of a frontal assault on Union defenses on the third day at Gettysburg.
Similarly, Longstreet.
Longstreet, more than anyone else in either army, intuitively grasped that warfare had
changed. He recognized the rifled musket and projectile-shaped bullet conjoined to fortified
entrenchments had rendered offensives charges of earlier wars suicidal. Yet, while he could
on the spot elaborate a specific alternative course of defensive action, he was unable to
develop a theoretical alternative that could have challenged the existing military paradigm. In
other words, he had no theoretically mediated, solid military ground to stand on. Finally, there
is the question of McPherson's "British military experts."
The comparison invoked here was between the British in the American War of Independence
and the Union in the American Civil War. 619 Yet while George Washington led an army that
fought defensively in a perimeter that stretched from Boston to Yorktown, and the territory the
Confederate armies sought to defend constituted a land mass that extended from the Atlantic
to the Mississippi (and beyond) east to west and from the Ohio to the Gulf north to south, the
vast differences were in two respects reduced to such an extent that abstract considerations
of space are misleading: First, populations were qualitatively greater in the North and South
(than that of the colonies in relation to the overseas fighting force the British mustered).
Accordingly, larger armies could be fielded: Thus, there were several different theatres of
fighting in the Civil War, and each theatre had distinctive military formations which confronted
one another on each side. On the face of it the major problem here was not one of space but
formation of a command adequate to national objectives. Second, railroads particularly, but
also steamship transportation, greatly reduced the time involved in covering those enormous
distances. For example, In early autumn 1863 it took Hooker just six days to move his
command from northern Virginia (elements of which were spread out along the Orange &
Alexander railroad) to Stevenson on the Tennessee - Alabama border. Whereas a movement
from the Virginia Peninsula to Boston in 1780 could not have been accomplished in fifty
percent more time. Thus, with a view to technological advances in transportation, vast
geographical spaces could not be said to have rendered the two wars similar to one another.
(Instead, it rendered the spaces of Civil War geography actually more compact than those of
the American War of Independence.) The transposition of an argument contextually generated
in and pertinent to the conduct of war in 1780 may be only superficially relevant to war in
1860.
There was one further difference that renders this argument suspicious. That argument
concerns generalship, in particular that of Ulysses S. Grant, a discussion which we shall take
up shortly. Of course, at the outset of the war, the strategic genius that guided the Union
armies (first the West, then overall) to victory from early 1863 onward, could not be foresee.620
We should note, moreover, that McPherson's "British military expects" are a sleight of hand.
The articles that McPherson cites (appearing 18 July 1861 and 29 August 1862) are, in the
manner of Times (London) in this era, unattributed. There is no internal evidence that the
opinions expressed were those of "military experts" or those of anyone other than one or more
military observers, in the precise sense of someone who has as a non-participant watched or
619Writing in 1913, Col. George A. Bruce ("Ibid," 468-469), tacitly contrasting the two wars, similarly compared the

generalship of George Washington, who did fight defensively, and Lee. Lee, of course, did not grand strategically, as
Bruce states, rise to the level of Washington: Lee, unlike Washington, was incapable of mastering the "art of war," i.e.,
"using the forces of a nation in a way to secure the end for which it [war] is waged, and not in a succession of great
battles that tend to defeat " "Ibid." This much said, it should also be noted that Washington was possessed of no
military genius, just dogged determination and a grim willing to fight on til the end.
620For Grant, see chapter 7, below.

viewed an event. In our view, the remarks of McPherson's "British military experts" were
simply more or less informed, Times editorial speculation.621
Whatever we make of the "tactical defensive" implicit in the views of these "experts," we must
recognize that they were isolated and their opinions carried little, nay, no military weight
whatsoever. The reason here is the same: At the time of the Civil War in England, as well as in
America, concepts of Napoleonic warfare largely elaborated by Jomini dominated the
traditions of military thinking. Right down to the 1870s, it was Jomini that was taught and
whose influence was felt at the British military institute, the Staff College. This much is
clear.622 As a matter of historical fact, down to the very end of the first imperialist world war,
embodied in the War College and personified by Douglas Haig the British penchant for
massed charges against new technologies incarnated in systems of machine gun
emplacements, concrete bunkers and labyrinth-styled fortified trenches reveals most starkly
that the Napoleonic-based doctrine of the offensive dominated all British thinking about
warfare. The third Ypres (Passchendaele) in latter 1917, following upon the two previous
battles at the Ypres salient and in particular the 60,000 casualties in the very first day of
fighting on the Somme, renders really absurd and ludicrous any notion that British military
thought during this entire era was not completely hegemonized by the doctrine of the
offensive.623
The entire line of argumentation concerning the possibilities for an effective defensive grand
strategy operative in Confederate military practice is problematic: It completely ignores the
role of ideal causation in human affairs. Moreover, it entirely misses the real historical
meaning of Lee's elevation, that is, the all-too-frequent slavish and uncritical pronouncement
of his unsurpassed military greatness. Even if only undeveloped or incoherent, and implicit
and largely embedded in institutionalized human practices, concepts nonetheless provide
direction to those practices. Intellectual traditions, especially those carried by men who direct
highly centralized (e.g., military) organizations, constitute a decisive element in the creation of
historical events (in this case, a war, its course of development, and its outcome).624 At the
same time, concepts often function ideologically, as ideal moments that not only veil real
621McPherson "experts" state, "Recalling their own army's experience in 1776, British military experts in 1861 agreed

that a country as large as the Confederacy could not be conquered. 'It is one thing to drive the rebels form the south
bank of the Potomac, or even to occupy Richmond ... but another to reduce and hold in permanent subjection a tract
of country neatly as large as Russia in Europe. ... No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except
where the disparity of force was far greater that it is in this case ... Just as England during the revolution had to give
up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South.'" Ordeal by Fire, 184. The internal
citation appeared in the Times of 18 July 1861.
622Gat, The Development of Military Thought, 9-10, 14-15.
Gat correctly notes that German romanticism was not imported into England, by Coleridge and Carlyle until the 1820s
and 1830s, and their impact on military theory was negligible. The sole exception was a retired military officer and
writer, John Mitchell (1785-1859), who during his formative years (spent in Berlin) had assimilated the German antiEnlightenment currents beginning with Goethe and, militarily speaking, had imbibed Berenhost (Ibid, 10-11). Mitchell,
however, definitely stood outside the mainstream of British military thinking.
623The literature on the Great War is enormous, but for the British side for whom the penchant for the offensive was
ubiquitous, see Lyn Macdonald, 1915: The Death of Innocence (London, 1993), and Somme (London, 1983); Hubert
C. Johnson, Breakthrough: Tactics, Technology and the Search for Victory on the Western Front in World War One
(Novato (CA), 1994); Martin Samuels, Doctrine and Dogma. German and English Infantry Tactics in the First World
War (Westport (CT), 1992); Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven (CT),
1996); and Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields. The 1917 Campaign (New York, 1958).
624Unless an account is methodologically sensitive to the relation between the ideas and practice of historical men
and women (and among other things this sensitivity follows from a proper ontologically weighing of place of ideality in
the production of the humanly real) and such an analysis is intrinsically and necessarily linked to a revolutionary
perspective on human possibilities (which among other things demands analysis of the central role of class struggle in
the formation of society), ideal causation will be largely ignored or misunderstood and historical developments will
take on a mystified character.

historical developments (by inverting their structure) but at once mask the role of those who
produce those concepts as obfuscatory concepts. The scholarly defense of Lee (Freeman,
Dowdey) was of a piece with the romanticizing of the Old South, the degradation of
Reconstruction as a barbarous yet "tragic era" of "Negro rule," and the glorification of southern
"redemption" (Dunning, Burgess, Fleming, Coulter). Lee, uncritically acclaimed, exalted, and
pristinely virtuous and honest, a noble and magnanimous personality as well as a ferocious
fighter, unerring military genius and unsurpassed commander, symbolized the equally
sacrosanct Old South whose most notable and compelling citizens were honorable, simple
and virtuous gentlemen planters: Lee's mythologization, as we stated at the outset, at once
legitimized a romanticized version of the brutal, backward regime of a planter aristocracy and
obfuscated the postwar, "redemptionist" political settlement that led straight to racial apartheid
and legal segregation.625

625Lee' mythologization extents, no doubt, as a matter of consistency, to his personal predilections. It is claimed (The

Oxford Companion to American History, 1986, 486, cited in Nolan, Ibid, 9), for example, that Lee was "personally
opposed to slavery." In point of fact he was gradual emancipationist, a position that since 1830s was characteristic of
Tidewater planters, who, at any rate, were (especially in the last decade before the war) selling their slaves to
planters in the Lower South where the demand was great. His attitude with regard to abolition was characteristically
southern, even for a gradual emancipationist: No matter what course is taken, it must be the South and only the
South (or Virginia, as the case might have been) that decides it. It should, moreover, be recalled that, as a matter of
historical fact, Lee, during the 1863 Pennsylvania Campaign, had his troops round up blacks, including freemen, and
transport them back to the southern soil for purposes of enslavement. His actual, highly dubious commitment to
ending slavery in God's own good time has been judiciously assessed by Nolan, Ibid, esp. 12-20.

7.
Problems of Army Leadership (III): Grant and "Free Men" in Union Armies East and
West, 1863-1865
Part I
Grant's Circle and Doctrine
Doctrine
Let's begin by restating the meaning of doctrine for a military force.626
Doctrine's raison. The central reason for doctrine lies in the relative unanimity with a view to
action that can be achieved by those who share it. Given this like-mindedness, even in the
absences of the commanding general, a subordinate commander will response to various
situations on the battlefield in ways that can be anticipated by other subordinates simply
because they make relatively the same evaluations and pursue similar options for action.
Accordingly, shared doctrine maximizes the chances for coordination, efficiency and
effectiveness in combat.
In formal, military terms,627 the great advancements of the Union army like other modern
armies over, say, its (their) 18th century counterparts were twofold. First, its corps structure
created resiliency; and, second, Union nationalism secured for northern armies both the
manpower and the resources to prevail in a lengthy war of attrition. The corps structure
provided the Union army with the organizational prerequisites for flexibility and
maneuverability allowing it to overcome the greatest liability of 18th century-styled armies
which, massed as unitary formations, were vulnerable to destruction in a single decisive
battle. Achievement of flexibility and maneuverability in operations spread out over different
fronts or, as in the case of the Civil War, two theatres, for purposes of tactical advance of
strategic goals, required and presupposed a body of competent subordinate commanders who
were capable and willing to take initiative. This the Union armies lacked at outset of the war.
Subordinate officer competency was necessary because troop dispersal meant that the army
commander simply could not get a view of the entire theatre of operations: Uncertainty and
confusion (especially in battle) were necessary, constitutive moments of the achievement of
flexibility and maneuverability. Accordingly, subordinate commanders would always find
themselves in positions wherein they would have to make independent judgments and take
independent actions. To do this they must have had assimilated a common doctrine, a shared
understanding of the relation of civilian to military power (and, in the specific Civil War context,
of the relations of officers to a volunteer, democratically inclined soldiery), of how the army
functioned and responded, of its capacities, limitations and the technical features of
maneuver, combat, etc., as well as its goals, and as part of this doctrine they must have
understood the lines of authority and the strategic objectives of, in a general way, a campaign
as well as their role and function in it. Doctrine, then and now, provides a shared theoretical,
operational and battlefield frame of reference, a set of standards for the conduct of military
activity that gives an officers corps cohesion, that minimizes (but obviously does not eliminate)
confusion, misconceptions or misinterpretations of orders and commands under battlefield
conditions, and that permits commanders (especially, at the corps level) to function
independently in the field within the framework of a prescribed (campaign, battle, etc.) plan.

626See chapter 4, "Doctrine and its Absence among Officers of the Army of the Potomac," above.
627This is the definition of shared doctrine developed above. See "Ibid.

Grant's Circle
A common culture of daily life prevailed among Westerners, what we shall describe as the
vision of a real community of free labor - free men,628 and, operative in Grants circle, was the
condition for the assimilation of a shared doctrine.
Grant's circle of advisors (his informal "staff") and his immediately subordinate commanders
understood that military power was subordinate to civilian political power (to, in this case, a
republican party President, and his lieutenants) particularly with regard to the formulation of
grand strategic objectives. Accordingly, they did not let whatever sense of gentlemanly honor
they possessed color their understanding that the war had become a revolution against
planter property in slaves. Grant and his circle, moreover, were nationalists of the same ilk as
Lincoln and would not accept as given (their entire raison for fighting was largely determined
in opposition) to a territorial political-national division between North and South. Because they
shared these two doctrinal commitments (commitments rooted in the everyday culture of
western life), they did not cautiously pursue soft war aimed at a stalemate and a return to the
status quo ante bellum (that is, they aggressively pursued hard war). As a result of these
commitments and their consequent efforts to make hard war, their largely West Point-based,
military-specific grasp of how an army functioned and responded, its capacities, limitations
and the technical features of maneuver, combat, etc., issued in a superior tactical practice. In
a dialectically circuitous fashion, superior tactical practice developed precisely because, first,
they did not experience an enervating contradiction between their military practice and the
civilian authority's grand strategic objectives and, second, their hard war perspective allowed
them to make a more judicious assessment of their opponents who they understood, though
gentlemen, had no illusions about the nature of the war being fought. This assessment, in
turn, provided them with combat-grounded and tactical insights on the basis of which they
were able to conduct more militarily successful operations, and transcend their limited West
Point formations.629
As Lieutenant-General, Grant, though, faced a much more complex situation once he
transferred his headquarters east (March 1864). While with his inner circle of advisors he
shared a common doctrine, the army headquarters (Meade's), corps, divisional and brigade
staffs were largely men whose overarching orientation toward the war as well as primal, if you
will, combat experiences had been shaped in an Army of the Potomac under McClellan. This
is particularly true of the junior staff officers, the majors and captains.630 These men still
operated with a romantic notion of a gentlemanly war and were incorrigibly pro-slavery (no
matter how much they now suppressed this sentiment), tactically cautious ("interpreting" their
orders to the side of caution and, in turn, ordering cautious execution of battlefield
movements), were awed by Robert E. Lee - often possessing nothing less than sublime
respect for the enemy commander and, accordingly, were easily discouraged, beaten as soon
628See Part III, below, for a detailed discussion.
629The meaning of aggressively pursing hard war can be elicited from two examples from Grant's Personal Memoirs.

First, during the Vicksburg Campaign, Banks, Halleck and even Lincoln wanted Grant, who finally had his forces
south of Vicksburg on the east side of the river, to wait for reinforcements from Banks. Grant relates that waiting two
weeks or a month for 15,000 additional men would also allow the enemy to reinforce, entrench, and prepare itself to a
point where 50,000 new men would in the event be inadequate (Ibid, 223, 227-228, 290-291). He refused to wait.
Second, Sheridan also exhibited the same incisive and aggressive military posture following Lee's abandonment of
the Petersburg trenches in late March 1865. In the early April on the road to Appomattox, Sheridan wanted to force a
fight in order to close a sensed enemy escape route, but Meade preferred to wait until all his troops were up. Grant
intervened and did what Sheridan would have done had he held command. Ibid, 617-618.
630In his Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (Butler's Book) 577-578, Ben Butler states he told Lincoln, in
face to face conversation in spring 1863, that, while he would resume command, he would not do so in the Army of
the Potomac since nearly all its junior officers were McClellanist and defeatist.

as a campaign ran into its first difficulty and, in the end, defeatist. Catton writes, "It was that
kind of summer [1864]. Everything interlocked; the Army of the Potomac, having been built to
a political pattern [our emphasis], reflected the doubt and suspicion politics had created, so
that failure was fated." Citing the diary of Marensa Patrick, Provost Marshal for the Army of the
Potomac, he notes, "The jealousy on the part of Corps Commanders against each other &
against Meade ... [prevents] unanimity of counsels, or concert of action, even among the
troops belonging to the Army of the Potomac. ... The same spirit ... will prevent Meade,
probably, from taking hold with any vim to carry out" any successful policy requiring initiative
and audacity.631
Catton, mistakenly maintained Grant had no politics, operated with the (doubly) mistaken view
that, ideally (as in the western armies), armies function best when devoid of politics, that,
accordingly, the Potomac army's ineffectiveness in the face of opportunity stemmed from its
fatal flaw, namely, that from the outset it had mixed politics with fighting. In fact, all the armies
of the Civil War (nay, all armies) shared (and share) this "fatal flaw, i.e., were (are) shaped by
politics at their origin (and, generally speaking, these army politics were or are institutionally
embedded.) The problem with the Army of the Potomac was that (a) the McClellanist politics
that shaped it were opposed to the grand strategic objectives of the Lincoln Administration; (b)
it contained officers who held divergent, nay mutually exclusive, perspectives on the aims of
the war (McClellanist, abolitionist, and old army which, ostensibly uncommitted, was
bureaucratized and hence objectively functioned as tacitly McClellanist); and, (c) in being
McClellanist and/or old army, the bulk of Potomac army's officers' corps was committed to a
gentleman's war and was, accordingly, as a matter of disposition incapable (regardless of the
personal courage and integrity of any given officer) of waging hard war. Moreover, in
operatively holding such a commitment, the tendency in officer practice was to comport
oneself in relation to fellow officers (and the enemy as well) in terms of a personal contest
between military commanders seeking recognition, fame and glory, i.e., the view of war as a
gentlemanly contest engaged in by individual commanders issued in a practice that
exacerbated bitter rivalries and personal jealousies. Finally, in summer 1864, this (largely
McClellanist) officers' corps was headed by a man whose politics were thoroughly consistent
with the Lincoln Administration, who practice, thus, disclosed an orientation toward the
revolutionary overthrowal of planter property in slaves, and who knew nothing else but making
hard war.
Soft war, tacitly pro-slavery politics were at the core of the problem: Further evidence (beyond
that elicited in Chapter 2, above) is abundance. For example, Catton cites an army surgeon,
John H. Brinton, who was an old acquaintance of Grant. Grant "had not many friends amongst
the Army of the Potomac men. They were all McClellan men, and insisted that Grant was only
treading the same path followed by McClellan and that his bloody victories were fruitless.
They did not like him and had no confidence in him. The Northern people as a mass believed
in him; the Eastern, especially the troops [read: officers] of the Army of the Potomac, did not."
He also cites James Ashley, a radical Republican Congressional representative from Ohio,
who in mid-July admonished Grant's chief of staff, John Rawlins, there was "a good deal of
discontent and mutinous spirit among staff officers of the Army of the Potomac, stating in fact,
"a good deal of McClellanism ... was manifested."632 And Granville Dodge wrote, "The Army of
the Potomac ... contained fine troops, but ... 'that heartiness among the leading officers that
we see in the west [was not present here]. ... 'Three different times has [sic] Richmond and
Petersburg been virtually in his [Grant's] hands and by some unexcusable neglect or
631Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command, 340, citing Marensa Patrick's diary (Inside Lincoln's Army) entry for 27 July

1864. This entry Patrick specifically referred to an assault following the Crater explosion.
632Ibid.

slowness each time his plans were ruined and the opportunity lost.' ... It seemed to Dodge that
too many officers carried out their assignments without vigor, solely from a sense of duty, 'and
this in my opinion is one great cause of the mistakes.' Things would be better, once the
election was over; 'the men are right in sentiment, though many leading officers are
McClellanized.'"633
Part of the disagreement with Grant was that the Potomac army officers found him
disagreeable. The latter was, of course, an element of the conflict between Easterners and
Westerners, in this case a function of the mutual antagonism that grew from the refined and
finished view of the vulgar and crude, and the commoner and egalitarian view of the elitist,
arrogant and snobbish. It was, after, McClellan himself who had characterized Lincoln,
another Westerner, as the "original gorilla." These views gave personal expression both to
sectional differences in society: By the European standards that significant and large
immigrant population of the West still held, life in the West was characterized by mobility easy access to expropriated Indian land - and opportunity which, in turn, gave rise to a
characteristically capitalist frontier form of egalitarianism.634 In the East, life had hardened,
and fluidity between classes had virtually ceased to exist. (A highly stratified society had
become visible as such. Said society, and his position as an officer in it, was, of course, part of
the attraction of the stable, stratified South for the eastern officer-gentleman.) The mutual
antagonisms also gave expression to ongoing changes in the political relations (political here
in the sense of the structure of power) between sections, that is, in the emerging dominance
of western men at the highest levels of the State, a transformation which signaled the end of
planter domination of the State.635
Because of the shared doctrine (which Grant articulated and developed more than anyone
else), in western armies the chain of command functioned so effectively that the corps or
divisional components of armies could be literally interchanged. For example, in the battles of
Chattanooga in late November 1863, Hooker's command that actually took Lookout Mountain
had three divisions: Osterhaus's of the XV Corps, Army of the Tennessee; Geary's XII Corps,
Army of the Potomac; and Cruft's, XIV Corps, Army of the Cumberland.636
633Catton, Ibid, 383, paraphrasing Granville Dodge (a major general in the western armies under Sherman who

served with Grant). The direct citation from Dodge quoted by Catton appeared in letter of Dodge to Richard J.
Oglesby dated 29 October 1864, in Oglesby Papers, Illinois State Historical Library.
634Charles Dana noted his surprise at the "utmost cordiality and confidence" between Grant, Sherman and
McPherson. All three men hailed from Ohio and had been raised to adulthood in either Ohio or Illinois, i.e., they were
Westerners. Dana continued, "there was no jealousy and bickering, and in their unpretending simplicity there were as
alike as three peas. Cited from Dana's memoirs (Recollections of the Civil War) by Earl Schenck Miers, The Web of
Victory. Grant at Vicksburg, 138.
635Similarly, Catton, Ibid, 341.
From Washington through Buchanan, every President had experienced formation in the oldest settled areas of the
United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, all slave-owners, had hailed from eastern Virginia; the
two Adams were Massachusetts men; Van Buren and Fillmore were New Yorkers; Harrison, who made his reputation
as Indian fighter while Indiana territorial governor, and Tyler were from the Virginia Tidewater region; Pierce was a
New Hampshire man; Buchanan hailed from south central Pennsylvania but began his political career only after
moving east (Lancaster); Jackson and Polk were the only exceptions. These two men, born in North Carolina, began
their political careers as Tennesseans, but both were beholden to the southern planter aristocracy, which was
precisely the point: Among cultured, worldly men (i.e., gentlemen), personal refinement was the other of hardened
class distinctions. The former was grounded on the latter, and so the gentleman accepted the latter as a matter of
course.
For the twenty years after 1860, though, Westerners dominated the Executive. Lincoln and Grant adopted Illinois as
their homes; Hayes and Garfield were Ohioans. The exception, Andrew Johnson, was never elected President and
was nearly impeached, at bottom, because he was pro-southern in an era when the memory of rejected planter
domination lived on as a constitutive moment of the present.
636Grant, Memoirs, 378, 550-551.

Staff and the Transmission of Doctrine

In the modern, bourgeois world, in the absence of a military school of war actually devoted to
the development of doctrine and its dissemination among an officers' corps, the staff of the
commanding general functions as the transmission belt of doctrine to the body of officers in
the army. That staff needn't be large. Only with the pursuit of national unification (usually out
of territorially and ethnically distinct groups or peoples, but in the case of the United States,
unification involved territorial conquest), either as conditioned by or as the condition of the
development of a national market, does creation of a Kriegakadamie and with it a general staff
become necessary. This creation is a practical and ideological consequence of the
bureaucratization and task fragmentation essentially characteristic of all societies undergoing
industrial capitalist development.
Grant had a staff appropriately sized, in sociological terms, to an undeveloped federalist state
form, one without a truly effective national centre and without a standing army in peace time
for purpose of repression of the underlying masses of workers, farmers, etc., whose largest
function was consummated in carrying the genocidal tasks associated with any and all
States.637 Grant's informal staff, "ran ... as a sort of barbershop meeting" - a concomitant of
the relaxed comportment of Westerners when together.638 As Keegan notes, their "small-town
background, their unregulated way of doing things, their unmilitary garb, their slovenly speech,
even their saloon-bar drinking style were a reassurance to Grant that he was in touch with the
rough-and-ready manner and modes of thought of his citizen army. A staff of regulars would
have been a barrier between him and his army. His staff of amateurs was a medium of
communication, because it resembled the men he commanded almost to the point of
mimicry."639
Grant, thus, intuitively recognized that for doctrine to be shared, it had and its ramifications
had to be openly discussed. Thus, in Virginia (1864) he could tell Horace Porter,
I want you to discuss with me freely from time to time the details of the orders given for the
conduct of a battle, and learn my views as fully as possible as to what course should be
pursued in all the contingencies which may arise. I expect to send you to the critical points
of the lines to keep me promptly alerted of what is taking place, and in cases of great
emergency, when new dispositions have to be made on the instant, or it becomes suddenly
necessary to reinforce one command by sending to its aid troops from another, I want you
Thomas' command, as it prepared to do battle with Hood's Army of Tennessee, at Franklin and Nashville in November
and December 1864, was scraped together, out of garrisons in Alabama and Tennessee, and assorted units from two
armies (Armies of the Tennessee and Cumberland).
637See the fourth critique in our Community and Capital.
638Keegan, The Mask of Command, 198. "Grant might have assembled a better staff had he cast his net wider than

Galena main street. But it would have been a staff better in degree than kind. The United States in 1861 lacked
altogether a pool of trained staff officers. There was, indeed, no staff college to produce one, West Point itself offering
no more than officer training to a modest regimental level. The management of bodies of men larger than 1,000
strong had to be learnt in some informal way, either in the civilian world or by jumping in at the deep end. The South
on the whole opted for men trained in the latter way. If we examine the careers of its dozen most prominent generals Beauregard, Bragg, Ewell, Forrest, Hill, the two Johnstons, Jackson, Lee, Longstreet, Kirby Smith and Stuart - we find
that eight had remained in continuous service after leaving West Point. Only Bragg, Forest and the Johnstons had
pursued careers outside the army (Jackson's professorship at Virginia Military Institute does not count). With the
dozen leading Northerners, however, the proportion is exactly reversed. Buell, McDowell, Pope and Sheridan were
serving officers. But Burnside, Halleck, Hooker, Grant, McClellan, Meade, Rosecrans and Sherman had all had
civilian careers and several of them most successful ones. Ibid, 196.
We have developed this point with a view to its genesis, formation and individual consequences in terms of the
society-grounded, different class psychologies that were found in generals North and South. See the discussion
under the heading "Officer Ambition, the Southern Model, Risk and its Rationalization" in chapter 4, above.
639Ibid, 197-198.

to explain my views to commanders and urge immediate action, looking to co-operation,

without waiting for specific orders from me.640

This attitude stood in stark contrast to officers of the Army of the Potomac, among whom
Joseph Hooker's practice stood in the most extreme opposition to Grant's. Hooker was
notorious for "shroud[ing] his plans behind ... a curtain of secrecy... [so thick] they cannot be
determined from the records."641 Tactically, he would not reveal plans to any of his immediate
subordinates because he believed no one kept secrets. Accordingly, and this hurt him
grievously during the Chancellorsville Campaign, he kept his corps commanders in the dark
until movements started.
Outside the informal discussion among Grants inner circle, the predominant mode of the
transmission of doctrine was the written order. Now, the written word quite obviously does not
have the flexibility of speech, since nuance, not only verbally articulated but also embodied in
gesture and posture, is more difficult to present. Thus, it is imperative that written instructions
be brief, direct and unambiguous, in others words, succinct and clear. Grant's dispatches were
models of lucidity: "No matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever has
the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even has to read them over a second time to
understand them."642 Grant rarely dictated any of these dispatches, as a matter of habit and
practice writing them in his own hand.
To be sure, Grant's circle functioned well enough when his command encompassed a single
army, but how did he operate once he assumed his Lieutenant Generalcy, i.e., leadership of
all Union armies? Recall that Grant held the reins to seventeen different commands with
533,000 men under him. In this respect, Halleck served him well. With Grant's assumption of
command, Halleck took on the double role of a liaison between Grant and his commanders in
other fields of operations and a "channel of communication" between Grant and Lincoln.643
In this relation, Grant formulated general strategic directives, Halleck, reading all the
subordinates reports, framed and wrote the detailed instructions for them. (Grant had
requested that all dispatches from departmental commanders go through Halleck.) Halleck
either transmitted them in whole or summarized them for Grant. The relation, then, was the
condition that made it possible for the Lieutenant General to have the time to think about
grand strategy. As Grant's "channel" to Lincoln, Halleck's great facility was to translate
Lincolns homey metaphoric speech and writing into militarily sensical commands and
directives and suggestions, and to translate militarily technical speech and writing into
language understood by Lincoln.644 Of course, Grant, unlike McClellan, took Lincoln into his
confidence. That too had no little bearing on the relation.645
640Keegan, Ibid. Citation from Porter's Campaigning with Grant.
641Ibid, 233 (citation), 237.
642Ibid, 200, citing Daniel Butterfield, Meade's chief of staff.
643T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 301.

J.F.C.Fuller (The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, 60) incorrectly characterizes the development of this relations in
terms of the creation of a modern, efficient staff. It was, in fact, much too small and far too unbureaucratized for such
a characterization (though the war itself would produce this rationalization and a general staff as its result).
644Williams, Ibid, 302, 304.
Williams adds that because of this peculiar talent, "Lincoln and Grant never misunderstood each other, as Lincoln and
McClellan had. " Such was only part of the problem, and not its most crucial element. Recall that McClellan
maintained a more or less aristocratic bearing toward Lincoln, he disdained the President, resented his authority and
belittled his intelligence. The "misunderstanding" was political, grand strategically decided and not merely linguistic
distortion, and it was in the end class grounded.
645Fuller, Ibid, 81.

Doctrine and Civilian Authority

In the case of Grant's relation to Lincoln, a certain element of doctrine appears to have been
resolved, in contradistinction to McClellan, before the Lieutenant General and the President
ever met. This element of doctrine concerned, in bourgeois societies of the politically
democratic type, the subordination of military to civilian authority. Grant, in a letter home, for
example, stated that, "If Congress pass any law and the President approves, I am willing to
execute it ... I do not believe even in the discussion of the propriety of laws and official orders
by the army. One enemy at a time is enough and when he is subdued it will be time enough to
settle personal differences."646 Or, again, as Keegan relates, that "ordered to recruit blacks
into the Union army - a contentious policy - Grant answered Lincoln, 'You may rely upon it ... I
would do this whether arming the Negro seemed to me a wise policy or not, because it is an
order that I am bound to obey and I do not feel that in my position I have a right to question
any policy of the government.'"647 This was patently a world of difference here from McClellan,
with his pseudo-aristocratic bearing. That difference, embodied in doctrine, once again
ultimately refers us back to the common lebensweltliche experience of the real community of
free labor - free men. Westerners were initiated into and partook in one of this community's
formative dimensions, that of a democratic political culture, and they were so familiar with its
norms that they took the relation of military to civilian authority as a matter of course.

In this respect, Lee's relation to Davis was qualitatively similar: He explained in detail to the Confederate leader his
campaign objectives in advance of operations. Davis, overbearing and difficult, was trained at West Point and felt
himself quite competent in commanding an army. Any other course of action would have made it impossible for Lee to
function in the Virginia theatre.
646John Y. Simon (ed.), The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant [hereafter cited as Grant Papers], 5: 264.
647Keegan, Ibid, 232-233.

A Note on Sherman
Within the Army of the Potomac the Democratic party officers' political faction was inextricably
tied to a West Point military formation. Yet here in the personage of William T. Sherman was a
man who had never served in that eastern army (though he did serve in Irwin McDowell's
Army of Northeastern Virginia and commanded, poorly we add, a brigade at the First Bull
Run),648 and still held exceedingly narrow, caste-like and non-western views, of officers and
soldiery. It goes without saying he engaged in military practices congruent with these views.
Sherman, in other words, in many respects had the psychological make-up of a man cut from
the officer's cloth of the Army of the Potomac. He stands out as an anomaly in our account of
the social types of commanders who dominated eastern and western Union armies. The
following constitutes an attempt to coherently describe him in terms of this account. Let his
begin with his attitude toward politicians, in this, the most political of all wars.
The self-protecting - self-aggrandizing corporate identity and stupid arrogance constitutive of
West Point formation were not restricted to the major army of the East. In the West, Sherman
exhibited the intellectual rigidity, dishonesty and haughtiness of West Pointers in a manner
few of his contemporaries anywhere could match. If Keegan's analysis of the political idiocy of
formally trained, army commanders of the last hundred and fifty years even applied to anyone
it was Sherman.649 Sherman could not distinguish a "politician" in the derogatory sense from
an civically engaged man with scruples. Take the case of John Logan.
With the death of James McPherson, at Erza Church (the "Battle of Atlanta") in mid-July 1864,
Sherman was confronted with the task of appointing a new commander to the Army of the
Tennessee. John Logan, commander of this Army's XV Corps, was the obvious choice. Logan
was a man who had been with the western forces from the beginning (i.e., prior to even the
formation of this army), who had come up through the ranks (i.e., led formations from the
regimental level on up), who was strategically sound, tactically sophisticated, did not suffer
from caution, was well respected by his fellow officers and well-liked and respected as well by
the soldiers in his command. But he was also a "politician, i.e., a Congressman from Illinois,
who following the first Bull Run (where he not only attempted to rally panicking troops but
picked a rifle up to stand against the rebels in the melee following the battle) decided he could
be more effective fighting. Sherman, however, picked O.O. Howard with his history of failed
commands. He picked him because Howard was pliable and because he was a West Pointer.
Sherman, so psychologically rigid that his compulsions were unavoidably visible, in his
constant irritability, his comportment, his falsifying and distorting army reports and even in his
sleeping habits, held that only West Pointers should hold high commands. Consistent with this
rigidity, he held this view in an experientially blind, a priorist fashion: "The army is a good
school, but West Point is better."650 Fortunately for Sherman, Grant was open to his
experience, and was able to get beyond his West Point military formation, for, had he been a
mere West Pointer, he obviously would not have had the character to come to Sherman's
defense in late 1861. Without such support, Sherman's military career might have ended right
there, and he, if remembered at all, would have been remembered as an officer who, unable
to handle the stress of warfare, became "crazed."
648William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run. A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War, 215-220.
649Keegan, The Mask of Command, 6.
650Contrast this with Grant. While stationed early on in the war at Cairo he occasionally meet rebel officers under a

flag of truce. He stated, ... these officers ... had been educated for the profession of arms, both at school and in
actual war, which is a far more efficient training," and "I had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my
graduation. ... I perceived at once ... that Hardee's tactics ... was nothing more than common sense and the progress
of the age applied to Scott's system. ... I do not believe that the offices of the regiment ever discovered that I had
never studied the tactics that I used. Summarizing the Vicksburg campaign, he stated, "A military education was
acquired which no other school could have given." Memoirs, 167, 150-151, 337.

Clearly, Logan was an officer cut in the mold of Grant.651 But Logan, it should be remembered
was no ordinary "politician." First, as we have already indicated, he fought, not (just) because
he felt he could lead (which in the case of most politicians can be translated as the selfaggrandizement of power), but because he thought on the battlefield he could be more
effective. Logan, while vastly popular in the "Butternut" belts of southern Illinois, was not
popular among West Point military men: He was a war Democrat, who believed in and
practiced "hard" war (though, this should have hardly bothered Sherman). However, these
beliefs and practices revealed the "extremism" of Logan who, after the war, emerged as one
of leading radicals in the country. (He was one of five men appointed "managers" by the
House to conduct the prosecution of the 1868 Senate impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson.)
At any rate, the central feature of Logan in relation to Sherman was the former's popularity
with the regular soldiery. He was something that Sherman, petty little man that he was, could
never aspire to. Of course, he disdained such popularity, but then again he also greatly
resented Logan. At a certain point in the history of the Army of the Tennessee, Logan was
crucial: During late autumn 1862 through winter 1862-1863, he held those units of the army
who hailed from "Butternut" regions together: The rare orator who could actually move men,
he spoke constantly among the soldiery with a view to confirming and reinforcing their
Unionism. He minimalized desertions in a period in which noncombatant popular morale had
reached a low point, and Lincoln's government and Union armies (particularly those in the
East) had correspondingly reached a similar low point in civilian support among the farmers
and workers in the North.652
Sherman's attitude toward "political" generalship was clearly that of Democratic party officers.
Correspondingly, he exhibited a preference for a professional soldiery: Like Democratic party
officers in the East, he often, especially early in the war, referred to and treated volunteers
contemptuously. (William Davis relates a story about Sherman in this regard. Early in the First
Manassas Campaign, Sherman had given orders prohibiting straggling, harassing Virginia
citizens and confiscating or destroying their property. On the march, he came upon a foot
soldier who had a quarter of mutton slung over his soldier. Colonel Sherman angrily queried,
"Didn't you know the orders against foraging?" The response was, "Yes, but I was hungry, and
it was rebel mutton, anyhow." Sherman at once had the man arrested, but good bourgeois
that he was, his scruples thence gave way: He refused to waste the mutton. Instead, he
instructed an orderly of his to prepare it for himself and his staff's supper. As a gentlemanofficer, he could not tolerate insubordination from a commoner much less a solider. He
preferred to treat enemy property, as did Lincoln, with a respect he could muster neither for a
fellow human being nor for a comrade in arms. In the end, Sherman, though he would never
admit it, learned a great deal about how to make war from soldiers like this one.)653
651For Sherman's choice of Howard over Logan, his abuse of Logan and his rank preference for West Pointers, see

Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 418, 419-421.

652For Logans outstanding oratory, recall Grant's laudatory remarks about his recruitment speech to otherwise
southern sympathizing farm boys at the outset of the war. Memoirs, 145-147.
653For the anecdote about Sherman, Davis, Battle at Bull Run, 96. Sherman, because he was not a Democratic party
officer, proves that the gentlemanliness on the southern model was hegemonic among regular army officers. He, like
them, disdained his volunteer soldiery (as opposed to the more hardy, disciplined Southerner). Uninformed by lengthy
combat experience with a volunteer soldiery, his steadfastly held views at the outset of the war are most revealing. He
was very anxious about the lack of discipline of volunteer soldiers, and greatly upset by their incessant demands and
the non-command-like - unmasterly position these demands placed him in. Like all northern gentlemen-officers, he
was first dishonored and perhaps only then worried about the consequences for his country, i.e., he was "mortified,"
"shamed" and "disgraced," by the Union soldiery's retreat cum panic at Bull Run. See his disparaging remarks on his
soldiers at the time of the First Bull Run Campaign, Sherman, Home Letters, for "shame," etc, 24 July 1861 (Ibid.,
203-204), for indiscipline 19 July 1861 (Ibid, 201-202), 24 July 1861 (Ibid, 204), especially 28 July 1861 (Ibid, 209)
and "undated, apparently August 1861 [editor's note]. Sherman was anti-political, not a Democratic party

Sherman was authoritarian through and through. He hadn't the capacity to understand, nor
the patient and tolerance to brook, any disagreement from below (immediate officer
subordinates or rank and file soldiers). In this respect he was, like Howard, quintessentially a
West Pointer. Yet, unlike Howard, he had militarily redeeming "virtues." While, for example, he
was often tactically incompetent654 (like far too many Union officers in the East), he developed
a logistical and operational genius nearly on a par with Grant's. He was at times capable of
genuine grand tactical (strategic) insight, and an ability to grasp, articulate and develop
operations for not just a battle, nor only a campaign, but for all the (forthcoming) campaigns in
their interrelatedness and in relation to the grand strategic (i.e., national political) objectives of
the war. This, too, he shared with Grant (but not at the same level of insight and
development). Militarily, this was the basis for their friendship. He was loyal, and that, no
doubt, Grant also appreciated. The fact that he took, and carried out, orders to the letter even
supporter/member, see 8 June 1861 (Ibid, 199), 24 July 1861 (Ibid, 203), 28 July 1861 (Ibid, 210) and 17 August 1861
(Ibid, 216). On the basis of his West Point gentleman-officer's formation, he shared with Democratic party officers and
southern planters a characteristic attitude, namely, hostility to the "masses," and toward a "democratic form of
government. Thus, for example, he states, "Nobody, no man can save the country. The difficulty is with the masses"
(Ibid, 28 July 1861, 210), and, "I doubt if our democratic form of government admits of that organization and discipline
without which an army is a mob" (Ibid, 3 August 1861, 210). Contrast Sherman's attitude to that of Grant cited in the
text at n. 88, below.
654An entire catalog of series Sherman's tactical misjudgments can be easily documented in his most important
campaign (Atlanta). We rely on Albert Castel (Decision in the West), the historian of that campaign. Here's an
enumeration of the major ones (see Map 7).
Sherman anticipated little or no resistance at Kennesaw Mountain (Ibid, 269, 270, 279-280). One result was huge
losses for Geary's and Butterfield's divisions (XX Corps) east of Gilgal Church (Ibid, 280), and another result was,
frustrated, he ordered massive direct assault upon fortified position (Ibid, 281) - something he explicitly asserted he
wouldn't do - in which his forces took 3,000 casualties, approximately ten times the rebel losses (Ibid, 319-20).
After Kennesaw Mountain, he assumed (and refused to believe otherwise until he saw with his own eyes) rebels
would cross south of Chattahoochee River before establishing a new line (Ibid, 330, 331). He was mistaken, and
again ordered a costly attack (Ibid, 331-332).Early on, in front of Atlanta, he believed Hood would evacuate his forces
and would take up a position at East Point to defend his rail line of supply (Ibid, 389). This was 21 July. Hood,
however, did not evacuate before his line of supply via the rail from Macon (Macon & Western RR) was cut, 31 August
- 1 September.
Finally getting to Chattahoochee, between its north side and in front of Atlanta, Sherman appeared more confident,
more adequately aware of his own possibilities and what could be realized (e.g., Ibid, 359). Yet his tactical
assessment still resulted in, by his own lights, an important missed opportunity. It occurred in the poorly defended
partial constructed entrenchments north of Atlanta in front of Thomas' army during the battle of Bald Hill ("Battle of
Atlanta"). Here Sherman failed to pursue the destruction of the Confederate Army of Tennessee as it divided between
Lee's corps exiting the city and Hardee's south of Jonesboro after the evacuation of Atlanta (Ibid, 539-542, esp. fn 2).
These tactical misjudgments flow from the rigidity of an authoritarian personality, viz., they follow from his closure to
(the datum and observations of) experience, or, if you prefer, from his experientially ungrounded projections of
Johnston's (later Hood's) actions. (Ibid, 269, 270, 279-80, 298-9, 301, 320-1 (600 n84), 330, 331, 389 (Hood), 414,
417, 424, 428, 436, 442, 492-493, 498, 511, 521, 570-571, 524, 554-555, 612 n99).
The misjudgments were exacerbated by the convoluted expressions of this personality. These characteristics were
manifested in irritability (Ibid, 270), and constantly blaming and scapegoating of others, especially Thomas [whose
own greater competence and experience Sherman lived and experienced as a threat] and then his army (Ibid, 284),
for his failures and shortcomings. In so doing (blaming), he exaggerated, distorted and outright lied (to Grant, to
Halleck) about his immediate subordinates, for example, about Thomas (Ibid, 285), Hooker (Ibid, 298-299), and
Thomas, Harker and McCook at Kennesaw (Ibid, 320). Sherman instead proved himself to be a petty, mean man by
his punishment of soldiers and commanders through their isolation in combat situations (where support and
reinforcement was tactically the order of the day) merely to retaliate against subordinate commanders he had wrongly
prejudged (e.g., the case of Stanley, Ibid, 531).
Thomas was the superior general (a fact which Grant too couldn't stomach). He proved himself every inch a great
general at Chickamauga (see Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga), and he demonstrated
his superiority to Sherman at Chattanooga. (Here see Cozzens, The Shipwreck of their Hopes: The Battles for
Chattanooga), and then again during the Atlanta Campaign (Castel, Ibid, 506-507); and he demonstrated for all to
see, including Grant, at Nashville (12/1864) where he generaled the only decisive victory, in the Napoleonic sense
(i.e., resulting in the outright destruction of the enemy army), in the entire Civil War.

when disagreeing with them, is perfectly consistent with the submissive side of an
authoritarian personality. Grant never saw this nonetheless decisive moment in Sherman's
personal constitution (most likely because he never served under him), though it was manifest
(in, we repeat, his constant irritability and even in his sleeping habits). When action followed
from these authoritarian predilections (e.g., his appointment of Howard as commander of the
Army of the Tennessee following McPherson's death), Grant was simply mystified. (In the
example cited, he remained perplexed right down unto his death.) 655 In the informal,
democratic culture of the West, Grant, a "democrat and populist to his fingertips" (as Keegan
pithily and correctly suggests),656 would have been blind to Sherman's authoritarianism, its
expressions unintelligible to him. By and large, authoritarianism went hand and hand with
West Point.
At any rate, both men understood and accepted the grand strategic objectives of the war.
They were, accordingly, committed to ending the rebellion on terms decided by the Lincoln
Administration (though the terms of Sherman's acceptance of Johnston's surrender, April
1865, leave some doubt here).657 Grant and Sherman did not share the basic unformulated
conviction of any number of officers in the Army of the Potomac (namely the war was a
struggle that ultimately came down to a gentlemanly contest between military commanders
seeking recognition, fame and glory). Nor did they share those conscious but unarticulated
assumptions of the vast majority of Democratic party officers in the same army (namely, the
objective of our military practice is to wear down the armies of both sides, thus produce a
stalemate that gives rise to peace negotiations on the basis of which the status quo
antebellum can be restored). It was this difference between Sherman and the officers of the
eastern armies, whom he was in so many other ways similar to, in which we can grasp the
western character of this unadmirable man.

655"Suffice it to say, the close of the siege of Vicksburg found us with an army unsurpassed ... Logan and Crocker

ended the campaign fitted to command independent armies." And, "I doubt whether he [Sherman] had an officer with
him who could have filled the place [McPherson's command] as Logan would have done. See Memoirs, 548-549
(citations, 294, 549). Also see Castel, Ibid, 419-421.
656John Keegan, Ibid, 182.
657See our discussion of Sherman's conspiracy with President Andrew Johnson to void his General Order No. 15,

specifically the account of Sherman, "Military Commanders and Black Labor" in chapter 7, below.

Part II
Two Campaigns
Vicksburg
A reflection on the Vicksburg campaign is, as we shall see, at the same time a meditation on
Grant's military "genius." The latter cannot, again as we shall see, be assessed in terms of
some unfathomable insight: While incisive, aggressive and bold (or, in the military jargon of
the day, audacious), this "genius" was constituted in the practice of command. To illuminate
Grant's "genius" we must turn to the Vicksburg campaign (and vice versa).
The significance of the capture of Vicksburg turns on the town's strategic importance. The
latter resided in the facts, first, that Vicksburg was "the first high ground on Mississippi south
of Cairo coming close to the river below Memphis,658 that is, it was a militarily fortifiable point
from which passage to waterways further south could be prevented, hence, a point from which
the waterways further south could be controlled;659 and, second, it was a central railroad
junction west of the Alleghenies. From Vicksburg, a railroad ran east, connecting with other
roads and led to major cities in the South. A railroad also began from the opposite side of the
river, and extended west as far as Shreveport. 660 Third, control of the Mississippi protected the
right flank of any Union army which sought to advance eastward, e.g., on Chattanooga, or
even into Virginia, from a base in Nashville. 661 Summarily and strategically, then, "with
Vicksburg, the Confederacy was geographically united; without Vicksburg the Mississippi
became a knife cutting the empire of the South into disintegrating sections."662 Cutting the
South into detached sections had a precise meaning, namely, both food (especially cattle) and
reinforcements from the trans-Mississippi (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana) would no longer be
easily accessible and readily available to the Confederacy's eastern armies, particularly Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia.663 The political and moral significance of the capture of Vicksburg
was, as we shall see later, of still far greater significance.
[Failed Efforts]
In 1863, the land above (north of) Vicksburg formed a large low-lying plain crisscrossed by
several rivers, the Coldwater, Tallahatchie, Yallabusha (which together emptied into and
formed the mouth of the Yazoo), and the Big Sunflower Rivers as well as countless streams
and creeks. This land was extremely fertile and forests of gum, cottonwood, tulip, sycamores
and still others rose from it. Together with the forests, vines and cane intertwined and
dominated the ground level of the plain. Accordingly, this forested tangle constituted a nearly
impenetrable natural barrier, some forty to fifty miles wide, for roughly one hundred fifty miles
along the northern approaches to Vicksburg.664 It was this natural barrier that Army of the
658Grant, Memoirs, 250 (citation).
659William Freeman Vilas, A View of the Vicksburg Campaign, 11.
660Earl Schenck Miers, The Web of Victory. Grant at Vicksburg, 24, and Cecil Battine, The Crisis of the Confederacy,

348.
661"The value of the Mississippi to the North was three-fold: (1) It cut the Confederacy in two, severing the eastern
States from the western. (2) It formed the main waterway from north to south, and, including the Ohio River, to as far
as Pittsburgh. (3) It protected the right flank and rear of any army operating from Nashville round the southern
extremity of the Allegheny Mountains. J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, 45.
662Miers, Ibid.
663Vilas, Ibid, 7. Texas alone possessed four times the number of cattle and horses than all the other southern states

combined. Cited from U.S. Census figures for 1850 by George A. Bruce, "The Strategy of the Civil War," 419.
664Ibid, 13-14.
Similarly, Grant himself: "The Mississippi from Cairo south, runs through a rich alluvial valley of many miles in width,
bound on the east by land running from eighty up to two or more hundred feet above the river. On the west side the
highest land, except in a few places, is but little above the highest water. Through this valley the river meanders in the

Cumberland under Grant had to confront before the town itself could be invested or captured
outright.
In the months of December 1862 to May 1863, Grant's soldiery made several efforts in its
approach to Vicksburg, all of which failed. Reviewing these varied attempts will exhibit how
Grant, as the commanding officer, originally sought to achieve the capture of Vicksburg.
[River] From 25-31 December 1862, Sherman's XV Corps undertook a river expedition.
Starting from Memphis, Sherman brought his corps south to Miliken's Bend in an effort to
establish a forward supply base. His force attacked entrenched rebel positions above
Vicksburg from land opposite the Walnut Hills. His force was roundly rebuffed, and facing the
beginning of the raining season, retired665 (see Map 8).
[Old canal] Started earlier, in June 1862 Gen. Thomas Williams and a brigade of troops
undertook to dig a canal. It was abandoned shortly thereafter. Following him in late January
1863, Grant directed efforts to have a 10'-12' wide canal, roughly as deep, cut straight through
the peninsula from Young's Point (opposite Vicksburg) to the river. The river, when it rose in
the spring, was expected to cut its channel along this canal allowing troops to use it, crossing
the peninsula. Grant at first attempted to reform the course of the canal but shortly thereafter
gave up on it, recognizing the river would not follow it.666
[Lake Providence] Shortly thereafter, James McPherson, another of Grant's corps
commanders, directed efforts "to cut the levee at Lake Providence" some thirty miles north
northwest of Vicksburg. The lake was a part of the old bed of the Mississippi some two miles
from the river's then present channel. If navigation could be opened there, Union forces, it was
thought, "could reach the Mississippi through the mouth of the Red River just above Port
Hudson and four hundred miles below Vicksburg." Survey of the land and water revealed to
Grant that it was not "practical country." The effort was abandoned.667
[Yazoo Pass] Beginning 3 February 1863, Lt. Col. James H. Wilson, an engineer on Grant's
staff, directed an effort to open a new route by way of "an old route through an inlet of the
Mississippi into Moon Lake, a mile east of the river." Beginning 155 miles north of Vicksburg,
Wilson's expedition sought to cut a way through to the Coldwater river, which empties into the
Tallahatchie that in turn empties into the Yazoo. All this was to be achieved by cutting a levee
opening onto Moon Lake. If successful, the attempt would have put Union forces inside
Vicksburg's defenses on Walnut Hills, the cliffs contiguous with and just above (north) of the
city. Having cut the levee, and having moved downriver, the project ended, 22 February, when
Wilson's force was unable to get around or take on 5,000 rebels at Fort Pemberton, a
fortification constructed at the mouth of the Yazoo, the point where in 1863 the Tallahatchie
and Yallabusha joined.668
[Steele's Bayou] About mid-March 1863, Grant, having toured the bayous with navy Admiral
David Porter, approved a join navy-army expedition through the flooded lowlands north of
Vicksburg. Porter's fleet consisted of ironclads, and tugs which pulled barges loaded with the
Sherman's soldiers. The route was through a series of bayous, starting in the north in Cypress
Bayou through Muddy to Steele's, to the mouth of the Rolling Fork River where the Sunflower
most tortuous way, varying in direction to all points of the compass. At places it runs to the very foot of the bluffs. After
leaving Memphis, there are no such highlands coming to the water's edge on the east shore until Vicksburg is
reached.
"The intervening land is cut up by bayous filled from the river in high water - many of them navigable for steamers. All
of them would be, except for overhanging trees, narrowness and tortuous course, making it impossible to turn the
bends with vessels of any considerable length. Memoirs, 262.
665Miers, Ibid, 64-68; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South, 342-343.
666Miers, Ibid, 75-77, 91-93; Catton, Ibid, 377-378.
667Miers, Ibid, 93, 107-109; 107, 108 (citations); Catton, Ibid, 378-379.
668Miers, Ibid, 109-115; 110 (citation); Catton, Ibid, 379-384.

River originated, and then southerly on the Sunflower to the point where it emptied into the
Yazoo. On 18 March, in advance of Sherman's force, Porter's fleet set out. For the next three
days, the fleet moved forward with great difficulty: It had to run a Confederate-fired cotton
blockade across the bayou; constantly deal with shifting currents and eddies which made
havoc of the fleet's formation; and confront recently surfacing, long submerged logs, huge
trees felled by rebel crews and blocking passage, overhanging branches that eventually
destroyed everything (smoke stacks, pilot houses, stanchions), and every manner of rodent
(mice, rats), small reptile (lizards, snakes) and insect that shook loose from these branches.
Finally, within 600 yards of the Rolling Fork, a thickly matted quilt of willow branches stretched
across the width of the bayou in front of Porter. A tug and, following it, an ironside, were
seemingly permanently and immovably entangled in it. To boot, a crossfire of rebel guns on
opposite banks, followed shortly by a Confederate gunboat, began to bombard the trapped
vessels. A message was carried back to Sherman, who began marching soldiers to Porter's
aid. Reaching him the next day, with the assistance of other Union work crews in the same
area, the infantry quickly drove off the rebels and silenced their guns. But, on this the fourth
day (22 March), Porter was more than willing to call off the expedition.669
All these efforts in front of Vicksburg, as we noted earlier, failed. In each case, Grant had
sought by way of a frontal approach to reach high ground in the rear of Vicksburg while
maintaining a river base of supplies. Or, in Grant's own words,
the problem was to secure a footing upon dry ground on the east side of the river from
which the troops could operate against Vicksburg. ... Marching across this country in the
face of an enemy was impossible; navigating it proved equally impracticable. The
strategical way according to the rule, therefore, would have been to go back to Memphis;
establish that as a base of supplies; fortify it so that the storehouses could be held by a
small garrison, and move from there along the line of railroad, repairing as we advanced, to
the Yallabusha, or to Jackson, Mississippi [as, similarly, Halleck did to advance on Corinth
roughly six months earlier].670

[Transcendent, Political Framework of Grant's Military Thought]

Finding a way to place his forces in the rear of Vicksburg, heavily fortified in the front, and at
its flanks (north and south), was not the only problem that now confronted Grant. Up until and
even into the Lake Providence expedition, he had been the recipient of the political and public
goodwill that Washington offered. This was not a fluke, not happenstance, as Grant's
leadership, at Forts Henry and Donelson, Nashville, and (with reservations) the second day at
Shiloh, had provided the Union with the bulk of its few victories, and more importantly, with its
southern penetration that had allowed Kentucky and Tennessee to remain Union states (even
if the latter was essentially occupied territory). To be sure, rumors of Grant's alleged
alcoholism led a lively if subterranean existence. Nonetheless, Grant was still a rising star in
Washington in late winter 1863.671 After the failure of the Lake Providence expedition, "public
opinion, i.e., military opponents, Washington politicians and the bourgeois press, began to
shift unfavorably. Grant's failed projects made explicit and cohered previously muted and
isolated opposition to him in the persons of Halleck, Stanton, Sen. Orville Browning (IL) in
Washington, and among newspapers editors in the big northern cities (not to mention the glib
669Miers, Ibid, 115-130; Catton, Ibid, 384-387; and, Vilas, Ibid, 21-22.

All Confederate work crews on these rivers and bayous were black slaves directed and guarded by rebels.
670Memoirs, 262
671Halleck, a "good barometer of the feeling toward Grant in official Washington" (Miers, Ibid, 118), wrote Grant that,

"'The opening of the Mississippi will be to us of more advantage than the capture of forty Richmond's" (Ibid).

ridicule from southern newspapers).672 "That February and March of 1863, ... in the press and
in Washington's most exclusive clubs and salons the dissatisfaction toward Grant erupted in
anger and accusations of incompetence."673 Charles A. Dana, writing in his memoirs
(Recollections of the Civil War) about his assignment by Stanton to spy on Grant, recalls his
first meeting with the man that he "was really under a cloud at the time because of his
operations at Shiloh."674
Grant only acknowledged this opposition obliquely. He noted that, "[At] this time the North had
become very much discouraged. Many strong Union men believed that the war must prove a
failure." And, then, he inserted this opposition in its correct context, stating, "The elections of
1862 had gone against the party which was for the prosecution of the war to save the Union if
it took the last man and the last dollar. Voluntary enlistments had ceased throughout the
greater part of the North, and the draft had been resorted to to fill up our ranks." 675 This
context of which Grant himself was acutely aware may have been crucial for his decision to
break with traditional military doctrine in inaugurating an overland campaign; 676 but, the
decision itself was mediated by his and his soldiery's experience on the ground during the
previous months. In point of fact, without that experience it is unlikely that an overland
campaign would have even had made any sense to Grant at all. It is a mark of his military
genius, that unlike anyone else, basing himself on that experience it did make sense.
Note Grant's analysis of the political context of his failures. "It was my judgment at the time
that to make a backward movement as long as that from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be
interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for the preservation of the Union, as a defeat,
and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue and the power to capture and punish
deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to go forward to a decisive victory."677
Now this assessment led Grant to his first break with the traditional military dictum (rule)
concerning operations. (In fact, his break with this tradition would turn the operational rule on
its head.) It was based on a military transcendent, political assessment of the grand strategic
requirements of his campaign (an assessment consistent, unlike McClellans, with those
requirements as understood by ultimate civilian, i.e., Executive, authority). Dana observed,
that after the failure of the joint army-navy (Porter's) project, "he [Grant] intended to transfer
his army to New Carthage, carry it over the Mississippi, and land 'at or about' Grand Gulf;
capturing that point, he intended to operate on the eastern and southern shores of the Big
Black River, 'threatening at the same time both Vicksburg and Jackson, and confusing the
Confederates as to his real objective.' In essence, Grant had decided that if he couldn't get at
Pemberton inside Vicksburg, then he would force Pemberton to come out and fight him." 678
This movement, a logical development of the earlier decision in which Grant refused to start
over from Memphis [there's no going back], radically deepened his break with the traditional
militarily "scientific" prescription for operations. Miers calls this decision "the big gamble."679
Grant intended to march his men south on the west bank (through a canal, under construction,
672E.g., the Cincinnati Commercial, the New York Times, etc. (The Times remained upset over Grant's anti-Semitic

action banning Jews from Department of the Tennessee in late Dec 1862.) Miers, Ibid, 106-107, and Vilas, Ibid, 2829.
673Miers, Ibid, 132.
674Cited in Ibid, 134.
675Memoirs, 262.
676Ibid, 263. "This," he flatly states, "was in my mind from the moment I took command in person at Young's Point"

(Ibid, 263).
677Ibid, 262-263.
678Miers, Ibid, 138-139, citing Dana and commenting on the latter's remarks.
679Ibid, "The Big Gamble" is the title to Miers' chapter 10.

to the bayou on the west side of the river, if necessary); and run the rebel guns on the bluffs of
Vicksburg thereby sending his supplies downriver on cotton-baled protected steamboats.680
The "gamble" resided in the fact that the supplies probably would not last long enough to beat
Pemberton's rebels in the open. Grant, having to have known that there was no militarily
sanctioned source of resupply once south of the city (unless, of course, the presence of a
Union force potentially behind Vicksburg compelled Pemberton to force a very early decision,
and unless, of course, Union forces were victorious), wagered his forces could nonetheless
sustained themselves long enough to take the enemy in its rear.
Now Grant really was alone in making this decision. He had cut out the War Department and
the President in Washington for fear of orders immediately countermanding his present
course. And when Halleck and Lincoln got wind of what he had done, both were upset. (After
4 July 1863, Lincoln, in telegraphing his thanks and congratulations to Grant, flatly stated,
"You were right, and I was wrong.") Even his most trusted lieutenant, William Sherman,
objected strenuously to the move south below Vicksburg and then inland. Sherman, in fact,
made the classical objection: "He liked so little about Grant's scheme that he ... unburden[ed]
himself in a long letter to Rawlins. Sherman already had stormed into Wilson's tent, sputtering
to prove his points from Baron Jomini's The Political and Military Life of Napoleon, the
redoubtable authority that Halleck had translated from the French. In the main, Sherman
argued for some other movement by way of Lake Providence or the Yazoo Pass. The road
back to Memphis should be secured and reopened, he thought; a minor force should be left in
the present vicinity 'to act with the gunboats when the main army is known to be near
Vicksburg - Haines' Bluff or Yazoo City'; the 'line of the Yalabusha [should] be the base from
which to operate against the points where the Mississippi Central crosses the Big Black,
above Canton; and, lastly, where the Vicksburg & Jackson Railroad crosses the same river,'
for then, he was sure, 'the capture of Vicksburg would result.'"681
[Movement South of Vicksburg]
All available water worthy vessels were employed in making the movement south of
Vicksburg. With the cover and distraction provided by Porter's gunboats, the troops march
down the western side of the river was successful. Grant crossed his forces at Bruinsburg
south of Grand Gulf, and sixty miles south of Vicksburg, hitting land 30 April 1863. 682 On 30
April - 1 May, McClernand's corps became the first to cross the river. It was followed by
McPherson's corps. Meanwhile, Sherman's troops engages in a divisionary feint above
Vicksburg at Synder's Bluff. The diversion was so convincing that the Confederate command
left its southern flank virtually uncovered. This, in turn, created the conditions for the early and
easy successes of Grant's advanced force, McPherson's XIII Corps683 (see Map 9).
On 1 May, John McClernand's XVII Corps, then John Logan's division (McPherson's corps)
engaged and drove off Bowen's rebel troops at Thompson's Hill, an outpost south of Grand
Gulf and five miles east of Port Gibson. The latter was abandoned. After quickly dispatching
this rebel force (which could not simply sit in Grand Gulf and wait upon Grant to invest it), a
680Miers, Ibid, 139; Vilas, Ibid, 31-32 (for a somewhat detailed account).
681Ibid, 139-140 (citing the first volume of Sherman's Memoirs). See n. 82, below, for a discussion of Halleck's

response to Grant's decision. Grant had anticipated correctly: Halleck, Stanton and Lincoln would have aborted the
Vicksburg campaign had Grant kept them in constant telegraphic contact with his movement.
682Bruinsburg was chosen at the point of disembarkment (instead of Rodney, further north) on the advice of an old
Negro. Crossing at Rodney would have been more time consuming, while the faster Bruinsburg crossing also had dry
roads leading into the interior. Miers, Ibid, 153.
683Catton, Ibid, 426, 422; Vilas, Ibid, 37-39 (for Sherman's corps' diversion).

march to Grand Gulf on 3 May revealed the Confederates had also evacuated here.684 Grant,
actually present with his advance force, set men to work on road and bridge repairs over
Bayou Pierre. Grant had, in fact, now seized the initiative, and now that he had it, he could ill
afford to lose it. "If Johnston and Pemberton worked in concert against him, Grant could be
beaten, perhaps disastrously; but he gambled on time - on time to interpose his forces
between the armies of Johnston and Pemberton, thereby in classically Napoleonic fashion to
beat each in detail, to drive Johnston eastward and to push Pemberton back into
Vicksburg."685
[Revolutionizing Traditional Military Theory]
Now word came from Banks on the Red River. "[The general told Grant he] could not
cooperate in the reducing of Port Hudson before the tenth of May and could not bring more
than twelve thousand troops, a number that must be greatly decimated in fighting-strength by
the need to post river guards at high points a distance of more than three hundred miles." 686
Grant already knew what Halleck would advise: Establish a base of supplies at Grand Gulf,
and wait for Banks.687 So what did Grant decide on doing?
To wait for his co-operation would have detained me at least a month. The reinforcements
would not have reached ten thousand men after deducting casualties and necessary river
guards for over three hundred miles. The enemy would have strengthened his position and
been reinforced by more men than Banks could have brought. I therefore determined to
move independently of Banks, cut loose from my base, destroy the rebel force in [the] rear
of Vicksburg and invest or capture the city.688

The problem of resupply still, however, remained. What was to be done? Grant was not one to
forget any lesson, no matter how much it failed to conform to conventional military thinking. He
recalled the Confederate General Earl Van Dorn's raid (20 Dec. 1862) on Holly Springs which
destroyed his secondary base of supplies and captured the depot's munitions and 1,500 man
garrison, compelling him to dispatch wagons to have his soldiers "scour" the countryside for
supplies. He also recalled experiencing the extraordinary results of these efforts. He wrote, "I
was amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded. I showed that we could have
subsisted off the country for two months instead of two weeks without going beyond the limits
designated. ... Our loss of supplies was great at Holly Springs, but it was more than
compensated for by those taken from the country and by the lesson taught."689 The fertile
lands of this section of the South, and the crops and livestock that grew on and lived off it,
would provide the solution. A base of supplies, the line of which was far too long to begin with
(and hence subject to constant enemy harassment and continuously endangered), would
simply be dispensed with. Contemporarily, a tenuous and endangered, because lengthy,
supply line was merely a difficulty a commander and his forces had to live with. If it proved
intractable, the solution was to shorten it, but not to abolish it altogether. Grant, however,
recognized that what according to prevailing wisdom would have appeared as a foolhardy risk
684Miers, Ibid, 154, 155-157, 158. For tactical accounts of the 1 May 1863 battle at Port Gibson (Thompson's Hill),

actually a series of running scrimmages, see Miers, Ibid, 155-157, Catton, Ibid, 426-428, and Vilas, Ibid, 35-37.
685Miers, Ibid, 159.
686Ibid, 159; Grant, Memoirs, 290. Grants says Banks had originally offered 15,000 men.
687Ibid, 290-291.
688Ibid, 290.
689Ibid, 258.

at once constituted a sound practice and opened the only real possibility of waging a
successful campaign to take Vicksburg. Moreover, he knew who and what he was up against:
Halleck's caution would lead him to disapprove of this course [of action,] but it was the only
one that gave any chance of success. The time it would take to communicate with
Washington and get a reply would be so great that I could not be interfered with until it was
demonstrated whether my plan was practicable. ... [Sherman, according to Grant, warned,]
"stop all troops till your army is partially supplied with wagons, and then act as quick as
possible; for this road will be jammed, as sure as life." To this I replied: "I do not calculate
upon the possibility of supplying the army with full rations from Grand Gulf. I know it will be
impossible without constructing additional road. What I do expect is to get up what rations
of hard bread, coffee and salt we can ... " We started from Bruinsburg with an average of
about two days' rations, and received no more from our own supplies for some days;
abundance was found in the mean time. A delay would give the enemy time to reinforce
and fortify.690

On 3 May, McPherson's advance force (Logan's division) crossed the reconstructed bayou
bridge, scattered a rebel rear guard and moved onto Willow Springs, northeast roughly 8-9
miles on the road to Vicksburg. McClernand's corps came up behind McPherson's. Grant and
an escort, in the rear, entered a deserted Grand Gulf. At once he sent instructions to Sherman
to bring his corps with 125 wagons of rations down to the crossing below Vicksburg. 691 These
were not, however, the standard rations, they were minimalist: "hard bread, coffee and salt ...
we can, and [we would] make the country furnish the balance."692
By 7 May, Grant had interposed himself between Pemberton (Vicksburg) and Johnston
(moving toward Jackson). His left (McPherson) was at Hankinson's Ferry, on the Big Black
River, his right (McClernand) was 6 miles east behind Big Sandy Creek. Sherman's corps
minus Frank Blair's division (which was still coming down the river) was at Grand Gulf. 693
Grant had struck while the iron was still hot: Joseph Johnston was preoccupied with Bragg who was preoccupied with Rosecran's Union command with which it had clashed in January
at Stone's River (Murfreesboro) in Tennessee. Accordingly, Grant reckoned Johnston might
not be able to quickly manage a concentration near Jackson to support Pemberton's defense
of Vicksburg. "Thus an urgency consumed Grant to drive south and find a spot where he could
plunge into the interior of Mississippi before this situation could be corrected. The [highly
successful] Grierson [cavalry] raid [into the Mississippi interior which destroyed stations, tore
up bridges and railroad tracks], designed to help both Old Rosy and ... [Grant], was fostered in
the hope that through disrupting communications the wedge could be enlarged between
Confederate forces in Tennessee and Mississippi."694
690Ibid, 290-291.

In this regard, Keegan (The Mask of Command, 192) comments: "Halleck ... comprehended the war's nature least of
all. A pedant of the worst sort, he had translated Jomini, escape from whose narrow geometrical strictures was a
prerequisite for victory on the vast campaigning field of North America. As Grant's superior in the West, he was nearly
to destroy the anti-Jominian will to continue in service, so strongly did he deprecate Grant's urge to 'keep moving on.'
A prisoner of his schooling at West Point, as in their different ways were also McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and
Meade, Halleck held that 'moving on' was permissible only within the limits defined by map and set-square. An army's
'base of operations,' in his view, should also form the base of a right-angular corridor within which all manoeuvre
should be confined [emphasis added].
691Catton, Ibid, 428, 429.
692Memoirs, 291. (Emphasis added.)
693Catton, Ibid, 435-436.
694Miers, Ibid, 149-150.

As of 12 May, the vanguard of McPherson's corps, Grant's army's right wing, moving
northeastly had reached Raymond, fourteen miles from Jackson. Here divisions commanded
by John Logan and Marcellus Crocker engaged a small Confederate concentration, a full
brigade of some 5,000 men under John Gregg that had rushed up from Port Hudson to assist
Pemberton. After a short period of fierce fighting in which the battle appeared to be going the
Confederate way, the increasingly weighty concentration of Union forces compelled Gregg,
fearing his brigade would be cut to pieces, to beat a hasty retreat to Jackson.695 Grant
commented that,
When the news reached me of McPherson's victory at Raymond about sundown my
position was with Sherman. I decided at once to turn the whole column towards Jackson
and capture that place without delay.
Pemberton was on my left ... A force was also collecting on my right, at Jackson, the point
where all the railroads communicating with Vicksburg connect. All the enemy's supplies of
men and stores would come by that point. As I hoped in the end to besiege Vicksburg I
must first destroy all possibility of aid. I therefore determined to move swiftly towards
Jackson, destroy or drive any force in that direction and then turn upon Pemberton.696

Grant at once ordered Sherman to cross his corps over the Big Black. In so doing, Grant cut
his communications with his rear.
By moving against Jackson, I uncovered my own communications. So I finally
decided to have none - to cut loose altogether from my base and move my whole
force eastward. I then had no fears for my communications, and if I moved quickly
enough could turn upon Pemberton before he could attack in the rear.697

Sherman thereby moved into the center behind and to left of McPherson who was instructed
to move on Jackson. McClernand, forming the army's left flank, was posted along FourteenMile Creek with lookouts posted north to Edwards Station.698
To this moment, Grant had kept Sherman's corps behind the Big Black, guarding its crossings
at its lower reaches. With the victory at Raymond, his thinking had to have been something
along these lines: The rebels are (i) sufficiently demoralized, and (ii) irreparably divided. If my
timing is right and the execution of our movements are brisk, we can fight each in detail.
Thus, he completed the break with his line of communications. This decision, which cut the
Gordian knot of military tradition, was the culmination of the entire preceding series of events
and experiences, decisions, and insights and outcomes. First, there was the experience of
Van Dorn's 20 Dec. 1862 raid on Holly Springs which destroyed his secondary base of
supplies, and compelled him to have his soldiers "scour" the countryside for supplies, and
then the experience of the amazing results of sending empty wagons into the countryside.
Second, there was the experience of seeing gunboats run the guns on the bluffs above, at
and below Vicksburg making it clear to him he could get his entire army south of Vicksburg via
the Mississippi. Third, he made the decision, based on a military transcendent, political
assessment of the grand strategic requirements of his campaign and made at the time (29
January) he arrived at Young's Point, not to return to Memphis and reestablish a fortified
supply line. From here there was, fourth, a quick succession of insights and decisions. The
most important were getting into the interior by crossing below Vicksburg and coming at it
695Miers, Ibid, 163-165.
696Memoirs, 294.
697Ibid. (Emphasis added.)
698Catton, Ibid, 439.

from the south and then the east, once at Grand Gulf making the countryside provide the
balance of his supplies, and the insight (based on an unerring grasp of the urgency of
immediate movement) that waiting for Banks was inviting a ruinous stalemate, to hold the
initiative just won his force must move immediately. Instead, it was utterly, completely and
compellingly necessary to strike while the iron was hot in order to get in-between Pemberton
and Johnston. And, fifth, the outcome of his advance movement, the victory at Raymond,
revealed he could successfully complete his inter-positioning between Pemberton and
Johnston. Thus, we arrive at the constituted act of military genius having "uncovered my own
communications ... I decided to have none" and felt better about it.699 Audacity?
The logic of Grant's position, extraordinary as the series of experiences and insights that it
rested on and in turn generated, is compelling. Where, then, is the audacity? Was it in the risk
of breaking with military tradition? No, that risk was not the gamble. For Grant, one sound,
tactical summation of combat experience (split the enemy force and beat him in detail), was
only practically realizable on foregoing another (work from a secure base of supplies). For
Grant, the latter was a falsifiably theorized projection of a condition of tactical practice
because he had discarded immersion in such theorizations: They were "nothing more than
common sense and the progress of the age."700 Since Grant had supreme confidence in his
own generalship and the fighting quality of his men, the only bet [gamble] was, having come
this far, that he could move faster than the rebels. Losing this gamble would only occur if his
forces did not move fast enough to interpose themselves between Pemberton and Johnson.
[Land Battles]
On 14 May, Pemberton, having taken a force of 50,000 out of its trenches at Vicksburg, pulled
up at Bovina, near Edward's Station, "to protect the railroad bridge and lower ferries across
the Big Black." Johnson had arrived in Mississippi and found Gregg's soldiers falling back on
Jackson after being beaten by McPherson's corps.701
Never having done so in thirty years of military experience, Pemberton called a council of war.
Johnston wanted him to move on Clinton, on McPherson's rear, drawing him further away
from Vicksburg. His scouting reports placed Sherman on his right flank. If he were to go to
Jackson, Pemberton wondered whether a return to Vicksburg would be possible? So the
council of war was called to decide. None of his lieutenants present wanted to move on
Clinton. William W. Loring spoke up: Grant without doubt had moved on Jackson; "Why not
suppose that he left no more than a single division on the Big Black? ...The logical step was
'to move next day on the Southern or Raymond road to Dillon's, which was on the main
leading road by which the enemy carried on his communications, give battle to the division left
in the rear, and thus effectually break up the enemy's communications.'" The recorder of this
council, Maj. Jacob Thompson, Pemberton's Inspector General, stated Loring's position was
"'afterwards acquiesced in by all the other officers.' ... In reducing Jackson, Union forces
would be 'too far removed' to participate in the fight Loring expected." Pemberton, not liking
the plan, accepted it to retain the loyalty of his officers.702 But the strategy was ineffective
because Grant had already abandoned traditional assumptions concerning lines of supply and
699Memoirs, 294.
700Ibid, 151 (citation).
701Miers, Ibid, 169, 170 (citation). The figure of 50,000 is given by Vilas, Ibid, 44. By the time the force reached

Edward's Station, seven miles beyond Bovina Station and sixteen miles east of Vicksburg, that force consisted of
eighty infantry regiments and ten batteries, estimated at 25,000 (Ibid, 46). Pemberton apparently reduced his force,
first, by posting a large detachment at Bovina Station, and then by detailing troops at points all along the railroad.
702Ibid, 171, for the council of war. Miers account relies on notes (internal citations) of the council taken by Maj.
Jacob Thompson.

communications. The upshot would be merely to further pull Pemberton away from Vicksburg.
Yet he would still unable to concentrate with Johnston against Grant. He would be left open to
being beaten in detail and Johnston would with his inadequate force be compelled to abandon
Jackson. Thus, Pemberton would be without aid, he and his officers would be further
mystified, his fighting men demoralized. All this came to pass.
By 14 May, Grant's forces, with McPherson on the left (just north of Jackson) and Sherman in
the center (on the western entrances to Jackson), assaulted Jackson. Thinking himself
outmanned and out-positioned, Joseph Johnston refused to fight. He ordered a retreat and
evacuated the city to the south and east.703 On the 15th, Grant instructed McPherson to move
his corps west northwest onto the road to Vicksburg, and at Clinton, to cut off the possibility of
a rendezvous between Pemberton and Johnston. Sherman was instructed to stay in Jackson,
in order to destroy "railroads, bridges, factories and military supplies." Blair's division
(Sherman's corps), the caboose of the entire army, was less than a dozen miles south of the
Bolton depot, itself just seven miles west of Clinton.704
On 16 May, Alvin Hovey's division, in the van of McClernand's corps (the rest of which was to
the southeast and did not come up to engage in the fight), met Pemberton at Champion's Hill
west southwest of Bolton. Logan's division of McPherson's corps came up on the right and
engaged the rebels in support. So did Crocker's. The major confrontation of the campaign
ensued. Fiercely contested for most of the daylight hours, the Confederates left the field and
retired behind the Big Black with a rearguard in front.705 Casualties were heavy, with the
Confederates losing nearly a quarter of their force (6,000 men if prisoners as well as killed and
wounded are counted. Union casualties were roughly 2,500.)706 The next day, 17 May,
McClernand's corps confront a well-entrenched, but demoralized, rebel rearguard at Black
River bridge over the Vicksburg and Jackson railroad. Two divisions and a brigade led by
Michael Lawler pushed the rebels out and, building makeshift bridges, chased them on other
side of the river.707 A day later, 18 May, McClernand's and McPherson's corps marched on and
confronted rebel entrenchments on the western side of Vicksburg.
At this moment, Grant ordered Sherman up from Jackson. By 19 May, the Union forces had
massed in a semi-circle in the rear (east) of Vicksburg without fortifying themselves. On the
right (north) was Sherman's corps, in the center (east) McPherson's, and on the left (south)
was McClernand's corps.
Grant wanted a quick battle once his soldiery fronted rebel fortifications (or, as the case
actually was, as they stood to the rear of Vicksburg). He felt the rebels were demoralized and
wouldn't offer much resistance. His men felt exceedingly confident they could take the rebel
defensives by storm. At 2 pm, 19 May, a general charge all along the line was ordered. The
assault was easily repulsed with high casualties. Grant had been mistaken. Having returned to
its entrenchments, and grasping the strategical shift that its new deployment entailed, the
Confederate armys resolve had stiffened.708
Grant planned another major assault for 22 May. Sherman's brigades, and McPherson's as
well broke off the attack by noon after severe casualties. Only McClernand continued,
pleading with Grant, on the basis of an alleged breakthrough in the offing, for reinforcements
703Catton, Ibid, 440, and Miers, Ibid, 171-174 (for the tactical account).
704Catton, Ibid, 441-442 (citation appearing on 442).
705Ibid, 443-445, Miers, Ibid, 178-195, and Memoirs, 302-304, for the 16 May 1863 battle of Champion Hill.
706Vilas, Ibid, 46-47.
707Catton, Ibid, 446, and Miers, Ibid, 196-198. It was at this time that Grant received a dispatch, dated 11 May, from

Halleck ordering him to return to Grand Gulf in order to rendezvous with Banks for a joint assault on Point Hudson.
Memoirs, 307-308, and n. 56, above.
708Miers, Ibid, 200-205.

and a resumption of the fighting so rebels forces could not concentrate on his sector. Grant
gave McClernand McPherson's left (mostly Quimby's) division and ordered the attack
resumed. On the right (Sherman's corps), the attack began again at 3 pm, and merely
repeated the terrible rebuff of the morning. The result was a serious blow to the Union army,
as the figure of 3,199 casualties demonstrated.709
The failure of a frontal assault left Grant's army the singular option of digging in and preparing
a siege. This it did. Forty-two days later Pemberton unconditionally surrendered Vicksburg to
Grant's Union army. Thirty-one thousand, six hundred prisoners, 172 cannon and 60,000
small arms fell into Union hands.710 Grant himself summarized the campaign thusly:
The crossing of troops at Bruinsburg commenced April 30th. On the 18th of May the army
was in the rear of Vicksburg. On the 19th, just twenty days after the crossing, the city was
completely invested and an assault had been made: five distinct battles (besides
continuous skirmishing) had been fought and won by the Union forces; the capital of the
State had fallen and its arsenals, military manufactories and everything useful for military
purposes had been destroyed; an average of about one hundred and eighty miles had
been marched by the troops engaged; but five day's rations had been issued, and no
forage; over six thousand prisoners had been captured, and as many more of the enemy
had been killed or wounded; twenty-seven heavy cannon and sixty-one field-pieces had
fallen into our hands; and four hundred miles of the river, from Vicksburg to Port Hudson,
had become ours.711

[Leadership and Audacity]

Grant, a nationalist and as such politically committed to the bone, was different and the
Vicksburg Campaign proved it. How did he prove his difference (from other Union army
officers, especially those in the East) and, along with it, his greatness?
First, consider his relation to his men. He was unlike his most trusted subordinate, William
Sherman, who exemplified by and large the attitudes and practices of regular army officers. 712
Sherman and Grant were personally men of opposite bends: Sherman was thru and thru
authoritarian and Grant was just as thoroughly populist and democratic. Sherman was heavy
handed with "his" men. Grant, on the other hand, had a different attitude toward volunteers.
"The armies of Europe are machines: the men are brave and the officers capable; but the
majority of the soldiers in most of the nations of Europe are taken from a class of people who
are not very intelligent and who have very little interest in the contest in which they are called
upon to take part. Our armies were composed of men who were able to read, men who knew
what they were fighting for, and could not be induced to serve as soldiers, except in an
emergency when the safety of the nation was involved, and so necessarily must have been
more than equal to men who fought merely because they were brave and because they were
thoroughly drilled and inured to hardships."713
Grant was different, secondly, because he, as a person, was flexible, possessing little of the
psychological rigidity that characterized that vast overwhelming number of military officers of
709Ibid, 206-215.
710Vilas, Ibid, 52.
711Memoirs, 312-313. Port Hudson, falling days later, with "6,000 prisoners, 51 guns, 5,000 small-arms and other

stores," fell without a fight and as a direct consequence of the surrender at Vicksburg. Ibid, 335.
712See "A Note on Sherman," above.
713Memoirs, 653. Compare these with his remarks about Buell ("he was a strict disciplinarian, and perhaps did not

distinguish sufficiently between the volunteer who 'enlisted for the war' and the soldier who serves in time of peace.
One system embraced men who risked life for a principle, and often men of social standing, competence, or wealth
and independence of character. The other includes, as a rule, only men who could not do as well in any other
occupation. Memoirs, 212.)

the Civil War period. This was doubly unusual inasmuch as Grant, largely a failure as a man in
the terms of the day (at least until the outbreak of war), might, one would have wrongly
suspected, have real needs compelling him to be defensive, closed and self-protective.
Grant's flexibility was the actual psychological structure underlying his capacity for the rapid
assimilation of the lessons of war, and, thereby, the same emotional structure underpinned his
military incisiveness. In practice, this meant Grant, manifestly, was different because he
turned the traditional, tried, codified and time-honored military dictum on how to conduct a
(siege) campaign on its head. That is, by refusing a base of supplies in and cutting
communications with his rear, and, successfully waging an otherwise classical campaign of
dividing a superior enemy and defeating him in detail on this basis of the refusal of this dictum
(i.e., on the basis of "living off the country" and "uncovering my [his] own communications").
This altogether experientially grounded, mediated assessment was also, in part, driven by
necessity, i.e., driven by his own offensive-oriented character. Such character was clearly on
display in efforts to divide Johnston and Pemberton and to concentrate against each in turn.
Grant, then, was not cautious in the sense described above.714 Recall his remarks about his
pursuit of rebel Col. Thomas Harris in southeastern Missouri (near the little town of Florida) in
late 1861. "As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see
Harris' camp, ... my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in
my throat. ...The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there
and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My
heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me
as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one
I never forgot afterwards."715 Here Grant exhibited, again a function of a personal flexibility, a
capacity to dialectically assume opponents standards, and to evaluate situations as
opponents did. This capacity to assume the perspective of enemy, homologous with the
facility of a linguist to speak familiarly in two tongues, would be demonstrated again and again
in the coming two years. Such an ability allowed Grant to pursue options that to others might
have appeared as far too "audacious." But this was hardly a difference that, in the end, could
account for Grant's military genius. Rather, in the structure and organization of Grant's
personality, flexibility was characteristically linked to aggressiveness, decisiveness and the
compelling need to be forward-moving. These characteristics were related to the manner in
which he immediately saw and grasped, as well as the manner in which he mediately thought,
offensively. Grant could not, in other words, intuitively and reflectively, do otherwise. For
example, with a view to the triple tasks of lifting the siege of Chattanooga in autumn 1863,
relieving the shortages of and pressures on Burnside (in Knoxville), and thereby relieving
Lincoln's anxieties about the loyal people of East Tennessee, Grant stated that nothing could
help Burnside, reinforcements, supplies or ammunition, short of "expelling the enemy from
Missionary Ridge and about Chattanooga" and "nothing could be done for him [Burnside] until
Sherman's troops were up [had arrived at Chattanooga and taken a position north of
Missionary Ridge with a view to driving the rebels off these heights]."716 He did not, for
example, say, that once Sherman came to the aid of Thomas, We could hold the rebels at
bay in Chattanooga and detach a corps to Knoxville to break the siege on Burnside. Grant
was simply not capable of thinking or acting in a defensive, indecisive way or in any manner
characterized by half-measures.717
714See chapter 4, above.
715Memoirs, 149.
716Ibid, 365, 371.
717Similarly, also see his account of an exchange with Meade with regard to Lee's abandonment of the rebel

fortifications at Petersburg (March 1865): "He suggested that if Lee was going that way [east toward Danville] we

His need to always push forward against the foe guaranteed his actions in any campaign in
which he commanded would always be characterized by decisiveness. For example, right
down to the surrender of Vicksburg, that is, during negotiations with Pemberton, Grant notified
Sherman to get ready to take the offensive against Johnston, in order to drive him out of his
fortifications.718 And it is essentially correct to assess decisiveness at once in terms of its
military value and as need: Such was demonstrated by his existentially anxious experience the period following the fight around Corinth, and by his (misjudged) response to Thomas - the
latter's failure to (order Schofield to) fight at Franklin in November 1864. The latter sent Grant,
imagination running wild about a Hood-led rebel army crossing the Ohio, into a panicked
frenzy. Recall the furry of letters he telegraphed off to Thomas ("The country was alarmed, the
administration was alarmed, and I was alarmed ... [for fear that] Hood would get north.")719 He
made threats to relieve Thomas, and had Logan on the way from City Point. (The latter made
it as far as Louisville to take command when Thomas' forces finally destroyed the rebel army
on 15 December 1964.) With Grant, panic could be brought on if the very real chance of
ending the war slipped through his hand. For Grant, a real fight was necessary to ease this
panic.
Contrast this with McClellan (as a real person, and as an ideal-typical representative of the
cautious regular army officer, especially those of the Army of the Potomac): McClellan,
through a convenient rationalization, did not consider the Peninsula Campaign, for example,
disastrous. If the massive failure of the campaign were laid out before him in newspaper story
one after another, in speech after speech in the Congress, through the displeasure evident in
the Administration's shift of men and matriel to Pope's army, in the gossip in cultured circles
in Washington, etc., McClellan remained immune to criticism, fixed in his belief (of success).
This psychological rigidity was a necessary emotional structure sustaining his megalomaniac
sense of his role in "saving" the Union. Yet the chance of a real fight brought McClellan to
panic. His apparent confidence, like that of so many other Union commanders, masked a sort
of existential insecurity as a military leader, a fundamental, ineradicable fear of a fight that led
to a depth-psychological inability to assimilate battlefield experience, hence to an
unsurpassable absence of combat (leadership) practice, hence to battlefield-based
incompetence.
The contrast is instructive, since it highlights Grant's flexibility, decisiveness and military
aggressiveness. The very contrast, in fact, constitutes an objective component in the
assessment of Grant as a great commander. Of course, none of these merely psychological
characteristic made Grant a military genius. His inversion of conventional militarily strategic
thinking embodied in the course of the Vicksburg campaign, his greatest campaign proved, in
part, that genius. The following year would suggest it more so.
The objective, historical significance of campaign lay in part in its socially subjective
consequences. Prior to the surrender of Vicksburg, Union morale among the broad masses of
farmers and urban workers had continued to decline after the horrendous slaughter of Union
soldiers at Fredericksburg (Dec. 1862). Following the defeat at Chancellorsville (May 1683),
little was left but a stoic willingness, following two years of hard sacrifice, to endure: The
northern treasury was nearly empty with a debt of a thousand million dollars and raising taxes
among a people who never had know federal assessments before was, let us say, dicey.
Casualties were over 100,000, over 200,000 men were dead due to disease, and many
would follow him. My reply was that we did not want to follow him; we wanted to get ahead of him and cut him off"
(Ibid, 610). But Meade, old regular army officer of the Army of the Potomac, just didn't get it (Ibid, 618).
718Ibid, 333.
719Ibid, 566-568. Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command, 394-401, provides a detailed treatment of Grant's panic over

George Thomas' alleged "slowness.

thousand more were in southern prisons.720 The unambiguous victory at Vicksburg (albeit
together with the withdrawal of Lee's army from northern soil following Gettysburg) changed
this situation in its entirety. In this vein, Grant himself should appropriately have the last word
on Vicksburg. "The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell. Much hard
fighting was to be done afterwards and many precious lives were to be sacrificed." But this
victory, together with that of Gettysburg, "lifted a great load of anxiety from the minds of the
President, his Cabinet and the loyal people all over the North" and, though exaggerated,
"morale was with the supporters of the Union ever after."721
Virginia Overland Campaign, 1864
The following discussion, in contradistinction to the preceding one, will steer clear of an
account of the course of the campaign. Instead, we propose to discuss the overall Union
strategic conception in the last year of the war. The discussion will once again stick closely to
Grant's views, and encompass tactical issues only insofar as they impinge on those views.722
[Overview]
In seceding from the Union and, then, creating the Confederacy, southern leaders well knew
their actions would lead to war. Nonetheless, outside occasional raids into Kentucky after
1862 and Lee's two short-termed campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and despite Lee's
offensive orientation to the Army of the Potomac, southern armies in the field were
fundamentally defensive. Accordingly, reestablishing Union integrity compelled Union armies
to operate offensively: Overall northern strategy did not require mere occupation of territories
claimed by the Confederacy (and this was really beside the point, as Lincoln, but not his
generals prior to Grant, understood very early on). Rather, it demanded destruction of the
nascent Confederate State or, what was in the most basic sense the same thing, destruction
of its armed force, its field armies. Defeat was not enough, the armies had to be ruined, so
they could not be reconstituted. Because of the active support they provided, this, in turn,
required that a certain amount of the burden of defeat actually fall on the great planters and
rural farming mass of the Confederacy as well. Southern slaves, in recreating themselves as
freemen (at the outset prior to any official decrees), had already effectively taken on the task
of reducing the plantation system even before Grant arrived in Washington. Understood by
western soldiers long before Grant or Sherman recognized it, Union armies would be
compelled to reduce areas of active southern farming, citizen support (Sherman's two armies
in Georgia and the Carolinas, Sheridan's forces in the Shenandoah Valley). But before the
destruction of Confederate armies could even begin, a strategy designed to pin them down
and hold them in place had to be developed.723
720Vilas, Ibid, 8.
721Ibid, 334. See also Vilas, Ibid, 54, for similar remarks Grant had personally made to him, while he (Vilas) was a

lieutenant colonel of volunteers commanding the 23rd Wisconsin (XIII Corps), a regiment in Grant's Army of the
Tennessee.
722There is a vast literature on the 1864 (and 1865) Virginia Campaign(s). Listed alphabetically, the following offer in
various degrees of sophistication and detailed accounts of the 1864 Overland Campaign:
Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac. A Stillness at Appomattox, and Grant Takes Command; Ulysses S. Grant,
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant; Andrew A. Humphreys, The Virginia Campaign of '64 and '65; and Noah Andre
Trudeau, Bloody Roads South. For specific battles: Cecil Battine, The Crisis of the Confederacy (Wilderness); William
Matter, If it Takes all Summer (Spotsylvania); and, Gordon Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864, and
the same author's The Battles of Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern.
For the siege of Petersburg: William Glenn Robertson, Back Door to Richmond; Richard Sommers, Richmond
Redeemed, and Noah Andre Trudeau, The Last Citadel.
723"From the outset of the war the strategical difficulties of the North pivot on the following factors: though the South
initiated the war, unlike most such cases, the strategy of the South was defensive; consequently the North was

[Grand Strategy of the War]

By the time of his arrival (23 March 1864) in Washington as Lieutenant General, Grant had
formulated a multi-theatre strategy guided by the national policy objectives of Lincoln's
government: Confederate armies in the field would be relentlessly pursued and fought until
defeated, so that the war could be brought to a conclusion on terms that allowed the Union to
be preserved without loss or dismemberment. In articulating his grand strategy, Grant
distinguished himself from all other Civil War generals (including Lee, Jackson and Sherman)
and at the same time exhibited his military genius by developing a systematic, comprehensive
plan based on coordinated movements in all combat theatres. Excluding Bonaparte himself,
he was the first modern general engaged in conventional warfare in the bourgeois era to
formulate, then consciously and methodically pursue, a multi-theatre strategy, one that,
moreover, was adequate to (i.e., capable of realizing) national policy objectives. In the end, of
course, Grant's grand strategy, modified in detail by ongoing experientially grounded
adjustments, was realized.724
Grant's multi-theatre strategy began with a recognized fact. In the past, Union armies had
operated independently either without a view of operations as a whole since each, under an
independent commander (subordinate to a merely formal leading general, Halleck), had
pursued the strategic objectives of its particular commanding officer: "The Union armies were
now divided into nineteen departments ... The Army of the Potomac was a separate command
and had no territorial limits. There were seventeen distinct commanders [since four
departments in the West had been consolidated]." As a result, hitherto the "various armies had
acted separately and independently of each other, giving the enemy an opportunity often of
depleting one command, not pressed, to reinforce another more actively engaged."725 Thus, in
the first place, Grant instructed his subordinate commanders that, henceforth, all armies were
to act in coordinated manner. (He specified the objectives of each commander and his forces.)
This would allow each and all to take advantage of their overall numerical superiority, bringing
maximum pressure to bear on the Confederacy, while at the same time preventing the rebels
from reinforcing (shifting from one front to another) armies or theatres that were weaker and/or
in difficulty. It was believed rebels would "crack under the strain" (Castel) since they chose to
defend the entirety of their territory, neither withdrawing into its heart and dragging the Union
forces into a prolonged, protracted war of attrition, nor waging a hit and run guerrilla campaign
against Union forces in the field, northern communities, supply centers, fortifications, etc.
The major Union armies in the field were Meade's Army of the Potomac, Sherman's Armies of
the Cumberland and the Tennessee, Butler's Army of the James, and the forces arrayed under
Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley. Each army was assigned a specific task. Sherman's forces
were to attack and destroy Joseph Johnston's Army of Tennessee operating in northern
Georgia and defending Atlanta. Butler's forces were to move up the James River and operate
on its south side. In connection with the movements of Meade's army, these forces were
assigned the task of menacing Richmond in its rear (one outcome of which might be, it was
compelled to advance into its enemy's country in order to reduce it piecemeal, so that the very spirit of resistance
might be pulverized. Logically this meant a war of offensive movement on the one side, and of defended positions
combined with occasional sallies on the other. J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, 46. (Emphasis
added.)
724Congress passed a bill restoring the rank of Lieutenant General on 26 February 1864. Lincoln made his
nomination of Grant to fill the position and sent it to the Senate on 1 March. The next day, the Presidential nomination
was confirmed.
For the account of Grant's strategy which follows, Grant, Memoirs, 410-12, 413, 415, 416, 429; William Glenn
Robertson, Back Door to Richmond, 14; Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 68.
725Memoirs, 410.

hoped, to weaken Lee's army by drawing off forces to protect the southern capital). At the
northern end of Virginia, Franz Sigel commanded scattered forces protecting the Baltimore &
Ohio railroad, the Pennsylvania border and access routes to the newly formed loyalist state of
West Virginia. Sigel was instructed to divide his forces into two columns. One was to move
east and south from Beverly, Virginia to get on the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad in
southeast Virginia; the other was to move south up the Shenandoah Valley toward Staunton.
(Presumably, the two columns would be able to concentrate along the rail line southeast of
Staunton.) In seeking to prevent the flow of food and forage from East Tennessee to Lee's
army (and breaking up Lee's communications with Confederate forces to the south while
menacing the left flank of his army), Sigel's columns, like Butler's army, were independently
operated adjuncts to the Army of the Potomac. The objective of the latter, Meade's, army was
nothing less than the destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia. In coordinating the action of
these armies, and all other minor Union forces (e.g., Banks forces headquartered in New
Orleans, the forces that controlled the Sea Islands, etc.), Grant set a specific date and ordered
a simultaneous advance on all fronts.726
Grant not only order a coordinated, simultaneous advance in all theatres of the war, he
prepared the advance by augmenting existing armies. In other words, Grant sought to
concentrate Union forces by stripping garrisoned forts, towns, and cities in peripheral areas of
their forces and bringing them to bear on the looming battle(s) in the decisive fronts in the
conflict. At the beginning of 1864, Sigel forces, for example, were scattered along the
Potomac, on the lower Shenandoah River, and along mountain passes to the west. The
concentration of those forces into two columns exemplified this approach. Similarly, Grant's
orders, which we shall have occasion to discuss later in another context, to strip the
Washington, DC defense of its artillerists to support the Army of the Potomac as the overland
campaign unfolded, also demonstrated how concentration of forces was effected.
Militarily speaking, Grant's strategy constituted a simple, clear plan. In concentrating forces
and coordinating their simultaneous advance, Union armies were to relentlessly pursue and
attack the two main Confederate armies until the objective of their destruction was achieved.
But realizing this objective did not require that both armies be destroyed at the same time. The
destruction of one or the other would leave the other or the one subject to an enveloping
pincer movement that in the end would mean its destruction also. "Moreover ... it [did] not
make much difference if the crack [occurred] in Virginia or in Georgia. Either way the
Confederacy ... [was] as good as doomed."727
726Compelled by the previous history of the war, the Army of the Potomac had at the same time to shield

Washington, DC from (an exaggerated fear of) Confederate attack.

"Tactically an insignificant affair, politically [the First] Bull Run [31 July 1861] was a decisive victory for President
Davis. Like the jinn from out its bottle, the defence of Washington loomed out of the dust of McDowell's retreating
army, to cast its shadow on very campaign in the eastern theatre of the war until the battle of Cedar Creek (October
19, 1864). Henceforth the slightest threat to Washington shook to its foundation the whole of the Federal strategy
"[It created a] liability to hysteria in the Union Government. The "siren begotten of the battle of Bull Run" created ...
unbalanced terrors ... [in] the political mind of the North. Fuller, Ibid, 37, 38, 39.
727Castel, Decision in the West, 68.
"The one great strategical problem of the North was to manoeuvre in such a way as to create an enemy rear. This
was accomplished in the West, the western Federal forces moving southwards down the Mississippi, eastwards
through Chattanooga, Atlanta to Savannah, and then northwards towards Richmond. A right flank wheel of over a
thousand miles extending in time over three years; a strategical movement compared to which the German right flank
wheel in 1914, however powerful, was child's play" [emphasis added]. Fuller, Ibid, 47. It might be added that the
German armies were stopped short of Paris on the Marne. Grant's armies crushed the Confederate armies of
Tennessee (outside Nashville) and Northern Virginia, occupying Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston and, in the end,
Richmond.

[Strategy of the 1864 Virginia Campaign]

Fearing the cautious nature of the Army of the Potomac leadership could well undermine his
overall campaign strategy (by returning to the comforting environs of the greater Washington,
DC area on the heels of the first battle with Lee's army), Grant decided he and his staff would
headquarter themselves in the field with Meade's army. In this manner he could at once
directly oversee operations against the Union's most determined foe and avoid the deleterious
effects that establishing headquarters in Washington with all its distracting, contradictory
political pressures (as well as its distance from the field of combat) would subject him to.
According to Grant, as he indicates both in his Memoirs and in military correspondence
preserved in the War of the Rebellion, the object he assigned the Army of the Potomac
(including Burnsides' IX Corps) was first and foremost the destruction of Lee's army, and only
then the capture of Richmond.728 Grant 7
wished to draw Lee into the open field, and there fight a standup battle. "It was my plan, then
[i.e. at the outset during the Wilderness fighting], as it was on all other occasions, to take the
initiative whenever the enemy could be drawn from his intrenchments if we were not
intrenched ourselves."729 It is likely, at least in this author's view, that Grant tacitly modeled his
view of what was possible in Virginia - defeat Lee's army in the open field, then invest
Richmond - on the Vicksburg campaign.
Grant's immediate goal of the campaign, then, manifest in each and every movement in this
period (from the crossing of the Rapidan to the massing and entrenchment of both armies
east of Petersburg, May 2 - June 15, 1864) of what legitimately can be described as war of
maneuver, was to force Lee into a situation in which he had no option but bring his army out
into the open. Here he would had to engage in a stand up fight, a battle without
entrenchments or fortified lines. Grant thought that on these grounds the Army of the
Potomac, with its vast numerical superiority, its morale and his leadership, could crush the
Army of Northern Virginia. He was sincerely convinced that Lee's army could be beaten in the
open, and his view of the quality of the fighting men of the Army of the Potomac alone is
testimony to that.730
[Tactical Problems in the Campaign]
On occasion, the Army of the Potomac had demonstrated real flexibility, maneuverability and
celerity (the movement from Gordonsville to Fredericksburg in November 1862 under
Burnside, under Hooker fording the Rappahannock and Rapidan in late April 1863 to get on
Lee's left flank, the concentration on Gettysburg from Maryland in late June 1863 under
Meade, and, later, the flank march in front of Lee's entrenched army at Cold Harbor in early
June 1864); but each of these movements were made into or away from a battle. Each came
at the outset or closing of a campaign. Flexibility and maneuverability of this sort had not,
728"To get possession of Lee's army was the first great object. With the capture of his army Richmond would

necessarily follow. It was better to fight him outside of his stronghold than in it. Memoirs. 419.
Major General Ambrose Burnside, former commander of the Army of the Potomac, had an independent command, IX
Corps, which was his old outfit he had generaled as far back as the Antietam Campaign (late summer 1862). IX Corps
was made up of four division (nine brigades, forty-two regimes) and additionally, a cavalry brigade and substantial
artillery. This command, which included two brigades of US Colored Troops (seven regiments) and in total consisted
of 25,000 men, reported directly to Grant. After both sides began to entrench at Petersburg after mid-June 1864, IX
Corps was absorbed into the Army of the Potomac.
729Ibid, 452, 463. In moving onto Spotsylvania from the Wilderness, Grants says, he "wanted to get between his
[Lee's] army and Richmond if possible; and, if not, to draw him into the open field. Ibid, 463, and also 469, 470, 505506.
730Speaking about the men of this army, he stated, "Nothing could be more complete than the organization and
discipline of this body of brave and intelligent men." Ibid, 459.

however, even been demonstrated during a battle itself and not during a running series of
battles that formed the moments of confrontation during the 1864 period of maneuver.731
Retrospectively (and Grant must have understood this at the time), the great advantage that
the battle of the Wilderness, fought on ground that largely negated the advantages of the
Army of the Potomac, was the Grant had seized the tactical initiative from Lee, an advantage
the he was to make permanent.732 But even as the Union army was each time the first to
break camp - after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, at the North Anna River and Totopotomy
Creek, after Cold Harbor - and thereby set the direction in which both armies would move, it
remained too slow to lead in a complicated, lengthy lockstep dance: Each time the armies
confronted one another, the lay of the land was topographically suited to a rebel
entrenchment. The virtues of alacrity and celerity belonged to the Confederate not the Union
army, and Lee exhibited his supreme mastery not only of the tactical offensive but of the
tactical defensive as well. Thus, each time Grant ordered Meade's army to give battle to the
rebel army, Union soldiers charged well entrenched positions in straight up bloody assaults.
Invariably, the losses were enormous. Grant himself was not fully aware of the severity of the
casualties (not until Cold Harbor, that is). The longer the maneuver period of the campaign
lasted, the further the Lieutenant General's headquarters became from the front lines - not in
terms of spatial distance, but in terms of subjection to the Army of the Potomac chain of
command733 - and the more he involved himself in overall leadership of Union operations in all
theatres of war. Accordingly, the longer the maneuver period of the campaign lasted, the more
he became incapable of achieving a detailed tactical understanding of the battle raging
immediately in his front (as well as, of course, the reasons why this understanding was not
accessible), and the greater the Union army losses in battle (relative to the time actually spent
in fighting). That Grant had decided from the outset to work through the old command
structure (in order to avoid the resentments and resistance of middle ranking officers that
might have emerged had he cleaned house and brought Westerners in to run the army),
merely hid the real problem, pushing it back out of immediate sight: Humphreys refers to dual
command and conflicting staffs that create "naturally ... some vagueness and uncertainly." But
731The march from Cold Harbor to Petersburg ended the period of maneuver, which we have identified with the

overland campaign, and inaugurated a war of position.

732"Here [at the North Anna River] Lee awaited Grant's next move. He had checked Grant's new advance, cutting in
ahead of him just as he had done at Spotsylvania Courthouse ... but he was twenty-five miles nearer the James River
than he had been, and there was a curious reversal in strategic roles. ... For the first time in the war a Federal army
taking the offensive in Virginia was retaining the initiative. Catton, Grant Takes Command, 249. The men of the Army
of the Potomac interpreted this as a rebel loss of will. Catton (Ibid, 254) cites the following remarks: "'They
[Confederates] are now fighting cautiously but desperately, disputing every inch of ground but confining themselves
exclusively to the defensive'" (Meade, letter to his wife). "'The enemy has lost vigor in attack. Their men are getting so
they will not fight except in rifle pits. My conclusion is that Gen. Hill's corps could be defeated in an open field by half
their number of resolute men" (Rufus Dawes, writing to diary, 24 May). This may have constituted a misreading of the
evidence, but Lee's army could no longer seize much less hold the initiative. Soldiers now were saying, "They all say
if he [McClellan] had not retreated with them [while here on this same ground in June 1862], himself leading the way,
but stood and let them fight it out as Grant is doing they would have been in Richmond two years sooner" (Catton,
Ibid, 268, citing Horace Porter, letter to wife.) The "Federal army now was being handled in such a way that Lee never
really had an opening for the kind of thrusts that had overwhelmed McClellan, Pope and Hooker" (Ibid, 255. Emphasis
added). This was a central feature of Grant's tactical success.
733Here we can note Catton's remarks: "[Time] was lost under the present system, ... [when] "Grant's orders filtered
downward through Meade's headquarters, force and vigor were lost, and ... Meade was so hot-tempered ... it was
hard for anybody to get along with him." This, according to Catton, was Grant's staff's argument. He, Catton, in part
reduced it to, "the antagonism that inevitably developed between two general staffs that had to operate side by side
with their respective fields imperfectly defined." Catton adds that, moreover, something was wrong, "Troop handling at
corps and division levels had been woefully inexpert on several occasions, and orders from above had been executed
slowly in some cases and feebly in others." Grant Takes Command, 234. See also Humphreys, Ibid, 83 (fn).
Humphreys is the original source of Catton's first explanation.

right here, lay, partially hidden - partially exposed, the core of the problem, to wit, the junior
staff officers who were McClellanists through and through, and who, not only resented Grant
cum Westerner but also resented and opposed the manner in which war was now being
conducted. At bottom, they ideologically opposed the Lincoln-Republican perspective that now
animated its conduct. Slowness, inexpertese and feebleness (Catton) were visible in the halfheartedness in the execution of orders, resistance, perhaps precognitive, to orders these men
disagreed with. It was individualistic sabotage and subterfuge, what we kindly dismiss when
we say their hearts were not in it
On the second day at Shiloh (5 April 1862) and again in Chattanooga in late October 1863,
Grant demonstrated that he effectively could intervene in a crisis, reorganize his forces halting
what to a lesser man might had the earmarks of defeat, and successfully assume the tactical
initiative. In the Wilderness on the evening of 5 May 1864, Grant was to prove one more time
he was not a mere "slugger" - the proverbial bull in the china shop, a man whose personal
affinity for thrusting his forces forward in audacious yet straight-up direct assaults merely
coincided with the grand strategic need for aggressive leadership. Though perhaps not a
brilliant tactician, his genius was not merely strategic.734
In the event, following that initial battle the Virginia Campaign of 1864 were not to have the
benefit of Grant's tactical insight. The Lieutenant-General faced a dilemma, and to resolve it
the Army of the Potomac would be bereft of his day-to-day leadership.735 On the one side
Grant could not forgo his responsibilities: He generaled all Union armies in the field, not just
the Army of the Potomac, nor merely the three main eastern armies (additionally, the Armies
of the James and Shenandoah), but also those ground forces in the field in the western
theatre of the war. To make certain that his grand tactical scheme was executed, that is, that
all the armies in both major theatres of the war advanced simultaneously and stayed in the
field (thereby denying the rebels the opportunity to engage in an established practice of
transferring forces from one area of operations to meet exigencies in another), he would have
to remain aloft from the daily command of the Army of the Potomac. On the other side, his
detachment from daily command would guarantee that over time those twin McClellanist
aporias, the predominance of caution and the corresponding tactical practice-determining
mood of defeatism, would have reemerged and began to hold sway in this primary eastern
army. In fact, there is little doubt that had Grant not been present (and at this point - early on
in the Wilderness - deeply involved in the day-to-day leadership of the army), that Meade,
perhaps struggling with himself a great deal, would have pulled his forces north back across
the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers following that terrible fight in early May. Meade,
Warren, Parke, all old Army of the Potomac generals, right down to the end did not know how
734For Grant's personal intervention in the course of battle in the Wilderness, see Gordon Rhea, The Battle of the

Wilderness, 263-265, 271.

735Grant's relation to subordinate commanders, Meade and Butler in particular, is discussed by Richard Sommers,
Richmond Redeemed (74-75, 171, 189, 230, 311, 312, 359, 389, 444) which covers the period of the war of position
(siege of Petersburg) to the end of 1864.
According to Sommers, at Petersburg the "General-in-Chief ... did "not unduly [meddle] ... in the prerogatives of his
subordinates" (Ibid, 74). He accepted Meade's tactical evaluations on the ground (Ibid, 189, 311, 359, 389) and thus
would not issue preemptory orders from City Point regarding situations in the field he wasn't familiar with (Ibid, 312),
allowing him, Meade, as "much [tactical] discretion as possible" (Ibid, 230). Grant left Meade to "choose the means
and the place for carrying out the mission; Grant repeatedly deferred to the junior officer's recommendations about
restricting or expanding the scope of operations... (Ibid, 444). This description characterized a relation that began to
develop in this form shortly after Grant gave orders to move south following the battle of the Wilderness.
Sommers thinks the Grant-Meade relation in terms of "strategic innovator" to a "competent tactical administrator," the
two officers forming "a harmonious and effective combination" (Ibid, 444). This is probably far too kind: Grant,
severely restricted, rendered Meade's role in tactical planning virtually null, and Meade, proud, chafed under the
restrictions. For a different assessment (differing from Sommers), see Rhea, The Battles of Spotsylvania and Yellow
Tavern, 313-314.

to, nor had the stomach for, offensive operations, remaining inflexibly cautious even when
boldness and tactical initiative were the order of the day.736 On the other hand, the men,
largely veteran soldiers, who had actually fought and survived in the Wilderness knew, even if
the army leadership did not, that they had not been defeated. They clearly understood the
army leadership's weakness (viz., its fear-inspired and caution-based desire for a retreat), as
the cheers for Grant as his mounted headquarters entourage passed the II and V Corps foot
soldiers heading south on the Brock Road sometime pass midnight on 7 May unmistakably
indicated.737
Grant's response to this dilemma was to severely restrict Meade's command prerogatives:
Grant issued orders to Meade indicating the movements he wanted executed, the order of
battle of the movement (movement of corps often even down to divisions), the timing of these
movements and the objectives he deemed should be achieved. The residue, narrow but
important, tactical dimensions of these movements were to be worked out by Meade. But this
intensified centralization was abstract, and with consequences that would have made Grant
himself swallow hard had he been able to foresee them.
Grant's centralization of his relation to the Army of the Potomac's command was abstract, in
part because it was only partially productive (which is also to say partially counter-productive).
It earned him a reputation (as a butcher of men), to which we shall return and, with which his
name is in many quarters still associated with down to this day. Had he been able to assert
day-to-day tactical control over the movements of the Army of the Potomac throughout the
course of the campaign, there is good reason to believe such command would have saved
numerous lives - particularly when we consider the actual historical alternative, the
incompetence leadership (some of which we shall examine shortly) exercised by Meade, two
of three of his corps commanders and many more divisional heads.
As supreme commander in a system of military and hierarchical social relations in which the
ultimate penalty for disobedience was death (and it was this recognition which, in our view,
prevented open sabotage), what Grant did do was to provide this Union army with that
indispensable element of will and single-minded determination that compelled the army
leadership to hold the field long after it would otherwise have retired. It is highly probable that
in a political context of the 1864 national elections, with a crypto-peace Democrat as the
alternative, Grant's presence preserved the national integrity of the Union.
[Losses and Failed Work]
From 5 May through 12 June 1864, the Army of the Potomac including IX Corps engaged the
Army of Northern Virginia in three major battles (the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold
Harbor) along with numerous minor battles and skirmishes. In less than forty days, Union
combat losses, those killed, wounded, missing and captured (and excluding those suffering
from disease) totaled an astounding 54,259 men.738 Outside the army's command layers,
figures with this degree of accuracy were not available as the fighting during the period of
736The autumn fighting around Petersburg clearly demonstrates the validity of this assessment. The 29 Sept-2 Oct

1864 right-left operations (Grant's "Fifth Offensive") around Richmond-Petersburg, for example, make this
assessment transparent. See Sommers, Richmond Redeemed, 243, 272, 387-388, 437 (Meade); 277, 401 (Parke);
272, 318 (Warren); and 242-243, 247, 327, 368 (Parke and Warren). These operations concerned the south side near
Boydton Road. On the north side, where Army of the James troops were put into the fight piecemeal, Ibid, 65-66
(Heckman), and 88-89 (William Birney).
737The cheering of the troops (for the bypassing Grant on the morning of 7 May 1864 as the army headed south
instead of retreating back across the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers), recorded by Grant himself (Memoirs, 461)
among others, is memorialized in a famous sketch (now resident in the Library of Congress) by Edwin Forbes.
738Trudeau, Bloody Roads South, 341 (chart). Compilation is based upon official figures. Common diseases and
illness included measles, smallpox and malarial fevers.

maneuver came to an end. Nonetheless, accounts by the newspaper voices of the northern
"public" made it patently obvious that these losses far exceeded anything that the Lincoln
Administration, the Congress, or the farming and working class families whose sons did the
fighting had ever witnessed before. (By way of comparison, at Gettysburg, still fresh in the
mind of that "public," Union forces suffered roughly 23,000 casualties.) Evidence of the
enormous casualties was not just to be found in the newspaper accounts, for those close
enough to the combat zone the evidence was overwhelming present in the streets of
Washington, DC as ambulances of the wounded made their way back to the capital. Letters
home from soldiers who had come through the Overland Campaign (and many more who had
not) told a similar story (see Map 10).
But unlike the past, the Union army was still in the field, but then so were the rebel forces.
Accusations against Grant began to appear, and were made with increasing regularity. He
was a "butcher" a "charlatan." (The retrospective accusation of historians who, even down to
the present day, merely debate the 1864 Virginia Campaign, is that Grant was a tactician of at
best average standing.) The Lieutenant-General was undisturbed. Until Cold Harbor, he
stayed his course.
The most serious charge against Grant himself concerned his tactical capacities. In other
words, Grant was, as we suggested above, the proverbial bull in the china shop, a man who
had a personal affinity for thrusting his forces forward in massed, direct assaults. Such may
have worked well in the West, but then western commanders did not rise to the stature of
Bobby Lee. (However, as we have already seen the Vicksburg Campaign was not won by
massed assaults.)739
739Gordon Rhea's study of Spotsylvania (The Battles of Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern,

May 7-12, 1864) argues a variation on these charges (Ibid, 312-319). According to Rhea, Grant gave little of the
necessary detailed attention to preparation for attack, e.g., preceding the 12 May assault on the salient. Most
egregiously, he failed to keep himself informed of Lee's troop location and strength in the primary zone of attack (Ibid,
313-314).
Let us assume for the moment that Rhea's assessment is correct. What would he have had Grant do? Ride around all
day, the previous day and evening assessing troop dispositions? Assign the task to the McClellanist cadre of junior
ranking staff officers under Meade whose task it would have been to gather this information from commanders on the
ground? (An assessment of whether he actually did the latter, it appears, involves access to information that is closed
to us.) We have already pointed to ramifications of the contradiction Grant lived as de jure commander of all Union
forces on the continent and the de facto commander of the Army of the Potomac. None of this, however, touches on
the central point, namely, as long as Civil War battles were fought between foes who had achieved virtual combat
parity, as they had in the East, and as long as these battles were fought on the based of closed order formations that
employed massed assault tactics, casualties would be extraordinarily high by historical standards. No amount of
attention to detail (say, for example, as McClellan compulsively had paid e.g., in the Seven Days) could change that
outcome.
On the other hand, Rhea's perspective itself is open to criticism. He writes in the post-Soviet era and in light of the
murderous destruction of Iraq colloquially known as the Gulf War. The debacle in Vietnam conjoined to the mass
movement against that war at home rendered a conscript army in the U.S. untenable. Thus, in launching its campaign
to control the oil producing nations in the Middle East, the American ruling class was compelled to employ an allvolunteer army. In the aftermath of the destruction of Iraqi objective substance and built environment, the same
masters have been loath to send in ground troops, instead employing fighter bombers and missile attacks. Haunted
by Vietnam, America's rulers fear a similar domestic revolt should the body count rise, as it inevitably would under
conditions of a ground assault on the national integrity of a modern nation-State. Professorially and ideologically
reflecting this fear (after all, historians like Rhea are largely dependent upon the good graces of the U.S. military for
their research materials, especially the United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania),
contemporary American military historians, like Rhea, evince a charming sensitivity to the useless waste in combat of
American lives. Of course, in this era of individualistic consumerism, the American egoistic personality does value its
life infinitely, especially against the background of the abysmal extent to which the US State's military planners, the
real butchers, have rendered life cheap.
Perhaps Rhea is sincere and, accordingly, merely engaged in poor judgment in his evaluation of Grant. But we
wonder whether his expression of today's dominant military assessment of the transcendent value of American lives
in combat situations also has embedded within it the cynicism and hypocrisy of the same military planners who, for

Throughout the campaign, the Union offensive had been based on the traditional tactics of
direct assaults by men massed for the attack. It was this approach to fighting that not only
brought Grant in for criticism as a merely average tactician and which he earned the nom
"butcher," but, far more importantly, likely resulted in massive causalities, since responsibility
for heavy losses in the face of the rifle (as opposed to the musket) could legitimately be laid to
the tactic of massed assaults.740
Massed assaults on the basis of close order formations were carried out in either in lines
(such as Pickett, with Lee's tacit approval, employed at Gettysburg) or columns (as Upton
utilized at Spotsylvania). In their emphasis on "shock" over firepower, these tactics exhibited
their pre-Napoleonic, French Revolutionary roots. Battlefield tactics based on close order
formation had, retrospectively speaking, obviously not kept upon with the evolution of
firepower. A musket, for example, was notoriously inaccurate beyond one hundred yards. It
was subject to misfires and its power was easily dampened by rain and thereby rendered
useless. The rifled barrel, conidial bullet and percussion cap, all of which we developed
between 1815 and 1850, improved accuracy, lessened misfires and protected ammunition
from inclement weather. Instead of a killing range of one hundred yards, the newer weaponry
extended this range to three to four hundred yards (with an eight hundred range, making
allowances for decreasing velocity and bullet fall, at the outside). Military leaders, however,
were by and large loath to forgo close order tactics. 741 They had been taught these tactics at
West Point: The tactics were tied to professional standing and control over the common
example, ordered the use of depleted plutonium coated shells (which upon impact released into the immediate
environment toxic gases and slowly decaying radioactive material, and thereby exposed U.S. military personnel, not
to mention the intended civilian as well military victims, to their effects) or instructed military doctors to use
experimental vaccinations (that contained known harmful biological agents) for troops bound for the Persian Gulf
theatre. This, of course, says nothing of the value of the Iraqi lives lost in the entirely, militarily criminal (since
unnecessary) "Turkey shoot" of soldiers evacuating Kuwait City. Nor, of course, does it touch upon the US led - UN
sponsored genocide of Iraqi children and elderly through economic sanctions - more than a million children dead of
disease and starvation on the basis of UN figures - over the period of the past eight years.
We also wonder whether Rhea, like the military planners and their masters, would have bothered to even cleared his
throat in assessing the projected losses of American military lives in the case of a American-led NATO confrontation
with Soviet-led Warsaw Pact countries. Or, alternatively, in the case of the contemporary equivalent of the Civil War,
to be sure, today at least, an albeit fanciful proletarian revolutionary upsurge, would he mourn the loss of hundred of
thousands of civilian lives after US rulers employed tactical nuclear weapons against targeted concentrations, centers
of the uprising? Hardly. Yet as far-fetched as either "scenario" is, such, namely the very existence of the bourgeois
dominated American nation and State, was at stake in Grant's 1864 Virginia Campaign. It is only in bearing this in
mind that an adequate assessment of Grant's alleged callousness can be undertaken.
740For the following two paragraphs, see the section entitled "Technological Change and the American Civil War" in
chapter 6. The entire problem of attrition is taken up, from the Confederate standpoint, in the same chapter, especially
the section entitled "Offensive Warfare and Attrition.
741"The percussion cap signed the death warrant of the cavalry charge, and the conidial bullet not only reduced the
power of the infantry assault, but also revolutionized artillery tactics. In 1839, a percussion musket was issued to
British infantry, and, in 1851, they were equipped with the Mini rifle, a weapon with a killing range of 1,000 yards. In
1815, cavalry, artillery and infantry were in close contact, and were operated by the general-in-chief as easily as a
platoon is today. The guns were frequently placed in front of the infantry, and the cavalry close behind the foot
soldiers. All this was changed by the rifle. The cavalry can no longer attack infantry unless completely broken. The
guns have to retire in the rear of the infantry, and as the range of the rifle is increased so is the distance between
them and the infantry they are supporting. Thus the old battle order, which in idea had changed but little since the
days of Gustavus Adolphus, was completely thrown out of joint; yet few of these changes were even notice, let alone
understood, by the tacticians of Europe [or the United States].
"Tactical and mechanical evolution moved so fast that every battle was in fact a new experiment. Because of the rifled
bullet, and all that this projectile created, no general could base his operations on really known, that is, fully tested
out, quantities. Throughout the war he was surrounded by a tactical doubt, not the normal fog of war, but an
uncertainty generated by the tactics he had been taught, and the tactics the rifle bullet was compelling him to
adopt. ... In the Napoleonic wars the tactics of the musket was known; in this Civil War the tactics of the rifle had to be
discovered. (Fuller, Ibid, 61-62).

soldiery, i.e., caste-based pride and, in another respect, class-based domination would be
forgone and threatened if tradition and training were dispensed with. The best tacticians
during the Civil War, Jackson and Hancock,742 still worked within these same traditions, viz.,
employed massed assault tactics. Within these traditions, surprise and flanking movements
were exploited as cover for the massed assault. Beyond this no Civil War general worked out
a tactical alternative to close order massed attacks.743 (Only James Longstreet among the
generals on both sides had explicitly recognized and understood the superiority of the tactical
defensive under these conditions.) Grant, as any map which lays out the movements of the
armies in the Overland Campaign demonstrates, like Jackson and Lee, attempted flanking
movements at every opportunity. In this respect, the common assertion that until spring and
summer 1864 Grant had never met Lee, should be reversed: Prior to 1864, Lee had not met
Grant. In the expansive sense, this was the case, first, because it was Grant, not Lee, who
seized the tactical initiative and then held it to the end. Grant, not Lee,744 continued to fight as
he always had. It was the case, second, because in the crucial first four months of fighting, it
was Grant's forces, not Lee's who suffered from the great disadvantage, attrition, that
Confederate armies alleged endured.
At each decisive level - organizational (a corps structure that gave both armies resiliency on
the field of battle), armaments technology (similar weaponry that made both armies
murderous efficient on the tactical defensive), and the combat soldier (no later than
Gettysburg man for man the Union soldier had proven himself every bit the peer of his
Confederate counterpart) - the two contending armies were more than less equally matched.
With the all-important presence of Grant at the head of the Army of the Potomac, this army
had finally achieved an overall parity with its Confederate nemesis, the Army of Northern
Virginia. The contours of the campaign revealed the meaning of parity: Emphasis on the
ground, in combat, shifted from Grant's sought after stand-up, open fight, a decisive battle, to
a protracted struggle, a series of battles, in which the outcome would be cumulative and would
be decided by attrition, that is, victory would be achieved by the side who over the long haul
and in the end had superior resources. In this total context, losses, even heavy losses, were a
necessary outcome of offensive war waged in the traditional manner.
Though not understanding the context, Grant's defenders nonetheless recognized that the
heavy losses were largely unavoidable. Their argument, constituting a political polemic aimed
at Grant's reactionary detractors, bears rehearsing inasmuch as the argument suggests,
negatively, how military parity might have in a historically real manner been avoided. Consider
the migr radical, Adam Gurowski. Gurowski is important, not because of any role he played
in official Washington or in the press constitution of "public opinion" but, because his views
summarized the thinking among radical Republicans. Gurowski notes the criminal imbecility of
742Battine, Crisis of the Confederacy, 415.
743Union Col. Emory Upton, a commanding 2nd brigade, 1st division in VI Corps had argued for and then carried out

an assault differing in some respects from conventional practice in a 10 May night attack at Spotsylvania. See Catton,
Grant Takes Command, 220-222, and Rhea, The Battles of Spotsylvania and Yellow Tavern, 161, 163-164, 168-173.
When left to their own devises, the soldiers themselves, Confederates first and then Union troops, had long before the
end of the war began to practice a distinctly different style of fighting. These tactics dispensed with mass formations
and stressed skirmishing, entailing movements in small dispersed groups of soldiers who sought whatever cover the
terrain offered (a tree, stump, brush clump, rock, ditch, etc.) fired, and advanced to the next naturally available cover,
etc. thereby in effect slowing building up a firing line against enemy's defense. Similarly, Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army,
192; and Fuller, Ibid, 59.
744"Aristocratic, imperious, proud, and above all temperamental, against Burnsides, Popes and Hookers he cultivated
such a god-like disdain for his enemy - the tradesmen of the North - that his 'embattled' cotton growers swept all
before them ... Unlike Grant, he never seems to have analyzed his victories, to discover how and why it was he had
won Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville ... "[Failing] to do so, these successes led him to believe that
he could take any risks he liked with the enemy." Fuller, Ibid, 376, 378. (Emphasis added.)

McClellan and his coterie (1861-1863) who failed, because they were southern-sympathetic,
waged gentlemanly war, etc., to carry out the hard task of destroying Lee's army by attrition.
That task still remained to be undertaken from the beginning in 1864. Grant himself tacitly
accords recognition to this point: "In the East the opposing forces stood in substantially the
same relations towards each other as three years before, or when the war began ..." He
added, rather blandly, that, "no substantial advantage had been gained by either side."
Gurowski's position was that, because McClellan had waited nearly a year before finally
engaging rebel forces and Burnside, Hooker and Meade had all effectively retired after a
single battle, the Army of Potomac had done little if nothing to weaken the Confederate Army
of Northern Virginia prior to 1864. As a result, Lee had always had time to recruit and bring his
forces up to strength. The task of destroying the rebel army in the East, that could have been
previously and partially undertaken in the form of attrition, still remained as Grant assumed
command. The fighting that began with the 1864 Virginia Campaign had essentially to
compress the work left undone in the three previous years into two months (May, and June
1864 that included some of the initial fighting around Petersburg). The first two months of the
1864 Virginia Campaign, then, saw bloodletting that horrified contemporary imagination.
Grant's most committed supporters argued that past failures of command had made the
contemporary relentless pursuit of the enemy, and its massive battlefield toll, necessary if war
was to won at all.745
It cannot seriously be suggest, however, that Grant intended from the outset to fight a war of
attrition.746 Such an aim assumed not only vastly superior resources, but qualitatively greater
numbers and the political will in the North to weather a war dragged on without any
commitment from political and military "hard war" advocates (especially Lincoln and Grant) as
to when it might end. (Grant's appointment as Lieutenant General was enthusiastically
greeted in the North precisely because it was a tacit promise that the 1864 campaign would
be the last.) Grant may have been able to count on the former (resources), but not the latter
(numbers and political will).
The attritional character of the war as it unfolded in Virginia 1864, is obfuscated by one of the
central myths of apologetic, i.e., Confederate sympathetic, historiography. Namely, Grant's
armies massively outnumbered their opponents at the outset and all during the Virginia
Overland Campaign. But that alleged advantage did not exist for the following reasons. First,
745Adam Gurowski, Dairy: 1863-1865. III. See the entries for 8 May 1864 (221), 13 May 1864 (226), 17 May 1864

(229-230), 24 May 1864 (236), 1 June 1864 (243), 3 June 1864 (244-245), 21 June 1864 (263-264), 28 June 1864
(267), 14 October 1864 (373); and especially those for 14 May 1864 (227), 16 June 1864 (260-161), and 24 June
1864 (265-266). The remark concerning "criminal imbecility" appears in the entry for 24 June 1864. Grant's remarks
appear in his Memoirs, 409.
Ted Jones' novelistic account (Grant's War, 43) imaginatively captures the whole problem between Grant's supporters
and detractors in the form of a confrontation between Halleck and Grant in summer 1862. [Halleck:] "I've read you
accounts, sir ... and the accounts in the papers. What have you accomplished sir? I'll tell you: nothing!" [Grant:]
"Nothing, sir? ... We drove the rebel army from the field [at Shiloh]. Even now our army is in pursuit. [Halleck:] "But at
such a fearful cost in lives!" ... [Grant:] "Johnson set the tone, General ... Would you have had me retreat? If so, then
when will we fight? War is not all moving and countermoving. The purpose of such movement as is necessary is to
bring the armies together. Then men die. If you expect to resolve this conflict without men dying then let us send the
men home and bid the rebels well. I feel certain they will be content with that arrangement. [Halleck:] "You are
impudent, sir." ... [Grant:] "Perhaps, General Halleck, but I think you fail to see war for what it is. It is bleeding,
maiming, and, yes, killing. I never have found the right number to die, but I know this: for the South to live, its men
must have land to stand on, to grow crops on, to move their armies about. There now is less of that land, and final
victory is closer, but only if we persevere "
746For a different view by a contemporary, see Butler's Book, 593-594, 609-610. Butler's conviction that from the
beginning Grant intended and fought a war of attrition is based solely on his, Butler's, experience of Grant's refusal at
the outset of the 1864 Virginia Campaign to exchange prisoners of war with the Confederates, hence to allow Lee to
re-man his army with said prisoners.

Union forces operated in hostile country. Accordingly, they had men tied up in guarding lines
of supplies (food, forage and ammunition) and communication (railroads and telegraph) from
enemy raids or attack aimed at destruction. Second, and similarly, operating in enemy
territory, Union forces had to be assigned to protecting wounded or sick as they were
transported back to hospitals or for care in friendly confines. Third, the very methods of
counting troops created a numerical disparity between the two opposing armies. Thus, for
example, if official Union totals placed the Army of the Potomac that was fielded for the 1864
after the battle of the Spotsylvania at, say, 80,000 men, these figures included every man and
officer on the muster rolls, including those wounded but not seriously enough to require care,
those absent on leave, those assigned to guarding supply lines as well as officers, teamsters,
orderlies, provost marshals, quartermasters and their staffs, regimental bands (musicians),
color-bearers and drummer boys. The considerably lower Confederate total, say 60,000 men,
however, would have included only those men would were armed (excluding officers),
effective regulars fit to go into battle.747 As Grant himself commented there was no real
numerical advantage here.748
Armed, so to speak, with this knowledge, not only did it not make any sense to undertake a
war of attrition, but in the event Union forces for the first for months of the 1864 Virginia
Campaign may have suffered more greatly from attrition than did those of Lee.
It was not, in fact, until well into the summer that attrition began to work to the Union
advantage. For example, Union casualties following the battles of the Wilderness and
Spotsylvania Court House, were placed at roughly 36,000 men. There was no help
forthcoming from south of Richmond (where Butler's Army of the James had been checked
and pinned down) or the Valley (where Union forces had suffered setbacks and Sigel had
ordered his troops to withdraw). Reinforcements, forwarded by Halleck from Washington
where newly formed regiments for the campaign were gathered, at this time numbered 6,0007,000 men.749 Yet Lee, whose casualties numbered some 23,000 at the same point in the
campaign, had received reinforcements from Hoke who brought a brigade from North
Carolina, Beauregard who sent troops from Petersburg, and Picket who brought a division
from Richmond, as well as troops were brought in from the Valley following the withdraw of
747Grant pointed out, [In] the Confederate army often only bayonets are taken into account, never, I believe, do they

estimate more than are handling the guns of the artillery and armed with muskets or carbines. Generally the latter are
far enough away to be excluded from the count in any one field. Officers and details of men are not included. In the
Northern armies the estimate is most liberal, taking in all connected with the army and drawing pay. Memoirs, 513.
W.R. Kiefer (History of the One Hundred and Fifty-third Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 108) provides an
instance (in this case, a single regiment) of the Union method of troop counting. At Chancellorsville in May 1863, even
unarmed soldiers (such as drummer boys) figured in Union troop strength totals.
748"The army operating against the South ... had to protect its lines of communication with the North ... Every foot of
road had to be guarded by troops stationed at convenient distances apart. ... It is safe to say that more than half the
National army was engaged in guarding lines of supplies, or were on leave, sick in hospital or on detail which
prevented their bearing arms. Memoirs, 638.
Similarly, Fuller states, "[The] deeper the North advanced into the South, the longer became its lines of
communication, absorbing thousands of men in their protection who were faced not only by a hostile army but by a
hostile nation in arms. While the South fought the soldiers of the North, the North fought the people of the South, of
which part was organized as regular formation, and part as guerilla bands..." Ibid, 46-47.
In this regard Grant noted (Memoirs, 513-514), "[Lee] was on the defensive, and in a country in which every stream,
every road, every obstacle to the movement of troops and every natural defense was familiar to him and his army.
The citizens were all friendly to him and his cause..." While rebel military leaders could always call on a friendly
farmer to show them some little used route that may not have been familiar with, Union officers struggled with grossly
inaccurate maps. In late May, Theodore Lyman, Meade's aide, remarked, "some places ... are from one to two miles
out of position, and the roads run everywhere except where laid down. The situation was "almost ludicrous. Cited by
Trudeau, Bloody Roads South, 226.
749Trudeau, Bloody Roads South, 341; Catton, Grant Takes Command, 248. By the close of the battle of
Spotsylvania, more than four thousand men had, furthermore, been sent back to Washington due simply to illness.

Sigel.750 These reinforcements totaled maybe 15,000 men. For Grant's forces, this situation
got worse long before it got better.751
Grant knew he actually lacked a numerical advantage, and for this reason if no other, he was
not fighting a war of attrition. But there was another reason. Until Cold Harbor, Grant expected
and desired to get Lee's army out into the open where he could engage in a stand up fight, but
one in which battlefield maneuver, and his leadership, could be brought to bear on the
outcome. He genuinely felt and thought, even if others in Meade's army were cynical, this
army could beat and destroy Lee's army in this manner: "There were good and true officers
who believe now that the Army of Northern Virginia was superior to the Army of the Potomac
man to man. I do not believe so..."752 The battle at Cold Harbor marked a turning point in
Grant's thinking.
By 1 June, it appeared to Grant that the waltz south and easterly round Richmond between
the two armies could be broken up: The opportunity to interpose his forces between those of
Lee and Richmond appeared as rebel forces on Lee's right flank had not had time to entrench.
But men tired from nearly a month of marching and fighting, fighting and marching, and a
chain of command ever unable to move swiftly, allowed the Confederate time to dig in. At Cold
Harbor on 3 June, Union assault(s) were made against a well-entrenched army who had
prepared a defense based on a labyrinthine complex of trenches, gun emplacements and
skirmish pits. This complex utilized every dip, every bog and pitch that water ran off, every
knoll, hill and patch of trees on the field of battle. It maximized the crossfires and enfilades of
every approach to Confederate lines. Union forces (Hancock's II Corps, Wrights VI Corps and
two divisions, 16,000 men, of the Army of the James under William F. "Baldy" detached for
service in this battle) suffered accordingly. The results, some 7,000 casualties, most of which
were concentrated within the first two hours of fighting, appear, retrospectively, horrendous.
Not that it was any consolation to the men who suffered or died, but Cold Harbor, clearly a
defeat, was less costly then either of the two previous stalemated battles in the campaign.753
Nonetheless, "[The notion of] 'Grant the Butcher' is a mythical character out of folklore, not
history. His conduct of operations from the Wilderness through Petersburg is not self-evident
folly but the understandable consequence of his experience in the West. From Fort Donelson
through the second day at Shiloh and on through Vicksburg to Missionary Ridge, he gained
major triumphs and made his reputation by carrying the war to the enemy strategically and
tactically. It is hardly surprising that he initially continued in Virginia the approach that had
earned him promotion and the opportunity to confront Robert E. Lee. Six weeks of bloody
campaigning, however, convinced the Lieutenant General that, such tactics were not
efficacious in this theater."754
Notes on the Siege of Petersburg
Prior to Cold Harbor, as the number of skirmishes and minor battles mounted following the
bloody struggle at Spotsylvania Court House, Grant began to recognize the Lee would not
bring his army out of its trenches. On 25 May, he noted in instructions to Meade that, "[A]
750Trudeau, Ibid; Grant, Memoirs, 481-482, 487.
751Catton notes that, "[At] the end of August, Meade's three infantry corps contained an effective strength of only

28,900 officers and men, while the infantry effectives in Butler's army numbered hardly more than 17,000. Never had
the margin over Lee been so small - and never had there been less substance to the charge that Grant was fighting a
war of attrition based on his possession of unlimited numbers. Grant Takes Command, 352.
752Memoirs, 514.
753For battlefield structure, Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 158-159; for casualties, Ibid, 163 and Catton, Grant

Takes Command, 167.

754Sommers, Richmond Redeemed, 423

battle with them outside of intrenchments cannot be had," and reflectively he recalled,
nowhere after the battle of the Wilderness did Lee show any disposition to leave his defences
far behind.755
After Cold Harbor, a universal fear of direct assault on fortified positions developed among the
soldiery and the officers corps. From this moment onward Grant's strategic thinking is drawn
to considerations of lines of supply and their sources, especially in mid-June and after as he
begins to see that his army will be compelled to conduct a siege.
[The Strain of Combat]
The period of maneuver (the Overland Campaign) placed tremendous strain and restrictions
on the conduct of the Union army as it undertook the siege of Petersburg.756 These can be
briefly summarized under the heading of the strain of combat. First, the army lost a great deal
of its veteran core, both capable officers and soldiers. At least for now (after 17 June), it no
longer had the mobility it exhibited in the spring. Second, the remaining veterans, again both
officers and particularly men, needed rest. At the same time, new recruits needed experience
(not just combat, but in activities as simple as learning daily army routines). Third, until both
conditions implied by the first points could be met, the army would not effectively function in
mass maneuvers, nor could daring tactical movements be undertaken.757
Recognizing the army's limited flexibility, Grant, nonetheless, was not led to conduct a passive
siege.
[New Men]
The casualties incurred during the Overland Campaign made recruitment essential. Recalling
that the Union armies were still essentially volunteer forces, these losses were greatly
exacerbated and magnified by the expiration of terms of enlistment of veteran soldiers (many
of whom enlisted as whole regiments). Thousands of men, three year volunteers, had had
enough of the fighting. Their terms of enlistment were now ending. On the basis of their
lengthy experience alone, these men were obviously a central part of the hardcore of the Army
755Letter to Meade, 25 May 1864, reproduced from War of the Rebellion in Memoirs, 491. The reflection on the

course of the campaign appears in Ibid, 500.

756Grant did not abruptly switch his offensively tactical approach at Petersburg, but was compelled in some respects
by the course of events to alter that approach.
After withdrawing from Cold Harbor, the Union army "stole" a march on a Lee's army beating them south to the
James, and, in an amazing engineering feat, crossed two corps before Lee had his army well underway. In the lead
was the force, some 15,000-18,000 under "Baldy" Smith, detached from the Army of the James. Prior to crossing, a
troop exchange with Butler's remaining force had occurred and regiments of black troops from Hinck's division joint
Smith's command. On the late afternoon of 15 June, Smith had ordered an artillery bombardment of the vast
Petersburg defenses on their northeast end. Following the barrage, Hinck's black troopers assaulted the works. In a
half hour, it was all over. Several hundred prisoners, five redoubts, sixteen artillery pieces and a half of mile of
trenches had been taken. It was early evening as Hancock came up with the lead division of his corps. Hancock had,
after a day of marching to confused orders, finally got to where he needed to be, aware now a night attack had been
planned. Smith, on the other hand, knew now that Petersburg was lightly defended, Bureaugard having stripped its
entrenchments to assist Lee, while Lee's army was still somewhere north a full day's march away. Petersburg was
there for the taking. Though merely territory, and not Lee's army, the decisive lines of supply and communication of
both that army and Richmond, would have also immediately fallen into Union hands. The duration of the eventual
siege would have been greatly shortened, and many of the men lost in the battles between June and November might
have otherwise lived. What did Smith do? Though with Grant since Chattanooga (November 1863), he reverted to
form, i.e., exhibited the McClellanist roots of his own Army of the Potomac formation. (Smith had been a close friend
of and advisor to McClellan in the early days of the army.) He got cautious, projected (the possibility of) enemy
reinforcements where there were none, and called off the final assault. In other words, he choked. When the assault
was finally launched, on 17 June, Lee had gotten most of his army into the trenches and was able to repulse it. So
began the nine month long siege of Petersburg.
757Sommers, Richmond Redeemed, 228.

of the Potomac. No exact figures exist, but the Army of the Potomac had lost some thirty-six
regiments of regulars in this manner. As casualties mounted during the five offensives around
Petersburg in the summer and fall that Grant ordered, fewer and fewer veteran soldiers
remained to fill their ranks.758
Added to three long years of war with no end in sight, newspaper accounts, stories by
returning veterans either injured or mustered out, and accounts based on letters from loved
ones at the front all discouraged men from volunteering. Gone was the enthusiasm and
patriotism that had motivated the better than one and a quarter million men who had
volunteered for service in the first year of war. The new recruits, however, were different. First,
the vast overwhelming majority did not volunteer but were drafted on the basis of the
conscription law of July 1863.
These new men changed the social composition of the army and gravely affected its fighting
spirit. The first two groups were men who had enlisted but gotten assignments to the defense
of Washington, DC as heavy artillerists. Contemptuously known as "heavies," these men had
by both encamped and campaign standards, experienced an easy and soft, if you will, military
life. They were reluctant to fight. In contrast to them, black volunteers made up the only group
of enthusiastic, truly loyalist volunteers. Like any new group of recruits, they were frightfully
inexperienced, but willing to fight and, having fought, usually demonstrated their mettle. The
balance of the new soldiery were conscripts.
While a small number of these conscripts would make good soldiers with "seasoning," by and
large they stood in stark opposition to black soldiers' enthusiasm and loyalty. Many, especially
the bounty jumpers and substitutes, were men who had not only had no desire to fight but did
everything they could to avoid it. Of course, it would be the men at the front who were the first
to become of aware of these intents and to suffer as a consequence. There were two further
categories of recruits. The one, made up of about as much loyal fiber as the bounty jumpers,
were men off the big city streets and docks, often thieves, pimps, or homeless individuals
whom the draft and substitute brokers got drunk and signed up; the other were immigrants,
usually German, just off the boat and unable to speak English. These men were hustled by
predatory entrepreneurs, substitute brokers - part of the scum that floats around the edges of
every capitalist society, who made their "living" by bringing in new recruits for a fee paid by the
recruiting offices of states seeking to fill their draft quotas. 759 The changing social composition
of the army transformed its character in a double sense: Now, not only was the army largely
lumpenproletarianized, and thus, confronted all the problems generally associated with the
dregs of society, as a result of this new presence, officers were compelled, in order to enforce
a discipline that had once been taken up with at best grumbling, to be sterner, and enforce
harsher penalties for breach of that discipline.

758Recall that in late July 1861 Lincoln had issued a call for 500,000 volunteers. These men were among the nearly

715,000 who had responded to that call (W.R. Kiefer, History of the One Hundred and Fifty-third Regiment
Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 7). On expiration of service, Catton, Grant Takes Command, 241; also Sommers,
Ibid, 238, 283. The figure of 1,255,000 appearing in the next paragraph is based on Kiefer, Ibid.
759Bounty jumpers were men who signed up for the often unusually high enlistment bonuses states paid to fill their
quotes, who deserted their outfit at the first opportunity and signed up again, and in some cases, again and again.
Substitution was a social class feature of the conscript law which allowed well-to-do or wealthy to engage another
man (some poor slob who was paid a nominal amount) to take his place, hence act as his substitute, or to defer his
prospects of conscription to another, later draft for a $300.00 fee paid to the government. For the social dregs
attracted by and roped into the draft, above all Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 23-31; Catton, Grant Takes
Command, 368, and Sommers, Richmond Redeemed, 234, 283. In his novel The Crater, Richard Slotin superbly
recreates the types of treachery (recounted in memoirs, regimental histories, etc.) that the honest, loyal soldiery of the
army experienced in relation to new lumpenproletarian elements.

[Siege Strategy]
Grant, fully aware of the problems created by the army's changing social composition,
persisted in his tenacious lock on Lee. He crafted a strategy to deal with these problems as
well as those associated with the geography of the siege. The former limited his fighting
capacity, while the latter prevented him from conducting operations at too great a distance
from his supply lines that traversed eastern Virginia down to his base on the James (see Map
11).
Grant employed his less dependable soldiery in the massive complex of trenches, literally an
entrenched encampment (Sommers), to, relieve combat experienced troops who were
henceforth used almost entirely in offensive operations. The better elements of the new
soldiery (heavies, USCT companies and provost marshals) were employed, first, to protect the
army's supply lines for its flanking movements as the veteran combat army core was engaged
both north circling Richmond from the east, and southward, southwestward and westward as
the Union forces sought to plant themselves on Confederate supply lines (Weldon, and
Southside railroads); and, second, to guard prisoners, protect supply depots and army
headquarters at City Point.760
Constant shelling by the Union forces from along its line, daily sniping, and intermittent battles,
that, accordingly, harried, wore down and rendered Lee's soldiery tactically immobile, were all
part of a strategy aimed at fixing Confederate defenders in place both in the battlefield and
strategic sense. This immobilization was crucial: After September, the Union armies in the
East did experience a growing numerical edge. In a siege situation, otherwise dubious combat
forces were employed from within Union lines in pinning down enemy forces. This limited
Lee's army's mobility and flexibility in response to Union offensives, and though for months
more or less adequate responses were found, this too was a feature of the attrition Grant
sought.761
Grand tactically, Grant developed a right-left strategy: Over the six months from the end of
June to the end of December, Grant, always probing to find a weakness on one end of the
rebel line or the other, used a two-pronged attack to extend Union lines northward, and south,
southwest, west and northward, slowing encircling the Confederate defense and stretching it
razor thin. These attacks were developed in a thrust north toward Richmond - a heavy feint,
followed shortly, say the next day, by the main blow - an attack south toward the Weldon
Railroad. There were five major offensives in the six months in question, north, then south or
southwest with the temporal lapse between each one shorting with each attack. After three
such offensives, he inverted their order. Finally, they were made virtually simultaneously. "His
war of attrition ... [was] not to be found in the nonexistent tactics of the slaughterpen but in the
nonrelaxing tenacity of strategic pressure."762 In the end, the pressure would break the
Confederate defense.
A couple of months of slacked winter fighting allowed the Union force to recuperate and
prepare for the spring. In March 1865, Grant began to bring the enormous pressure of these
forces, unlike the Confederates rested and well-fed, to bear again. In late March, he ordered
an attack all along the line. The defenders broke and Lee was compelled to evacuate his once

760Sommers, Ibid, 227, 228.

761Ibid, 228, 423.
762Ibid, 423. (Emphasis added.)

To be sure, the constant use of veteran troops, especially Hancock's II Corps, eventually wore these troops out, both
the men and the officers. Death, wounds, illness and just plain fatigue left this outfit, the very best fighting unit in the
eastern armies after the reorganization following Gettysburg, a mere shell of its former self.

proud, now ragged army. Thus, began the chase that ended at Appomattox Court House two
weeks later.763

763According to Benjamin Butler (Butler's Book, 879), when Lee gave the order on 2 March 1865 to abandon the

trenches of Petersburg he had 30,000 men, a week later upon surrender his army numbered 8,000 effectives. George
A. Bruce ("The Strategy of the Civil War," 482), having carefully examined the various accounts and official records
concerning the last two weeks of the war, relates that as of 29 March the Army of Northern Virginia numbered 40,000
men. At the moment of surrender (9 April), the Union forces had captured 19,100 rebel soldiers, and Lee had at his
disposal 7,500 armed soldiers (i.e., effectives), 2,000 cavalry, and 20,000 men, who having discarded their weapons,
were unarmed.

Part III
Real Community of Free Labor - Free Men
"Westerner" here is short-hand for the entire complex of urban as well rural social strata that
materially, often mediately, depended upon the rapidly developing capitalist farming economy
of the old West.
Grant, like Lincoln and the bulk of the radical Republicans, was a Westerner. Beyond the
banal assertion that his attitudes toward the war and his military practice were mediated by his
Westerner formation, what was it about being a Westerner that made men like Grant different?
Difference here is taken in opposition to eastern military leaders, and among civilian politicians
opposition to Congressmen from the East: Westerners were different because they were
willing to fight as Grant himself stated to the "last man and the last dollar," and, as a
consequence, in the willingness to wage "hard war." At the top of the military and civilian
hierarchies, Grant and Lincoln provided the indispensable element of will and single-minded
determination to see the fight through to the end, i.e., to an unconditional rebel surrender,
without military retreats or politico-civilian compromises.
Westerners in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
What was it that motivated Westerners to take this stand? Unlike Easterners they did not
derive their human and social models from others, specifically from southern gentlemen; nor,
unlike Southerners, were they driven by the need to defend, and the end to merely preserve,
narrowly sectionally-based, existing property and anti-democratic power relations based upon
slavery in production. Also unlike those in their own camp who either fought or supported the
Union war effort from a sense of moral outrage over slavery, Westerners were first and
foremost nationalists: For them, the "Union" (i.e., the State nationally), invoking their deepest
loyalists, constituted the guarantor both of the realization of vision of the future of the nation
and those actually existing conditions upon which that future rested. Among them (whom we
count Grant), the most politically conscious were animated by and at the same elaborated this
vision. These men formed the organic intelligentsia (lawyers, politicians, editors and leading
military officers) of the entire farming-based society of the West. In mid-nineteenth century
America among western soldiers as a whole, moreover, this vision existentially underpinned
the motivations of the young men who volunteered to fight to suppress the rebellion. That is,
the vision constituted the actual emotional-psychological infrastructure of their feelings,
motivations and rationality, rendering each coherent and connected. This vision was
elaborated on the basis of community as formatively experienced in the West. As the
foundations of this vision we find the lived experience, then idealization, of what we shall call
the real (i.e., free soil) community of free labor - free men. The experience of this community
among Westerners provided them with an image of a world intrinsically worth seeing unfold
and develop, a sense of righteousness of cause, the confidence to fight a war, and the grim
determination to see the fighting through to a victorious end.764
764The terms "free men," etc., are obviously taken over from Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. The

Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War.

Our use of the analytic concept of a world vision is based on Lucian Goldmann's original development in his The
Hidden God, 89-102, 313-318. See our preliminary remarks, "The Planter Ruling Class and the Constitution of Class
in History," in the Preface, above.
A world vision refers to the thematic, guiding moments of the awareness of historically significant social classes,
specifically to the objectively embodied consciousness of man, community and nature which orient the practice - vis-vis other classes - of leading personages among the dominant social groups within said classes.
As we hope the following presentation will exhibit, Grant's Personal Memoirs, set down when the era of the real
community had already passed but written in 1885 by a dying man who relived and celebrated these events as
contemporaneous, constitutes the central document from which the world vision of the social class of "free men" can
be reconstructed.

The real (i.e., free soil) community of free labor - free men was the actual-historical lifeworldly
(Lebensweltliche) foundations of Westerners experience. Thereby, it formed the basis of their
expectations and aspirations. It also formed the unarticulated ground of their common unity
and identity (hence, community). It was this world that they assumed without question
constituted the "good life"; that they not only sought to defend (as in "free soil") against the
encroachments of tenantization and the slave regime; but it was also this world in its future
development these men projected as a nationally valid model for all American social life. How
was this community constituted?
The western community was rooted in early farming settlements. Accordingly, it presupposed
the free (squatted) or cheap (purchased) lands, thrown open to settlers by a national
government following expropriation and genocide of native peoples. Though largely vitiated by
tenancy, by mid-century this material presupposition of the western community had been
ideally formulated, consciously and conceptually articulated, as "free soil."
On the frontier in its earliest, most primitive form - a form which this vision tacitly idealized and
romanticized, family farmers, beyond farming (and hunting), often added blacksmiths,
tanneries and sawmills to their farmers. Within the communities, smiths, wheelwrights,
carpenters, potters, millers, tanners, shoemakers and even physicians could be found. The
communities were founded on private ownership of the land; ownership and all legal rights
were in hands of a male householder; productively speaking, these communities of farming
families were self-contained. Far from thriving market centers, their self-sufficiency was
reproduced through large families (which provided labor) and a rigid, patriarchally dominated
sexual division of labor. Regular sociable activities knitted together what otherwise would been
solitary farming families. Those activities fell into several categories: First, neighborliness
which began with established families greeting a new neighbor in the vicinity; second, an
informal system of family farm product exchanges; third, occasional "socials"; fourth, religious
services; and last, political and civil gatherings, especially party aligned discussions, debates
or the occasional sessions of the justice of the peace court.765
Many of the essential features of these communities rose out of the regular if only periodic,
socializing and harmonizing, neighborly exchange and public activities of daily life. At their
origins and during their early years of development, these activities knitted what had the
Grant's celebration of the long departed real community of free labor - free men, should be counterposed to the
reflections of another western, ex-Civil War general and former President, Rutherford Hayes. Penned at almost
exactly the same time, Hayes, with his mind returning to the outset of his term in office, specifically to State
repression of the railroad workers strike of 1877 on behalf of capital, wrote: "Shall the railroads govern the country, or
shall the people govern the railroads? ... This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no
longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. How is this?" Cited in Robert Bruce,
1877: Year of Violence, 320.
765In its primitive, i.e., early forms, beyond farming, activities included gathering wood together with caring for a small
garden, cooking, clothing production and repair, and child care.
Neighborly activity included raising a cabin that ranged from a first to a newer, perhaps larger one. It extended to
taking care of daily chores for a neighbor taken ill, including planting and harvesting corn, getting up wood, repairing a
cabin.
Product exchanges, though sometimes accounted for in terms of a universal medium (money), were most often done
on the basis of extending "credit" which never involved monetary exchange or interest charges (such as a smithy who
sharpening tools and was latter repaid with so many pounds of beef, flour, etc.). Labor exchanges involved swappings
back and forth of corn and wheat planting, harvesting, corn-husking and hay-making.
Socials most often centered on "frolics" such as a dance or swim that always including a good deal of drinking.
Services included regular churchgoing and special events, especially weddings.
The textual account and enumerations here are based on John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois
Prairie, 57-145, and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 12-14 (and the sources cited by Sellers at n. 12, 450).
Faragher's discussion of the early western settlement communities examines the Sugar Creek woodlands and prairie
known as the Sangamma of central Illinois. As evidenced by Sellers, though southern settled, Sugar Creek's early
formation and structure can be taken as exemplary for the development through the old West.

external appearance of a series of solitary farming families into culturally integrated (even if
socially divided) productively self-contained communities. As their productive capacity
developed, these communities, or those characteristic of the areas of both southern and New
England re-settlement in the West, would find markets for their grains, meat, etc., surpluses
large and small, in other words, they would lose their self-contained, but not their selfsufficient character.
As market integration grew, the dynamic regions of the West underwent social and economic
differentiation. (As communities, not isolated farms, these communities themselves were
never economically primitive as the division of labor enumerated above has already
indicated.) Differentiation was the other side of economic expansion, within which the life
chances and trajectories of young farming men was open-ended, or so it was hoped and
expressed. With a public domain of, seemingly, endlessly available new land (formally, new
"territories" based, again, on Indian expropriation) regional growth raised the hope and in
many cases the opportunity for socio-economic advancement.766 Before the closure of the
public domain in the old West (no latter than 1856), social mobility in Yankee communities
(and to a much lesser extent in "Butternut" ones) led Westerners to hold out the hope that
stratification in these communities would remain fluid, and not become fixed. 767 One
subjective consequence was that a socio-economically and politically important stratum of
western men had, emotionally-psychologically speaking, internalized hierarchical social
relations to a far less degree than Easterners (and, obviously, Southerners). Similarly, almost
all Westerners, moreover, anticipated, an anticipation based on the aforementioned hope,
that, whatever social station one might currently occupy," it could be transcended. Thus, the
real community of free labor - free men was ideally, and in some, i.e., recently past, respect,
really and characteristically a more egalitarian society. But that "egalitarianism" was not
archaic: The West was not a socially homogeneous community of yeoman farmers, nor was
the western economy autarchic. By the mid-1850s (at the origins of the Republican party), a
well-developed division of labor existed in the economically dynamic regions of the West, and
the western economy even in its most frontier fringes was well-integrated into the incipient
industrially capitalist economy of the East, and mediately of that of western Europe. With
regard to, relatively speaking, the large mass of property owners (among the smaller men,
farmers, retailers, merchants, for whom the vision was most ideologically integrating),
"egalitarianism" was related to a real condition; otherwise, once again, it was held out
anticipatorily. What was intended and meant here was that social differentiation was not fixed,
i.e., western society was not substantially stratified, viz., there was "equality of opportunity,"
and more of it at least by the European standards that large immigrant populations among the
unpropertied masses of the West still held: It was fervently believed that every man had a
chance, no one was held down by social station, no one was, in other words, held to a fixed
position in the process of production and the social order. Until the decade before the Civil
War, the social order of the dynamic regions of the West was fluid largely because, relative to
the societies of Europe, opportunity was real, or at least perceived as real. In other words,
although often overblown, here personal "advance" was experienced by enough men to
render it real.768 Ideally by way of anticipation, men could own land, work it themselves, and
thereby objectively constitute themselves as "free labor"; hence, men themselves were "free,"
766"'Of all the multitude of young men engaged in various employments of this city there is probably not one who

does not desire, and even confidently expect, to become rich, and that at an early day.'" Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Men, 14, citing the Cincinnati Gazette for 11 June 1860). Foner (Ibid.) comments, the "universal desire for
social advancement gave American life an aspect of almost frenetic motion and activity, as men moved from place to
place, and occupation to occupation.
767Tenantization provided evidence to the contrary. In this light, much of the mobility was not upward, but simply
moving on (further west).

objectively constituting themselves as "free men" in distinction to the slave. The

presupposition of this existential freedom was cheap, plentiful expropriated Indian land, "free
soil."
To the extent this experience as "free men" was real, it had given rise, then, to a lived and
experienced egalitarianism. This experience in idealized form constituted a central element of
the world vision of Westerners.
This egalitarianism was exhibited during the war: In western Union armies, soldiers and
officers were more familiar with one another, and capable of greater cooperation. For
example, Grant, in front of Port Gibson during the Vicksburg Campaign, noted that
the troops were set to work at once to construct a bridge across the South Fork of the
Bayou Pierre. At this time the water was high and the current rapid. ... Colonel J.H. Wilson,
a member of my staff, planned and superintended the construction of the bridge, going into
the water and working as hard as any one engaged. Officers and men generally joined in
this work.769

The experience of mobility among men who envisioned a nation modeled on the West had its
basis in an ideologization, i.e., the vision professed to characterize both the West uniformly
and the North as a whole. In this way, northern achievements (growth, expansion) were
purported to be based upon an activity, "free labor," itself illicitly generalized. Based upon
objective activity that controlled its own means of production, "free labor" was not yet
proletarianized, did not mean "waged labor." This was possible because the West had only
recently begun to be reshaped by capitalist social relations, and because rural
proletarianization remained largely disguised.770 In this respect, the system of "free labor"
could be said to distinguish itself from that of southern slavery. The vision animating the most
politically conscious Westerners, then, constituted an "affirmation of the superiority of the
social system of the North - a dynamic, expanding ... society," one in which ... [a man] could
lift himself up," a society "whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of
the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man."771 From this
perspective, the aim of social mobility was not great wealth, but productive independence.
"Free labor" still meant, for those who upheld the notion, men had expansive life chances
based on their economic activity. In other words and negatively speaking, they retained the
opportunity to refuse proletarianization.772 (Thus, this vision had a compelling appeal to those
already undergoing open or concealed proletarianization in the rural economy of the old
West.) "Free labor" could be conceptually articulated and generalized because it caught and
fixed features of a petty commodity producing social order which was not fully capitalist: "If the
Republicans saw 'labor' as substantially different form the modern-day notion of the 'working
class,' it was partly because the line between capitalist and worker was to a large extent
blurred in the ante-bellum northern [read "western"] economy, which centered on independent
768"Contemporaries and historians agree that the average American of the ante-bellum years was driven by an

inordinate desire to improve his conditions of life, and by the boundless confidence that he could do so. Foner, Ibid,
13. While this was in the limited sense described above true, Foner ought to have recognized that it was western
organic intellectuals, mostly politicians and editors, who formed the core of "contemporary" sources and who where
too often largely speaking to their own condition.
769Grant, Memoirs, 287.
770See the section "Capitalist Development in the Old West" in chapter 2, above.
771Foner, Ibid, 11.
772"A man who remained all his life dependent on wages for his livelihood appeared almost as unfree as the southern

slave" Ibid, 16-17. "Free labor" was clearly then rooted in the Jacksonian notion of the independent producer. See
chapter 1, above.

farm and small shop." In this theorization of the practice of daily life, no line was drawn
between waged labor and middling groups.773
By the mid-1850s, however, southern planter efforts to render new territories fit for slavery
threatened to generalize the already large and tacitly recognized presence of the western
tenantcy, and with it the largely floating population of rural waged laborers, and in so doing,
transform a situation of disguised proletarianization into an open, fixed condition on the
"European" model. If such came to pass, the existential and lifeworld foundations of the vision
of the real community of free labor - free men would, accordingly, be directly undermined. The
organic intellectuals of the old West clearly saw this situation, and, while doing everything
they could to deny the emerging actuality of "Europeanization,"774 they drew a line beyond
which they could not and would not cross, a point beyond which there could be no
compromise within the national State with the political representatives of the South. That line
consisted in the straightforward commitment to non-extension of slavery into the new
territories. The defense of western society and, because it was productively integrated with
the East, the future prospects for the integrity of the North as a whole, demanded no less.
The Vision of Community
So what shape did this vision take among those who felt, formulated and acted on it? In his
Memoirs Grant states:
There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South
was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the
institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was
burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and
one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With
the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory.
The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not
toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash."
The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The nonslaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to
his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and,
not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them.
The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but
it was worth the cost.775

Here Grant, taking the issue of the war as his point of departure, counterposed North and
South as systems of labor. Slavery, repugnant to otherwise civilized peoples, degraded labor,
i.e., it fixed men in a humiliating dependency, corrupted them morally and personally, and
lowered the value of a product to a level where "free labor" could not compete with it. (Among
non-abolitionists, "degradation" did not in anyways imply a concern for the humanity of the
slave.) Hence, southern whites, excepting those designated "poor white trash," refused to toil.
Moreover, because labor was held in contempt, education, both in the narrow and broad
senses of institutional learning and a civically informed practice of personal formation
(Bildung), was irrelevant, and outside planters, had no reality or institutional embodiment.
Among northerners, on the other hand, this perspective viewed labor as the means to achieve
773Ibid, 15.
774A single, paradigmatic example. Lincoln, speaking in 1859, asserted that, "Advancement, improvement in

condition - is the order of things in a society of equals," and he condemned the Southerners' insinuations that
northern wage earners were "fatally fixed in that condition of life." Foner Ibid, 16, citing Lincoln.
775Memoirs, 360-361.

the productive independence that essentially defined membership in the human community.
Personal formation was a "public" function in the farming West, achieved on the basis of the
elaboration of (i) opinion (e.g., in the medium of newspapers), (ii) interest and need
articulation (in social and political meetings), and (iii) social and party organization. This
formation was a part of the context of the lives of "free men" productively defined in terms of
"free labor."776
The system of slave labor further sapped and exhausted the great planters as a ruling class,
i.e., destroyed whatever cultural creativity they may have possessed compelling them to live
the life of a leisured gentleman in its most dissolute form (e.g., in gambling, drinking, etc.).
Moreover, the entirety of social relations based on slave labor led to soil exhaustion, to
popular impoverishment and to the abandonment by middling groups (small planters) of their
productively grounded independence. Finally, it led to, horror of horrors, slave revolt
archetypically patterned after San Domingo (Haiti). In contrast, the North "had the people, the
institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation." Such was the core of the
Westerner's vision: Modeled on the "real community of free labor - free men," the "North" (i.e.,
the West) could provide from within itself all the necessary skills to accomplish any task and,
in particular, the task of tasks, making "a great and prosperous nation," that is, objectively and
historically extending all-around capitalist development to the entirety of the continent. (In this
decisive regard, "the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North.")
Grant was serious. Resource rich and dependent upon no other country or people, the selfsufficiency of a free people, Westerners understood in the context of war as northerners, was
an experientially founded fact he could simply point to. At the outset of the war, he had found
among the soldiers in his regiment, the sons of "farmers, lawyers, physicians, politicians,
merchants, bankers and ministers." These were largely young men (whatever their status)
who saw in the great capitalist farmers, because of their prosperity and independence,
exemplary social models. Taken together, within these men all the requisite skills for nation
building were present. Thus, for example, in running the blockage at Vicksburg, only two
civilian captains and one crew could be found who would volunteer to do so.777
Volunteers were called for from the army, men who had had experience in any capacity in
navigating the western rivers. Captains, pilots, masters, engineers and deckhands enough
presented themselves to take five times the number of vessels we were moving through
this dangerous ordeal. Most of them were from Logan's division, composed generally of
men from the southern part of Illinois and from Missouri ... In this instance, as in all others
during the war, I found that volunteers could be found in the ranks and among the
commissioned officers to meet every call for aid whether mechanical or professional.778

A developed division of labor within the community of free men made this all-around collective
capacity possible. This regardless of the lived fact that, on the basis of his own youthful
experience, Grant himself had not always seen and grasped the possibilities for the
construction of a "great and prosperous" nation.
Self-Sufficiency and the Confidence of "Free Men"
At the outset of the war, it is likely Grant did not have the confidence that the vision of the
future he held suggests he might have otherwise have had. His own personal experience, that
776On Grant's view, and ours, autonomous opinion, interest and organization did not exist in the South outside the

class of great planters.

777Memoirs, 145 (citation). Farmers, we presume, meant tenants as well as property owners, for what Grant does not
say is that the largest group of regular soldiers in his army were not property owners.
778Ibid, 278. (Emphasis added.)

is, his failures as an regular army captain, a farmer in eastern Missouri near St. Louis
woodcutting and selling cords of wood in the city to make ends meet, a real estate agent in St.
Louis, a clerk in the retail store of his father,779 indicates he had to be convinced. Thus, in the
citation above he said, "In this instance, as in all others, I found [i.e., discovered and learned]
that volunteers could be found in the ranks " (emphasis added), etc.
Grant's confidence developed dialectically in negotiating the twin hazards of officering a
volunteer soldiery and leading it in combat. It is self-evident that by and large fighting and
successfully concluding a battle builds confidence. But then what of officering volunteers?
Referring to the genesis of the idea of an assault on Belmont in early November 1861, Grant
states, "I had no orders which contemplated an attack by the National troops ... but after we
started I saw that the officers and men were elated at the prospect of at last having the
opportunity of doing what they had volunteered to do. ... I did not see how I could maintain
discipline, or retain the confidence of my command, if we should return to Cairo without an
effort to do something."780 The confidence that Grant developed was there already present in
his soldiery, in men, "sons of farmers, lawyers, physicians..." etc., as a group of Westerners
who had already learned in pre-soldiering daily life to harmonize work and activities. Let
Grant give us a lengthy example of what this meant.
Following its defeat at Chickamauga (under the command of Rosecrans) in fall 1863, George
Thomas' Army of the Cumberland retreated to Chattanooga. At Chattanooga, Thomas' army
was hemmed in on two sides by water (patrolled by rebel cavalry) and by a Confederate army
on the other two sides. The Union forces had no means of resupply and were rapidly running
out of rations. A means of breaking this blockade and siege had been worked out, but food,
forage and ammunition still had to come from Nashville. Rebels had destroyed the railroads:
From Nashville to Decatur, from Decatur to Stevenson and then Chattanooga roads had been
torn up, the rails twists, bridges destroyed, and locomotives and cars had been overturned or
carried off. Nonetheless, rebuilding the railroads was Grant's answer to the problem of
supplying Thomas' soldiery, thereby lifting the siege.
General [Granville] Dodge, besides being a most capable soldier, was an experienced
railroad builder. He had no tools to work with except those of the pioneers - axes, picks,
and spades. With these he was to intrench his men and protect them against surprises by
small parties of the enemy. As he had no base of supplies until the road could be
completed back to Nashville, the first matter to consider after protecting his men was the
getting in of food and forage from the surrounding country. He had his men and teams bring
in all the grain they could find, or all they needed, and all the cattle for beef, and such other
food as could be found. Millers were detailed from the ranks to run the mills along the line
of the army. When these were not near enough to the troops for protection they were taken
down and moved up to the line of the road. Blacksmith shops, with all the iron and steel
found in them, were moved up in like manner. Blacksmiths were detailed and set to work
making the tools necessary in railroad and bridge building. Axemen were put to work
getting out timber for bridges and cutting fuel for locomotives when the road should be
completed. Carbuilders were set to work repairing the locomotives and cars. Thus every
branch of railroad building, making tools to work with, and supplying the workmen with
food, was all going on at once, and without the aid of a mechanic or laborer except what
the command itself furnished. ... General Dodge had the work assigned him finished within
forty days after receiving his orders. The number of bridges to rebuild was one hundred and
eighty-two, many of them over deep and wide chasms; the length of road repaired was one
hundred and two miles.781
779Ibid, 124-126, 128.
780Ibid, 161.
781Ibid, 364-365. (Emphasis added.)

The community of free men provided everything in terms of skills and knowledge that was
necessary to rebuild the road. The mobility or fluidity of this community had been so great that
social distinctions could not harden. Hence, a certain egalitarianism pervaded relations among
men: Men of different strata or, in the case cited here men with different military rank, could
work cooperatively together without the resentments or friction that might render the task at
hand otherwise unachievable. While in the East, military officers largely derived the
gentlemanly models for personal and professional comportment from a slave society, and the
men (soldiers) could not generate but fragmentary-unintegrated models (precisely to the
extent that industrialization, fixed social division of labor, hardened stratification and class
conflict shaped their experience), in the western officers and men of the Armies of the
Cumberland, Ohio and Tennessee derived their models for personal and professional
behavior from the divided, but "softly" stratified, and hence quasi-egalitarian community of
free labor - free men.
So, what was it about fundamental lifewoldly structure of the "real community of free laborfree men" that inspired the confidence permeating the Westerners' vision of world? The
answer is the cooperative, collective self-sufficiency of the community of free labor - free men
that made any task achievable. That "any task was achievable" was taken for granted by all
because, arising on the foundations of lebensweltliche Erfahrung, it was visible to all
Westerners. Western men who had shared the experience of real community had
fundamentally similar visions of man, world and nature. Accordingly, on the pressing, practical
questions of the day (i.e., what kind of war to conduct), they essentially arrived at the same
answers.782 By and large all men (i.e., Westerners) possessed the confidence previous
experience had induced - to the extent their travels, waged work, and their extra-western lifeexperience, had not shaken it. The native confidence of both Lincoln and Grant's had been
shaken, the former by the experience of Washington and the Army of the Potomac and the
latter's by his pre-military history of personal failure. But enough of the men who had lived
their entire life in the West had seen none of the darker sides of American society and
existence to deprive their vision of its substance.
Western Veterans
In history as in the gestalt-oriented study of mind, figure and ground constitute a unitary
structure: No ground, no figure; no figure, no ground. But in history itself the ground often
recedes into insignificance as the figure is popularly highlighted. Taken as a whole, Grant's
military service was outstanding: He, however, stood out only against a much less heralded
background, namely, his fighting men. In this regard, Grant's military efficaciousness had
several essential presuppositions, all of which can be specified in terms of the quality of his
fighting men. The decisive qualities of the western armies were the fighting men's confidence,
their willingness to fight, their determination to see the war through to the end, and,
manifested early on, their superior understanding of war in relation to their own officers. As
782It is in this, the real community foundations of experience, thought and reflection, that the coincidence of outlooks

between Grant and Lincoln in 1864 lies. This coincidence is not to be found in some inexplicable paradox, or even in
the logic of war itself. In the shared experience grounded upon the real community of free labor - free men, Grant the
"nonpolitical," hard military man and Lincoln the nonmilitary, consummate politician found the basis for agreement on
the course of action necessary to end the war.
Never more than partially realized and dead for over a hundred and thirty-five years, in its various modifications the
real community of free labor free men is absolutely decisive for the ideologically utopian vision of all Americans (and
their theorists) who strive for a perfected form of mittelstndliche Existenz, itself a culturally hegemonic projection: It is
to this mythologized arcadia, eine Urgemeinde, that all middle strata ideologues inevitably return. In this respect,
Grant's Personal Memoirs stands as the central, truly the greatest, literary document in American history.

characteristics of the personalities of fighting men, each of these qualities is inseparable from
the rest. Analytically, we can, however, briefly consider each in turn.
The willingness of men to fight was inextricably bound up with their confidence in their fighting
abilities.783 That attitude (of willingness) was more than the expression of the first blush of
patriotic sentiment (as at Belmont). Long after the bloody engagements at Shiloh,
Murfreesboro (Stone's River), Chickamauga and Chattanooga, Westerners, now veterans,
decided to continue to fight. Unlike their counterparts in the Union Army of the Potomac, who
left in grooves (some thirty-six regiments) following the expiration of their three years terms in
mid-summer 1864, the majority of these men stayed on. A history of successes on the western
battlefields formed, no doubt, a major unarticulated moment in their decisions (and that, of
course, was also a tribute to command leadership), but their were other elements also. Pride
in achievement, the gritty patriotism of veterans, friendships and camaraderie among the
survivors of some many campaigns as well as a certain felt obligation to the dead, and a clear
grasp of the need to end the rebellion.784
Retrospectively, this understanding can be seen in these men, most mere privates, who
refused to heed all and any orders not to plunder and destroy property. In the winter of 18621863, against the orders of the commanders, western soldiers of the Army of the Tennessee
set fire to fences and buildings all along the line of march, deliberately burned down the village
of Holly Springs in its entirety in retaliation for abuse of northern prisoners of war. Similarly,
during the Vicksburg Campaign, they had destroyed productive agricultural works, burning
"grist mills, cotton gins and corn cribs," they killed livestock "cattle sheep, hogs, and
chickens," taking food from women and children, while they pillaged "mansions and log cabins
alike."785 These actions, of course, went way beyond Grant's orders to forage in the
countryside as well as orders (to Sherman) to destroy essentially military targets (a munitions
production facility and rails) in Jackson, Mississippi in May 1863 during the Vicksburg
Campaign. (Similarly, these actions on the ground, so to speak, went beyond Sherman's
orders to his armies after taking Atlanta in early autumn 1864. Sherman's orders in Atlanta
were similar to those he carried out under Grant in May 1863.) They anticipated by nearly two
years, the line of military action that Shermans two columns followed in their march through
Georgia to the sea.786 A regimental historian explained the rationale for the men's actions in
these simple terms: Southerners "would not endure to see their property destroyed and their
families brought to distress. Desertion would soon disorganize their armies, and leave no
783This is the dialectic of confidence, in which Grant's own confidence in the military outcome of the war was built on

that of his men who in turn inspired were inspired by him, discussed in the previous section.
784Albert Castel (Decision in the West, 11) notes other motivations as well: At the beginning of the 1864 Atlanta
Campaign, "Their reasons are mixed: the $402 bonus, their officers' persuasive appeals to patriotism and pride, the
bonds of friendship and esprit de corps, a determination to finish the job of putting down the rebellion, and the
prospect of a thirty-day furlough.
The bonus and the furlough were, along with a special uniform decoration and a government commitment not to
disband a regiment on condition that seventy-five percent of the men rejoined, were inducements the Lincoln
Administration offered three-year men at the end of their terms of service.
785Castel, Ibid, 44-45.
"Fanning out through the countryside, the invaders have plundered farms, plantations, and villages, burned
thousands of cotton bales and hundreds of thousands of bushels of corn, killed and eaten poultry and livestock in
uncountable numbers, torched houses, shops, and frame buildings, and made off with hundreds of horses and mules.
Also they have taken thousands of slaves - or, rather, the slaves have gone with them" Ibid, 52. Accounts of instances
of similar behavior appear in Ibid, 53, 207, 263, 286. Also see Grant, Memoirs, 218-219, 235, 251, 267, 288, 319; and
555, for an anecdote, though relating to a latter period, in which the regular soldiery effects the same type of action.
786With Sherman, the practice had its original rationale in the impossibility of holding his lines of communication and
supply back to Chattanooga and then Nashville (having left Hood free to reconstruct his army after Jonesboro) while
moving east to the sea. See Grant's comments, Ibid, 550)

more fighting to do."787 Another soldier, writing in a letter home, commented, "such is war &
the sooner the aristocracy or rather the ones who brought it on feels the effects, the sooner
we will have peace.'"788 The fact is that long before Sherman or Grant had come to this
conclusion, western soldiers operating in the South understood the requirements of the type of
war in which the foe had enormous popular support yet limited material resources.
The practice of the destruction of the enemy's material and psychological requisites for
fielding an army was rooted in the military policy of living off the food and forage while
operating in the foe's territory. The enunciation of the policy had been preceded in soldiery
practice. Policy formation itself was rooted in necessity (i.e., the loss of a base of supplies
following Van Doran's raid on Holly Springs), in late December 1862, as well as his
systematization of this practice in the Vicksburg Campaign in May 1863. The policy of living off
the enemy's country dates from the 2 August 1862 order from Washington during the
Manassas Campaign.789 That is, as policy, it appeared first with reference to the armies in the
East and was formulated by civilian authority. McClellan and his successors never appeared
to engage in this policy, except when their soldiers practiced it (against explicit military orders
to the contrary). Yet the policy as such was never abandoned. Rather, its was developed and
improved upon in the West, beginning with the practice of western soldiery in the Army of the
Tennessee.790
In the end, it was the commanders who finally realized the men were right in this most brutal
of all ways, that is, in bringing the consequences of war home to the civilian populace. As
Grant would come to discover, in the East the problem was twofold: The destruction of civilian
morale was merely the other side of the destruction of Lee's army. (The problem could not be
merely a matter of attrition, at least in the sense of a military calculus of numbers: For the
losses of Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg
where far greater than the Confederate losses of the Confederate Army of Tennessee at
Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga and Chattanooga, yet the former was still very much
intact at the beginning of 1864.) In the East, it was Grant himself who, after February 1864,
had to provide what was already present in the regular soldiery of the Union's western armies.
That (which was already present) was, of course, the will and single-minded determination of
Westerners to end the war, an ending based on the knowledge that only merciless defeat
could really bring it to a close.
This single-mindedness of purpose was a personal and conscious elaboration and expression
of regional and class, and, on that dual basis, cultural difference between Easterner and
Westerner in the North. It distinguished western soldiers well as officer, and made officers,
particularly Grant, militarily effective in the first place.791
787Seymour Dwight Thompson, Recollections of the Third Iowa Regiment (Cincinnati, 1864) cited by Castel, Ibid, 44
788Sergeant David Nichol of the Pennsylvania Light Artillery writing his father 21 May 1864. Cited by Castel, Ibid,

207.
789Memoirs, 235.
790It is not until Sheridan was assigned to clean up the Shenandoah Valley (August-September 1864) that this policy

was again put into effect in the East. Ibid, 536, 538.
791The difference was, of course, most visible in the officers, particularly the "professional" or West Point trained
officers. In the East, as we have suggested, officers, rose from well-to-do eastern families, aspired to be gentlemen
on the southern model. In the West, officers like Grant or like western civilians such as Lincoln himself, Ben Wade or
Zach Chandler, if not farmers themselves were part of a farming community (i.e., dependent upon farmers' success
for their livelihood), were consequently common in the sense of vulgar (from the Latin, vulgate, "of or from the
people"). But their commonness exhibited profound understanding and a theoretically reduced, coherent practice: The
former endlessly admired the southern gentleman, the latter (though there were real differences between moderates
and radicals) grasped that the southern aristocrat was responsible for the war in the first place; the former made soft
war, respecting southern property (land, estate and, especially, property in human chattels), the latter made hard war

expropriating, plundering or liberating that same property depending on its form.

8.
A Newly Freepeople and Black Soldiers in the Civil War
Lincoln and Slavery
It had been War Department and Presidential policy since the end of the war of 1812 not to
employ blacks, free or slave, as US soldiers (though the navy had never adhered to this
policy, i.e., did employ blacks and at the same wages as whites). This was not statutory law,
merely de facto policy.792 Accordingly, the weight of custom and Lincoln's opposition as well,
as we shall see, both prevented free blacks in the North from playing a role as soldiers at the
outset of the war.
Prior to issuance of his draft Emancipation decree (21 September 1862), Lincoln's position
with respect to arming blacks was enunciated in a series of decisions. In October 1861,
preparations were made for the Port Royal (SC) expedition, designed as conquest of a land
foothold to provide the Union navy with a base of operations for blockading the important rebel
ports of Charleston and Wilmington. With foreknowledge that the area in which Union forces
intended to operate was densely populated by black slaves, the War Department drafted
instructions that would authorize the expedition commander to use black labor in conjunction
with Union soldiers in construction of fortifications and facilities. The Department's draft
submittal to Lincoln found the President carefully inserting a phrase that excluded black labor
from "a general arming for military service."793
In December 1861, Secretary of War Simon Cameron submitted a draft of his annual report to
Lincoln. It included the statement that, "It is the right, and may become the duty of the
Government to arm and equip" slaves "and employ their services." Lincoln deleted the
passage, after the report had already become public.794
In May 1862, Lincoln voided the emancipation decree of Maj. Gen. David Hunter,
commanding the Union military district of South Carolina. The decree made provision for
enlisting blacks as soldiers. Hunter then made formal appeals to the War Department to enlist
blacks. In a 21 July 1862 Cabinet meeting, the request was considered. Cabinet members
approved. Lincoln did not.795
Even after Lincoln had been compelled by military necessity, i.e. by defeats on the field of
battle (especially McClellan's Peninsula Campaign fiasco), to seriously entertain a limited form
of emancipation, he continued to waffle. On 13 July 1862, he made a plea to border state
Congressional members to accept a phased in plan for compensated emancipation that
included provisions for colonization of blacks abroad. As late as 1 December 1862, in his
annual message to the Congress, he proposed a constitutional amendment enshrining
gradual, compensated emancipation and allowing slavery until the year 1900. (The proposal
was ignored.) And at the end of 1863, Lincoln was still offering the possibility of gradual
emancipation to recalcitrant planters in areas under Union military control such as Arkansas.
Lincoln's perspective was basically nationalist, putting forth some form of emancipation policy
if it advanced the objective of saving the Union yet refusing to tamper with slavery if it did not.
Thus, in remarks made for public enlightenment, appearing 25 August 1862 in the Chicago
Tribune, Lincoln stated that, "I would save the Union. ... If there be those who would not save
the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there
be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I
792Howard Westwood, Black Soldiers, White Commanders, 58.
793Ibid, 2.
794Ibid, 4.
795On Hunter, see, "Pressure of 'Utopian' Abolitionist Military Commanders," below.

do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would
do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do
that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps save the
Union..."796
There was, of course, an abysmal difference between the insight that a lasting emancipation
was a precondition for Union victory in the war, and advocacy of and support for Union victory
without regard to emancipation (Lincoln's initial position) or with regard to emancipation only
to the extent that it furthered chances for Union victory (his later, militarily emancipatory
position). It was precisely events in the different theatres of war that forced Lincoln to modify
his position over the course of the war.
Slave Action Driven, Military Moments in Black Emancipation
Briefly we can describe those nodal points in black emancipation, instigated by collective
slave actions themselves, that compelled military commanders to respond with directives
which cumulatively made a return to slavery impossible. We shall take up these points in more
detail in our discussion of military commanders.
As Union armies approached slaveholding southern territories, slaves grew increasingly
restive. In the Louisiana sugar plantation region, slaves refused to work unless paid wages,
and in some cases sacked planter homes.797 Wherever Union armies had established regional
control, in fact wherever and whenever these forces entered slaveholding southern territory,
Negro slaves deserted "their" masters and plantations en masse. In a precedent established
by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler at Fortress Monroe (on Chesapeake Bay just southeast of
Hampton, Virginia) in late May 1861, runaway slaves were deemed "contraband," that is,
abandoned Confederate property seized and held by the Union army. Butler's description of
blacks coming into Union lines as "contrabands" provided a convenient way for nonabolitionists (starting at the top with Lincoln) to justify employment of black labor by the Union
armies.
On 25 April 1862, an amphibious Union force under Butler captured New Orleans. In the hope
of expanding this southernmost beachhead further into Confederate territory, Lincoln
appointed Butler head of the military Department of the Gulf (at this time coextensive with
captured New Orleans). By August, Butler forces' conquest was imperiled by threat of
Confederate attack. With a view to this urgent military necessity, Butler sought to enlist free
blacks in New Orleans. He had begun his recruitment with those free blacks who had been
eligible for the Confederate militia. For purposes of his recruitment, Butler had considered as
free "slaves of masters claiming British or French citizenship ... [Such] slaves were free,"
Butler reasoned, "because British and French law prohibited slavery." In the course of time, he
regarded as free those slaves whose masters had refused allegiance to the Union. These
slaves were free, Butler held, in light of the Second Confiscation Act. Thus, he could and did
enlist many of them also. Shortly after the August threat of an attack appeared, it receded.
This did not hamper Butler. Soon, "He was organizing his own aggressive move into the
plantation area west of New Orleans that began in late October, and his blacks played a part
in that move."798 In fact, between September and November 1862, Butler's calls for the free
796Cited in Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, V. II, 232-233. Emphases in original. The remarks were drafted 22

August. Within a week, newspapers across the country had carried them.
797Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 4.
798See Butler's testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War (Report to the Joint

Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, HR, 37th Congress, 34th Session, 1863, Vol. 3, 357-358),
summarized by Westwood, Ibid, 7-8. Citations appearing in Ibid.

colored militia of Louisiana to enroll in his Union volunteer force resulted in the formation of
several militia units. The militia became the 1st, 2nd and 34th Louisiana Native Guards. These
regiments were redesignated the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Infantry Regiments, Corps d'Afrique, and,
in early 1864, as the 73rd, 74th and 75th Regiments, United States Colored Troops
(USCT).799
In November 1861, Union forces captured the Sea Islands off coastal South Carolina and
Georgia. Here most planters had already abandoned their estates, leaving them to the de
facto charge of slaves. In the following year, the Union command of the Sea Islands attempted
to organize cotton production for sale in northern markets. Amongst the command was Maj.
Gen. Rufus Saxton. He wrote Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, for permission to enlist blacks
in order to organize a military self-defense force to protect cotton production. Stanton
responded favorably, authorizing much more than mere self-defense units. He authorized
Saxton to arm, uniform, equip and take into service up to 5,000 volunteers of "African
descent." His response noted blacks should be recruited for self-defense purposes, and this
was to be done "by every means in your power to withdraw from the enemy their laboring
force and population, and to spare no effort consistent with civilized warfare to weaken,
harass, and annoy them, and to establish the authority of the Government of the United States
within your department." Saxton's black militia, initially established beginning in October 1862,
effectively constituted the self-defense of a productive community of free black labor.800
In his movement south and in his 1862 prior preparations to penetrate the defenses of
Vicksburg, Grant's army encampments were inundated with slaves and slave families who,
enslaved more or less within the general vicinity of Union camps, had abandoned "their"
plantations. Within the same vicinities, pro-Confederate planters, fearing Union retaliation, fled
their estates. Small numbers of these de facto ex-slaves were employed for wages as officers'
servants, teamsters and cooks. With a view to the overall situation, Grant sought anew to
organize cotton production for sale northward. Affecting the Union military Department of the
Tennessee, he issued General Order No. 13. The order called for the formation and
organization of black labor, including women and children, to "pick, gin and bale cotton." In
November 1862, he appointed John Eaton to establish a settlement, a "colony," to this end.801
In the march of his two armies (actually two columns of two corps each) from Atlanta to
Savannah, enormous numbers of blacks and black families abandoned Georgia planters'
estates and gathered in the rear of each column following in the army's wake. Motivated by
the military need to come to grips with the twin problems of reduced army mobility and of
799William Gladstone, United States Colored Troops, 1863-1867, 22. Butler was well within the authority granted him

as a military commander by the Second Confiscation Act. This legislation had declared free all slaves of all
slaveholders who supported the Confederacy, and authorized Union commanders to enlist all persons of "African
descent.
800Without aggressive Union military leadership, the Confiscation Act was difficult to enforce since it was watered
down by concessions to Lincoln and his on-again off-again Constitutional scruples (i.e., his fear confiscated land
would not be returned to the owner's heirs upon the latters death). He was alarmed over alienating slaveholder's in
Union border states.
For Lincoln's central objection (met with a rider to the bill explicating Congressional intent), see Randell,
Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, 279-280), and for the Supreme Court's rendering of the Constitutional grounds
for this objection (that it would work against the attainer clause of the Constitution by failing to allow the confiscated
property to revert to the owner's heirs upon the former's death), Ibid, 286-287.
For the exchange between Saxton and Stanton, WR, Ser. 1, V. 14, 374-376, 377-378.
During fall 1862, Saxton had some of his units raid Confederate territory as part of their training. He reported to
Stanton that their performance was exemplary. WR, Ser. 1, V. 15, 158-163. Saxton's militia was known as the 1st
South Carolina Infantry. On 4 February 1864, it was redesignated the 33rd United States Colored Troops (USCT).
Gladstone, Ibid.
801This is dealt with in greater detail in the section "Military Commanders and Black Labor," below.

feeding and sheltering enormous numbers of self-freed blacks following his army columns, on
16 January 1865, Maj. Gen. William Sherman issued Special Order No. 15. The intent of the
order was to diminish the massive numbers of ex-slaves following his columns by effectively
offering them land. The order gave "possessory title" of forty acres or less of land for
settlement and working to blacks in areas of the South Carolina coastal conquest. Whites
were excluded from settlements.802
Governmental Formalizations of Emancipatory Black Self-Activity
Driven by radical Republicans, at the national summit of the State a decree, enactments and
creation of a new federal agency codified events on the ground.
Legislation was enacted by a Republican controlled Congress with radicals in the vanguard.
The radicals sought both to arm blacks in the defense of the Union and to formally, i.e.,
legislatively, free them from slavery. The first State endorsement, i.e., Congressional
authorization, of the use of black men for military purposes was the 17 July 1862 Second
Confiscation and Militia Act passed during the Thirty-Seventh Congress. Section 12
empowered the President to take black men into the service of the United States for the
explicit purposes of constructing fortifications and performing camp duty (such as cooking, or
as teamsters) or any labor in any military or naval capacity. Section 15 of the same act
provided that blacks so employed were to be awarded wages. It spelt out the wage structure
and additional compensation (e.g., clothing).803
Effective 1 January 1863, the area of application of Lincoln's final Emancipation Proclamation
was spelt out. The decree was restricted to rebel states at war, and only those parts of states
actually in rebellion. Its application thus excluded, first, the entirety of those border states that
remained in the Union (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) and second, all rebel
territory occupied by Union forces as of 1 January 1863 (i.e., Union occupied Tennessee and
Virginia, New Orleans and several surrounding parishes). Some three quarters of a million
blacks, nearly one quarter of all slaves, were not covered by Lincoln's Proclamation.804
Designed only to advance the war effort, i.e., not to liberate slaves, it was politically expedient
and applicable only where it was unenforceable. It permitted black recruitment to the army in
non-combat roles in the aforementioned restricted area of application. According to the
decree, freemen were to be "receive[d] into the armed services of the United States to
garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places and to man vessels of all sorts in said
services."805 In military pursuit of the object of preserving the Union, Lincoln himself ignored
802Westwood, Black Soldiers, White Commanders, 112f. See the section referred in n. 10, above, for elaboration.
803Actually, the law referred to "persons of African descent. "Blacks" were not considered "colored. In the view of

"white" legislators, the former were African born, the latter were American born and had European, "white" as well as
African, "black" ancestry. With regard to this legislation, Gladstone (United States Colored Troops, 14), commenting
on another, similarly worded piece of legislation, states that, although "the Conscription Act of March 1863 was
interpreted to draft colored men, it was not until February 29, 1864, that the law was changed to specifically include
the enrollment of blacks. In this text, following contemporary usage the term "black" will be utilized to describe men
who in the Civil War era were deemed "colored."
The law also provided for the pay structure for enlisted blacks. The inequality it entailed was a key source of
discontent among the black soldiery. Whites were compensated at $13.00 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance.
Blacks, on the other hand, were compensated $10.00 per month with a deduction of $3.00 for clothing. The legal
rationale for this gross disparity was a provision, as interpreted by War Department solicitor William Whiting, in the
July 1862 Militia Act which on the face of it applied only to noncombatant black laborers. (In the navy, the provision
was ignored.) Rectification of the inequality (including back pay) was finally undertaken in fall 1865. See Westwood,
Ibid, 19, n46.
804Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 1.
805James D. Richardson (comp.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 6:157-159; and also

Westwood, Ibid, 9.

territorial restrictions. In the spring, the Department of War initiated a nationwide black
recruiting program conducted in the Mississippi Valley and elsewhere by a new national
agency.806 In the loyal states, state governors themselves undertook recruitment programs
(extending so far as to raid Union held, Confederate territory for black volunteers) in efforts to
meet their enlistment quotas.
On 22 May 1863, the U.S. War Department issued General Order No. 153 establishing that
new federal agency, the Bureau of Colored Troops. This bureau was directly under the
Adjutant General's office, with Major C.W. Foster appointed chief with the title of Assistant
Adjutant General. The Bureau was responsible for recruiting "colored" soldiers,
commissioning officers to command them, organizing regiments, and maintaining their
records. The first regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) was mustered into
federal service at Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1863.807
During the Second Session of the Thirty-Eight Congress, Congress and the Executive had
been able to agree on two major pieces of legislation. The first was the Thirteen Amendment
to the Constitution abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States. Enacted 31 January
1865, this amendment, an enormous achievement given attitudes in the North at the outset of
the war, was not just important for its intrinsic significance but because, in incorporating
emancipation into the organic law of the nation, it vastly strengthened the objective, slavefreeing outcome of Lincoln's military emancipatory policy by putting that outcome beyond all
positive law, custom and local institutions.
Pressure of "Utopian" Abolitionist Military Commanders
Military leadership in the Union armies included men, colloquially known as political generals,
who, as nationally prominent political figures with large popular followings, were often
abolitionists. These men committed Lincoln's government to actions far in advance of what the
President was willing to tolerate and capable of accepting, in his judgment what the northern
popular classes would tolerate or accept, and, in particular, what border state planters would
tolerate or accept. Because their actions were supported by radical Republicans in the
Congress, and, more importantly, because these same actions largely coincided with what
was historically necessary (i.e., were objectively subjective moments in the course of military
events that compelled an emancipatory outcome), their actions, though often rescinded by
Lincoln, illuminated the path that he would be constrained to follow. Among these political
generals numbered Maj. Gen. John C. Frmont, Brig. Gen. John W. Phelps of Vermont, and
Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Consider each in turn.
[Frmont]
806Ibid .

Apparently, Lincoln had intended no such restriction on military recruitment and use. For example, in March 1863,
Gen. Hunter employed black troops in the front line capture of Jacksonville, Florida. Lincoln wrote him a
congratulatory note without hint of reprimand, Ibid, 10.
807The last regiment of black soldiers, 125th USCT, was not mustered out of the service until December 1867.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, permission was given to John A. Andrews, governor of Massachusetts, to raise
the first black regiment in the North. Permission was also given to raise the Corps d'Afrique under Maj. Gen.
Nathaniel P. Banks (successor to Butler in New Orleans). These units were not part of the national colored service
until the Corps d'Afrique was later redesigned as regiments in the U.S. Colored Troops.
Fourteen states raised volunteer units under their state designations. These units were eventually redesignated as
U.S. Colored Troops. These segregated regiments were led almost entirely by white officers. Three states raised
"colored" regiments that maintained their state designation without becoming federalized and absorbed into the
regiments of the United States Colored Troops: Connecticut, Louisiana and Massachusetts. By the end of the war,
178,975 men volunteered and served as members of the USCT. Another 9,695 black men served as sailors in the
U.S. Navy. Aboard ship, "blacks" and "whites" were integrated. Gladstone, Ibid, 122.

John C. Frmont had gained national fame as explorer of the Rockies (hence, the sobriquet,
the "Pathfinder"). He was an ex-Democrat who after 1854 reinvented himself as an abolitionist
Republican. In 1856, he, as the Republican party nominated candidate for President, was
defeated by the Democracy's James Buchanan. At the outset of the war, his influence had
garnered him a Union military command with the rank of major general. In August 1861, at a
time when half of Missouri fell into Confederate hands made up largely of guerrilla forces, his
command included the state of Missouri. In response to rebel successes, Frmont placed the
state under martial law. He proclaimed any guerrilla captured behind Union lines would be
executed, he announced his intent to confiscate rebel property, and he declared free all slaves
owned by secessionist Missouri planters. Lincoln rescinded the order. Intent on appeasing
border state planters, Lincoln was worried that, in response to Frmont declarations,
slaveholder-controlled border state legislatures might bolt the Union in the other three border
states that had remained Unionist (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware).
[Phelps]
On 1 May 1862, Ben Butler's force, less than 14,000 men, occupied New Orleans, a city of
some 170,000 souls (largest in the Confederacy). Isolated in the heart of Dixie, exchange of
messages between Butler and Washington, D.C. took twenty days or more. New Orleans had
not been unanimous in its desire for secession, and, by July, Butler was able to begin enlisting
pro-Union whites in his army. To defend his conquest, he had to garrison the city and Ship
Island (his original point of disembarkment and David G. Farragut's fleets' base of operations),
maintain a protective screen above the city, and detach troops for Farragut's attempt to
capture Baton Rouge. In this context, Butler, acutely short of armed manpower, sought not to
produce a revolt of the local citizenry by an abrupt challenge to local custom, i.e., by recruiting
black slaves. (He would, of course, abandonment this position essentially adopting that of
Phelps' in early autumn.)
Butler's commander in charge of the city, John Phelps, was a "crusading abolitionist." Having
occupied Ship Island with an advance force in December 1861, Phelps abolished slavery
there, announcing it was "both unconstitutional and 'a social evil which is opposed to moral
law.'"808
By the end of the first month of the New Orleans' occupation, Phelps was receiving fugitive
slaves with open arms, sending parties of men into the interior in order to bring back slaves on
nearby plantations. Butler, because his occupation force was small and accordingly militarily
weak, was opposed to this action, and referred the entire matter to the War Department.
Stanton hedged the problem, that is, he ruled that fugitive slaves coming into Union lines
should not be turned away, but should be employed at reasonable wages, fed and sheltered.
Phelps took this as vindication, but Butler found it difficult to draw the fine line the ruling
required.
On 30 July, Phelps requested arms and clothing for three regiments of blacks he intended to
raise. Phelps noted he needed more soldiers, since white troops were taking ill in large
numbers in the swamp lands. Butler was opposed. He ignored the request (though Phelps
claimed he had already organized 300 blacks), and sought to divert Phelps by having him use
"his" blacks to fell trees between Lake Pontchartrain and one of his flanks (in order to open a
field of fire for gunboats supporting the infantry). This, according to Butler's chief engineer,
was a military necessity. Phelps, however, tendered his resignation requesting a leave of
absence in outrage over Butler's effort to reduce him to a "mere slavedriver."809
808WR, Ser, I, V. I, 6, 465 and, Ser 3, V. I, 637 for citations.
809WR, Ser. 1, V. 15, 534, 536-537, 535. For Butler's brief account, Butler's Book, 488-489. From Butler's account, it

appears that Phelps was morally outraged by his assignment. The fact that the blacks as workers felling trees

Butler attempted to mollify Phelps, but refused to accept his resignation. In a series of written
exchanges between early August and mid-September, Butler explained the military necessity
involved in his orders, but Phelps held firm demanding his position be taken up in Washington.
It was. Needless to say, Lincoln did not accept his demands to arm slaves and abolish slavery.
On Halleck's recommendation to Stanton, Phelps' resignation of his commission was
accepted. In mid-September, Phelps returned to civilian life. Shortly thereafter, Butler began
on his own efforts to enlist free blacks into military companies, reconstituting an old New
Orleans tradition, that of the black Home Guards, on a Union basis.810
Noteworthy in this regard were two facts. First, the black troops enlisted in late August by
Butler formed the first such regiment in the war. Second, Butler agreed with black leaders,
men who organized these three regiments (over two thousand constituting a small brigade) to
appoint from amongst them their own line officers and to pay them the same amount as white
soldiers. The two features were later reneged upon by Nathaniel Banks, a Lincoln appointee
who superceded Butler. The latter was removed because he was a man given to making hard
war against all enemies of the Union before Lincoln was compelled to admit the necessary of
this approach and instruct the War Department to make it a matter of military practice.811
[Hunter]812
At the end of March 1862, Maj. Gen. David Hunter arrived at Hinton Head, headquarters for
Union forces that had occupied the Sea Islands, to take charge of the newly formed
Department of the South. He superceded Maj. Gen. Thomas Sherman. The successful
occupation of the Sea Islands had led to a panicked departure by white property owners.
Sherman and his aide, Rufus Saxton, were left with the task of "caring for" and governing a
large slave population. Among other problems they dealt with was that created by the
presence of a small group that historically has come to be known as Gideon's Band. Edward
Pierce, a Treasury agent, had brought this privately financed group of people, some fifty-three,
to govern island plantations and to teach blacks, both adults and children. Their engagement
in the Islands, its specific contours peripheral to the discussion here, is known as the Port
Royal Experiment.813
Both Sherman's and Hunter's instructions had provided that the commander could use as
assistance any "ordinary employees [whether or not fugitives from slave labor], or, if special
circumstances seem to require it, in any other capacity, with such organization (in squads,
companies, or otherwise) as you may deem most beneficial to the service; this, however, not
being a general arming of them for military service."814 Thereafter, the War Department had

effectively shielded Union soldiers, i.e., might be fired on if an officer within Confederate ranks raised the issue of the
destruction of planter "property," again, that these men were expendable," was not, it appears, an issue for either
Phelps or Butler.
810Butler's Book, 491-493.
811Ibid, 493, 495. For Butler, see Appendix I, below.
812For Hunter's activity in the Sea Islands, Westwood, Ibid, 56-65.
813The Department of the South included Union occupied areas in the states of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

In the wartime context, the United States Department of the Treasury was de jure responsible for administering
abandoned southern properties, including "contraband" (i.e., ex-slaves) seized by the Union army. Ex post facto
confirming events which were already taking place on the battlefields, the basis for confiscation of southern property
was an instruction issued by Secretary of Treasury Solomon Chase in February 1863 (George Bentley, History of the
Freedmen's Bureau, 7, n. 31), an instruction legally based on the Congressional Second Confiscation Act legislated in
1862.
814WR, Ser. 1, V. 6, 176-177.

construed the instructions to mean that blacks could be armed "in cases of great emergency"
but "not under regular enrollment for military purposes."815
In April 1862, Hunter undertook, in cooperation with a black preacher named Abram
Murchinson, to gather names of blacks willing to enlist. The effort was largely unsuccessful,
since blacks were engaging their new found freedom as wage laborers in cotton production.
On 8 May, Hunter went further. He decided to enlist two regiments of blacks, and issued an
order (9 May), transmitted to subordinates in his command, "to send immediately to these
headquarters, under a guard, all the able-bodied negroes capable of bearing arms." This
amounted to conscription. The same day he issued an emancipation decree freeing all slaves
within his Department, in and beyond Union lines. Hunter failed to report this action to the War
Department. On 19 May, Lincoln voided this decree, reserving for himself the right to free
slaves under his war powers.816
Hunter was preparing, under the direction of Brig. Gen. Henry Behham, an assault on
Charleston. His recruitment (conscription) of blacks was, in part, part of an effort to increase
available manpower. On the morning of 12 May, his soldiers began rounding up blacks
between ages seventeen and forty-five for enlistment. Some men fled into the swamps, where
soldiers attempted to hunt them down. His orders (to round up blacks) consummated a series
of major judgmental errors on Hunter's part. The best that can be said for him was that his
concept of emancipation was abstractly conceived and executed. At any rate, Hunter allowed
men who were not "professly willing" to return home. Some did remain. Still he had not
reported his actions to Washington. Now, though, he had a "regiment." It had taken to drill, but
his soldiers were unpaid. Accordingly, there was discontent. On 11 July, Hunter finally
requested a general authority to enlist blacks as soldiers. (On the Virginia Peninsula following
the Seven Days, McClellan cried for troops. Hunter was instructed to send six white
regiments. He cited his compliance with McClellan as justification for his request.) On 21 July,
the request was taken up in an Executive level Cabinet meeting. No Cabinet Secretary
objected. Lincoln, however, remained opposed to arming blacks. He went no further than
allowing local commanders "to arm, for purely defensive purpose, slaves coming within their
lines."817 Hunter's request to reconstruct his army with black troops was not granted. Without
pay, Hunter's soldiery melted away. He would not prosecute for "desertion." On 9 August, he
disbanded his regiment. He had applied for a leave of absence. In late August, the leave was
granted. In early September, he departed to be superceded by Saxton.
Military Commanders and Black Labor
Slavery only became "problematic" for Union military commanders as they had to practically
confront the self-emancipatory activity of masses of blacks. When the latter abandoned "their"
masters and plantations, they remade themselves as de facto ex-slaves whose massive
presence haunted Union army camps in the South. Those camps, because they existed only
where successful thrusts had been made into lands whose owners were aligned with the
Confederacy, offered protection to blacks and their families as they threw off their status as
slaves. Accordingly, they gravitated to them. At this point, Union army commanders were
forced to cope with the problems of feeding, housing and, central for them, productively
employing masses of blacks.
Two major areas of Union penetration were formed by mid-1862. The first was along the
South Carolina-Georgia coast (including, in particular, the Sea Islands), and the second was in
815WR, Ser. 3, V. 1, 609-610, 626, and V. 2, 30.
816WR, Ser 3, V. 2, 29-31 (conscription), Ibid, Ser. 1, V. 14, 341 (decree).
817On the Cabinet meeting, David Donald (ed), Inside Lincoln's Cabinet, 96, 99-100.

the Mississippi Valley between Memphis and Vicksburg. After the successful capture of
Atlanta by Sherman's western armies in late summer 1864, the latter's largely unhindered
march to the coast reproduced the same problems. It was Rufus Saxton in the coastal region,
Grant (who detailed this work to John Eaton and then, by order of the Department of War, to
Lorenzo Thomas) in the Mississippi Valley, and Sherman in Georgia who were forced to find
solutions to these pressing problems.
[Saxton]818
Capt. Rufus Saxton had been Thomas Sherman's quartermaster during the initial occupation
of South Carolina coastal lands. He had been involved in the effort to govern blacks in this
area. Upon David Hunter's arrival (replacing Sherman) at the end of March 1862, Saxton
returned with Sherman to Washington for reassignment. There he testified before and
favorably impressed members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He was
promoted to brigadier general by Lincoln, and on 29 April ordered to return to Port Royal to
assume responsibility for blacks in the Department. Consequent on a shipwreck, Saxton did
not reach his destination until the end of June. He was well-received due to his earlier relation
to blacks.
Saxton immediately faced the problem of dealing with black refugees who had been
evacuated following Hunter's transfer of troops to McClellan in eastern Virginia. The question
was not one merely of resettlement, but of protection from marauding rebels. This, and a
related problem - theft from black settlements by white soldiers, might well be dealt with under
the heading "problems of the formation of a community of freepeople." Saxton distributed 2030 muskets to each plantation employing black freemen with orders to teach the people how
to use them. Hunter also assigned him three white companies to deal with theft.
McClellan's demand for additional forces found Hunter compelled to give up his only cavalry
regiment. In this event, Hunter decided to pull back from the entire Carolina and Georgia
coasts and northeastern Florida as well to the immediate environs of Port Royal. This both
upset and terrified the Gideon's Band group. Saxton immediately wrote Stanton (16 August).
He described his situation and requested authorization to "'enroll as laborers [in the
Quartermaster's service] ... a force not exceeding 5,000 able-bodied men from among the
contrabands ... to be uniformed, armed, and officered by men detailed from the army.'" His
force would assist in working the plantations, guard black settlements, and "'in the event of
any emergency immediately provide aid."819 Stanton responded quickly on 25 August,
authorizing the request, and adding: "In view of the small force under your command and the
inability of the Government at the present time to increase it, in order to guard the plantations
and settlements occupied by the United States from invasion and protect your inhabitants
thereof from captivity and murder by the enemy, you are also authorized to arm, uniform,
equip, and receive into the service of the United States such numbers of volunteers of African
descent as you may deem expedient, not exceeding 5,000, and may detail officers to instruct
them in military drill, discipline, and duty, and to command them." (Saxton, it should be noted,
had ingeniously requested laborers, not soldiers.) Stanton also noted the 17 July statute
enacted by Congress (the Second Confiscation Act) provided that blacks "received into the
service of the United States who may have been the slaves of rebel masters" would be
"forever free" and so would "their wives, mothers and children." Stanton directed Saxton "and
all in your command" so to "treat and regard them." Black troops had effectively been
authorized for the first time.820 This constituted the first beach in the President's "I'll ignore the
818For Saxton, Westwood, Black Soldiers, White Commanders, 62-68.
819WR, Ser. 1, V. 14, 374-376.

issue" defense of the slavery status quo. By December 1864, 15,000 blacks lived and worked
on the Sea Island settlements.821
[Grant, and Eaton and Thomas]
Early in the war, Henry Halleck had been assigned to overall command in Missouri. Along
with his regiment, Grant as a colonel too was assigned to Missouri. Stationed first at the town
of Mexico, then Ironton (while there, he was commissioned brigadier general), then Jefferson
and Cape Girardeau, he fell under Halleck's command.
Very early in the war Halleck exhibited his bigotry (unbounded in the case of his nativist
treatment of the Union army's German soldiery 822): His General Order No. 3 of November
1861, ostensibly aimed at leaks of military information such as force strength to rebels, curbed
mobility through Union lines and applied in practice especially to non-laboring blacks. Grant's
use and enforcement of this order suggests his attitude toward planters and "their" slaves was
largely determined by his nationalism, or, from other side, by their loyalty to Union or their
rebellion against it. Documentary expression of this attitude can be found in his letters home,
letters that at this time indicate an attitude very similar to Lincoln's. Writing his father (Jesse
Root Grant) from Corinth on 3 August 1862, Grant stated, "I am sure that I have but one
desire in this war, and that is to put down the rebellion. I have no hobby of my own with regard
to the negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage."823
Once inside previously rebel held territory and practically dealing with masses of blacks, Grant
began to reassess the new reality (i.e., black subjectivity) he was confronted with. Writing his
sister Mary some two weeks later, he noted "their institution was beginning to have ideas of
their own..."824 Indicating the occasion and the basis for his new assessment (..." every time
an expedition goes out more or less of them follow in the wake of the army and come into
camp"), he related how he had come to handle the problem created by the massive presence
of civilian "contraband." ("I am using them as teamsters, Hospital attendants, company cooks,
etc. thus saving soldiers to carry the musket.") At a loss concerning their fate ("I dont know
what is to become of these poor people"), he, nonetheless, concluded that his action had the
effect of "weakening" the enemy. In short, however he might curb the "stealing" of slaves, the
slaves themselves were creating a social upheaval that would harm the southern cause. 825
Indeed, in less than a month William Rosecrans, one of Grant's generals, reported "a perfect
stampede of contrabands" from the vicinity beyond his encampment.826 Grant was content,
until he began in earnest to undertake the Vicksburg Campaign, to deal with the situation (of
inflowing blacks) in an ad hoc manner. In mid-November 1862, he decided on a systematic
820Ibid, 377-378.
821Westwood, Ibid, 68.
822See Appendix II, below.
823The letter continues, "If Congress pass any law and the President approves, I am willing to execute it. ... I do not

believe even in the discussion of the propriety of laws and official orders by the army. One enemy at a time is enough
and when he is subdue it will be time enough to settle personal differences." John Y. Simon (ed.), Grant Papers,
5:264.
824Ibid, 5:311. Letter written from Corinth to Mary Grant, 19 August 1862. (Emphasis in the original.)
825Ibid.

Grant stated further in the same letter, the "war is evidently growing oppressive to the Southern people.
826Grant Papers, 5:310-311; and 6:32. Rosecrans telegraphed 10 September 1862 that "a perfect stampede of

contrabands east has filled us with men women & children carts wagons bedding, etc. [sic]," Ibid. Earl Schenck
Miers, The Web of Victory, 43, speaks (with reference to crossing the Mississippi below Vicksburg) of an "unforeseen
hindrance," namely, "the thousands of Negroes - 'of all ages and both sexes,' Grant said - who streamed into Grand
Junction and slowed down his advance to a virtual standstill.

and productive approach. With "Negroes coming in by the wagon loads,"827 he determined to
put them to work, "'picking, ginning and baleing. Cotton now out and ungathered in the field."
He appointed John Eaton, chaplain of an Ohio regiment, to supervise, fully occupy and extend
the use of black labor on abandoned plantations. Westwood, in his analysis, comment that,
"At first Eaton's responsibility was confined to the army's advance area, but in mid-December
Grant enlarged it, ... [making] Eaton ... general superintendent of contrabands for the entire
department." At the outset, Grant had "explained to Eaton ... that the purpose was to
transform the fugitives from a burden into an asset." But he soon discovered something new
(to him) and important: "When it had been made clear ... that the black man could work well
as an independent being, rather than under slavery's lash, 'it would be very easy to put a
musket in his hands and make a soldier of him'."828
In February 1863, Grant, in great need of manpower for work on the canal in the Mississippi
lowlands, "prescribed that three hundred black laborers would be added to each division's
pioneer corps."829 In mid-February 1863, Grant telegraphed the War Department in
Washington to suggest establishment of a "colony" for blacks aside Lake Providence. (No
immediate response was forthcoming.) Grant, independently of Saxton, had hit upon the same
idea, namely, formation of a self-sufficient productive settlement as a solution to the problems
of social reproduction (feeding, housing, etc., within the context of the larger society) entailed
by the self-activity that was recreating slaves as a freepeople. Grant recognized the
possibilities for this solution because he saw, like all those in the Union encampment who
cared to give it any thought, that the size of the abandoned plantation lands cared for by black
labor near Vicksburg's west bank was growing. Then on 24 March 1863, Stanton instructed
Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to head west. He gave him broad instructions: "He was to
see to it that 'contrabands' would receive humane treatment and be enabled 'to support
themselves.' ... he was to have black soldiers organized 'to the utmost extent.' For their
officers he was to select 'willing' whites not only from existing officers but from any in the
ranks, even privates. ... The geographic and status limitation of the Emancipation
Proclamation were not applied to Thomas' activity." Thomas reached Lake Providence on 8
April. Thus, at last Grant's mid-February recommendation had tacitly received approval.
"Thomas ... provided for putting blacks to work on abandoned cotton plantations and decreed,
'protection will be afforded to the contrabands engaged in picking, when it can be done
without injury to the service, until the organization of negro regiments, when that duty will be
performed by them.'"830
827"Citizens South of us are leaving their homes & Negroes coming in by wagon loads. What will I do with them? I am

now having all the cotton still standing out picked by them. Telegraph to Halleck, 15 November 1862, Grant Papers,
6:315.
The massive nature of the problem created by black refugees is also evident in a 16 December 1862 telegraph to
Grant's headquarters from Brig. Gen. Thomas A. Davis. Davis stated three railroad carloads of blacks had arrived in
camp and indicated he had no place to house them. Yet, "to turn them out of the cars into mud is inhuman. He
wanted guidance. John Rawlins, Grants aid, responded the same day, telling Davis to house them in tents and
vacant houses, to issue the refugees rations, and employ them in the "Quartermaster's Department, and on the levee
and hire [them] to Steamboats for work on the river. Grant Papers, 7:500-501.
828Westwood, Black Soldiers, White Commanders, 23-24. The internal citation is from Grant Papers, 6:316-317.
Westwood also relies on Eaton's own account (Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen) published in 1907. Similarly, for the
productive use the "contrabands," Miers, Ibid, 44. Also Grant, Memoirs, 424-426. Grant's Special Order No. 17 read:
"Chaplain Eaton ... is hereby appointed to take charge of the Contrabands that come into Camp in the vicinity of the
Post, organizing them into suitable companies for working, see that they are properly cared for, and set them to work
picking, ginning, and baleing Cotton now out and ungathered in the field" Grant Papers, 6:315-316.
829Special Order No. 66, Grant Papers, 7:417. Emphasis added.
830Westwood, Ibid, 25, 26 (citations, emphasis added). The internal quotation cited by Westwood is drawn from

Thomas' order-book, Orders and Letters, April-November, 1863, 14, housed in the National Archives.

In early April 1863, Halleck, confirming the direction that thinking of Lincoln, Stanton and the
Cabinet was moving in, wrote Grant stating, "It is the policy of the government to withdraw
from the enemy as much productive labor as possible ... Every slave withdrawn from the
enemy, is equivalent to a white man put hors de combat. Again, it is the policy of the
government to use the negroes of the South so far as practicable, as a military force for the
defence of forts, depots, etc."831
With Grant's support, Thomas immediately set to work: In quick order he established
recruiters who with him organized black regiments; he commissioned regimental officers; and,
he set about making dispositions for cultivation of the plantations. On 23 April, Grant issued
orders for his entire Department, first protecting black laborers on plantations within Union
lines, and, second, instructing all commanders to endeavor to organize black regiments and
"in removing prejudice against them." He also recommended dismissal from the service of
those officers who tendered their resignations over the Emancipation decree.832
In the Mississippi Valley, military need, that is, the manpower required for garrison duty,
guarding refugee camps and protecting plantations worked by black labor in Union held
territory, drove the expansion a of black military force. These demands on Grant's command
had so increased by the moment of Vicksburg's capture that he sent specially selected black
recruiters with raiding expeditions into regions west of the river. Still Grant had to avoid the
appearance of the "theft" of blacks. He continued his policy of differential treatment for loyal
and rebel slaveholders, offering the slaves of the former only the option of enlisting, engaging
whatever means appropriate (including de facto conscription) for the other.833
In December 1863, Thomas reported to Stanton black recruitment for period 1 April - midDecember totaled some 20,000 men in his area of responsibility. He reported that roughly
5,000 men were lost as casualties, or due to disease or capture.834
Within framework of capitalist development, Grant, like Saxton, had effectively laid the
foundations for development of an agriculturally productive, self-sufficient and autonomous
black community.
The collapse of these prospects can be exhibited through an examination of the Sherman's
responses and the fate of the resolution to similar problems some fifteen months later.
[Sherman]
Except for some garrison troops, there were no blacks in Sherman's armies during the Atlanta
campaign. He had some blacks in his pioneer corps, since he openly accepted able-bodied
black males as laborers on the march from Atlanta. However, he did not arm any. According to
Castel, "Indeed, there never will be [any armed black soldiers under Sherman's command], for
he considers them incapable of equaling whites as soldiers and does not want any."835 At the
outset, efforts were made to minimize the number of refugees following columns, but efforts,
though they continued (especially on the left wing), became lax. Best estimates put the
831WR, Ser. 1, V. 24, Pt. 3, 156-157.
832Westwood, Ibid, 27-28; Grant Papers, 8:356.

Grant was familiar with the open bigotry that was pervasive among the soldiers and officers of his army. (Though he
appears not to espoused it himself, how could he have avoided it?) Thus, "[For] many Northern troops, initial
exposure to blacks was the spectacle of ignorant, illiterate, unkempt refugees; abuse of black soldiers by whites was
not uncommon. Westwood, Ibid, 31.
833"Many of the soldiers ... frankly regard the 'niggers' as barely human. "'You have no idea,' an Illinois enlisted man
writes home after his first contact with slaves, 'what a miserable, horrible-looking, degraded set of brutes these
plantation hands are.'" Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 53. Westwood, Ibid, 31-32.
834WR, Ser. 3, V. 3, 1189-1191.
835Castel, Ibid, 129.

number of blacks who had abandoned "their" plantations to trail Sherman's army columns at
6,000-7,000. By the time his columns reached Savannah, Sherman had several problems.
First, there were, of course, the masses of blacks that had followed his columns. Now that his
command had encamped, these "refugees" had caught up to his soldiery, and the attendant
problems of food and shelter became pressing. Moreover, other problems had also emerged.
On entering Savannah (21 December 1864), Sherman had to find the minimal supplies
needed to inaugurate his Carolina march, and he was now confronted with a local economy
whose sinews, Confederate currency rendered worthless by his army's conquest, were no
longer a viable medium of exchange and on which 20,000 civilians nonetheless depended.836
The first problem Sherman figured he had solved: He would dump his refugees on Saxton.
Halleck, however, had written and warned him in so doing he would be accused in the North
of leaving the refugees to the "tender mercies" of Wheeler's cavalry. (This Confederate
formation was the only effective force that had managed even to harass Sherman's columns
on the eastward march.) The argument that Halleck rehearsed went something like this: If
blacks were fully encouraged to abandon the plantations as slaves, their desertion could
drawn some 50,000 laborers off from Georgian planters and the rebel army. Halleck
suggested Sherman settle the refugees he had on the coastal plantations to silence his
critics.837 Halleck had a specific incident in mind. He was referring to the events at Ebenezer
Creek, about 20 miles from Savannah, on 8 December. Jeff C. Davis, commanding a corps of
the Union left wing, had ordered a constructed bridge removed before the mass of blacks in
the rear could cross - leaving them to the rebel cavalry that was in hot pursuit. That incident
had made clear to Sherman that issuing field orders to the blacks not to follow would not solve
any problems. The refugee problem now obviously required a systematic approach, perhaps
along the lines Halleck was suggesting.838
On 12 January, Stanton, having traveled south, met Sherman at his headquarters in
Savannah along with twenty black churchmen. The latter, when queried how they could best
take care of themselves "and assist the government," indicated they would need land to
cultivate in order to reproduce themselves. Asked whether it was preferable to integrate with
the local white populations or maintain separate settlements, they preferred the latter to avoid
bigotry. Sherman, upon Stanton's request, made a draft aimed at resolution. Stanton reviewed
it carefully, made changes and Sherman issued it as Special Field Order No. 15 on 16
January 1865. The order was law for the Department of the South.839
Provisions of the order read as follows:
"The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the river for thirty miles
back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint John's River, Fla., are reserved and
set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the
proclamation of the President of the United States." This area was to be administered by
Rufus Saxton, given general managerial and police powers.
Whenever "three respectable negroes, heads of families," chose a locality within the specified
settlement area, Saxton was to license them, and under Saxton's supervision, they would
divide the land in the locality among themselves and others wishing to join them. Each family,
then, would have "a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground." Saxton was to supply
each family head, "subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory
title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries"; these titles would be
836Westwood, Ibid, 107-108.
837WR, Ser. 1, V. 44, 836-837.
838Westwood, Ibid, 109-111.
839Ibid, 112, citing the letter of Sherman to President Andrew Johnson, 2 February 1866.

treated as possessory, as it would turn out a rather dubious legal status. That possession
would be secured by the military "until such time as they can protect themselves or until
Congress shall regulate their title.'"
On the Sea Islands and in inland settlements "no white person whatever, unless military
officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive
management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United
States military authority and the acts of Congress." However, the order would not apply to,
and hence did not change, the existing settlements on Beaufort Island. This referred, no
doubt, to the Gideon's Band whites conducting, as it were, the Port Royal Experiment and to
the land they, as northern whites, had acquired.840
As the fighting dwindled in 1865, former owners came drifting back to these coastal lands with
a view to reassuming control over their former lands. These whites were unauthorized and
subject to military arrest, but two events intervened. First, there was the creation of the
Freedmen's Bureau as a Congressional Act of 3 March 1865. On 12 May, Maj. Gen. Oliver
Otis Howard, commander of the two corps making up Sherman's right wing on the march to
the coast, was put in charge of the Bureau and Saxton lost his autonomy. He was reduced to
the status of one of Howard's commissioners. The second event occurred on 29 May, when
Andrew Johnson promulgated a broad amnesty proclamation for all those former rebels willing
to now take a loyalty oath. The oath takers were in abundance, all in turn agitating for return of
formerly owned lands.841
Johnson had a sympathetic ear for his fellow southern countrymen, but at the same time
attempted to tack a course in a Congress from which he wanted legislative enactments (and
which would meet again in December.) He instructed Howard to find some accommodation,
i.e., return of property in exchange for waged tenancy.
Abolitionist at heart, Howard waffled, stalling with support from Stanton. When Congress
returned to Washington for its new session, Howard began working with Lyman Trumbull, a
leading senator from Illinois, on proposed legislation that he hoped would finally resolve the
difficulties posed by President Johnson efforts to reverse Congressional intent in creation of
the Bureau. Congress acted in February 1866, indefinitely extending the life of the
Freedmen's Bureau and, among other provisions, defining means to confirm Sherman's title
possessors in possession for three years. Lobbying Johnson, white planters had, at Johnsons
suggestion, their representative (William Henry Trescott) see Sherman in order to get at the
meaning of his order. Trescott conferred with Sherman. On 3 February, Sherman, at
Johnson's written request, wrote the President stating, "I knew of course we could not convey
title to land and merely provided 'possessory' titles, to be good as long as War and our Military
Power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the Negros who were absolutely
dependent on us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or
legislation." A few days later, Johnson vetoed the Congressional legislation. The attempt to
override was two votes short. Meanwhile, Johnson had long sought to get ride of Saxton, and,
in January 1866, he had removed him.842
Howard still vacillated, trying to salvage something for the freepeople. Trescott got Johnson to
put regular army authorities in South Carolina (as opposed to Howard at the Freedmen's
Bureau) in charge of determining what constituted a fair accommodation. Regular army
840WR,Ser. 1, 47, Pt. 2, 60-62. Also Westwood, Ibid, 112-113. (Emphases added.)
841Ibid, 114-116. For a detailed discussion of O.O. Howard and his indecisive and, from the freepeople's perspective,

harmful role as the Freedman's Bureau head, see the section entitled "Role of the Army and Freedmen's Bureau" in
chapter 10, below.
842Westwood, Ibid, 117-119, citing from the letter of Sherman to Johnson, 3 Feb 1866, housed in the Library of
Congress.

officials favored the white ex-owners' interpretation of "fair." That pretty much ended the
matter. The final scene was played out in July 1866, as Congress again acted by limiting the
life of the Freedmen's Bureau to one more year, and by confirming Johnson's return of
property settled by freemen and their families to the former white owners.843
Blacks, the Union Armies and Grant
Black contributed to the Union war effort in a way that civilian Northerners simply did not. The
latter's labor, whether that of farmers producing grain or cattle for sale to Union armies
quartermasters or that of textile workers producing blankets, uniforms and shoes, were
mediately essential to maintaining fighting forces in the field. As the southern armies proved,
for example, Lee's or Forest's command, men could fight barefooted in homespun clothing
(robbing the enemy death of their clothing and shoes) eating beef at best irregularly (or, when
it could be raided and stolen from Union depots). In some respects, it might be said that
northern farmers and workers fed and clothed two army groups. Black noncombatants, on the
other, were directly involved in the immediate tasks of support and social reproduction of both
sides, and when that reproduction was finally massively withdrawn from rebels forces, its
absence spelt the end for the Confederacy every much as the attrition Lee's army suffered in
the trenches around Petersburg between June 1864 and March 1865.
Blacks, men, women and children engaged in a variety of roles, functions and activities for
and around Union armies. Among those activities which directly supported army movements
or social reproduced army personnel as soldiers or officers were informal spying and acting as
guides; chopping wood (for Union steamships carrying supplies down the Mississippi), digging
canals (such as along the Mississippi River during Vicksburg Campaign), building bridges,
and stevedoring (New Orleans); destroying railroads and canals (such as in Columbia during
Sherman's Carolina march); and cooking, serving as personal valets (for men and,
particularly, officers) and as hospital attendants.
Planting, caring for and harvesting cotton (in especially South Carolina and Mississippi for
sale northward), as discussed earlier, were among those tasks black noncombatants
undertook that indirectly contributed to the Union war effort.
Once recruitment to Union armies was undertaken, black soldiers performed their duties in
corduroying roads and constructing fortifications; in guarding supply wagons, ammunition
trains, ambulances, in guard duty at prisoner of war camps and guarding rebel prisoners; and
as stretcher-bearers and teamsters, on quartermaster staffs, as color-bearers, and as burial
details. At this point in the war (May 1863), black men were initially, then, assigned essentially
non-combatant roles allowing experienced veterans to return to combat. Of course, black
enlistments were a real boon to those states that could raise black regiments since it
decreased the draft quota of whites of the state in question.
Outside radical Republican circles, the fighting capacity of black soldiers had always been in
doubt among the generation of Northerners who lived through the Civil War. From our
perspective today, this doubt, or rather uncertainty and fear, was rooted in racist convictions
concerning the bare humanity of "Negroes." However, after the battles of Fort Wagner (7
September 1863), Petersburg (15-18 June 1864) and Fort Gilmer (Caffin's Farm, 29
September 1864), the question of the fighting capacities of the black soldier could no longer
be doubted. Thereafter black soldiers began to play increasing roles not only as pickets, in
cavalry reconnaissance and as heavy artillerists, but in cavalry and infantry fighting. Grant, for
his part, had altogether satisfied himself on this count much earlier. On 7 June 1863, a little
force of "colored" and white troops across the Mississippi, at Milliken's Bend, were attacked by
843Ibid, 120. So as not to interrupt the circuits of exchange, the new legislation contained the proviso that no returns

could take place until after current crops were harvested.

about 3,000 men from Richard Taylors trans-Mississippi command. "With the aid of gun boats
they were speedily repelled. This was the first important engagement of the war in which
colored troops were under fire. These men were very raw, having all been enlisted since the
beginning of the siege, but they behaved very well."844
Grant's relation to the black soldiery should be seen through the prism of the Lincoln
Administration policy of military emancipation. With all its limitations and restrictions, the
central feature of the policy was to destroy the Confederacy through deprivation of labor,
production and supplies. Grant was an enthusiastic elaborator and executioner of that policy.
Thus, what drove the use of black men as soldiers was always practical, Union nationalism
(and lacking any moral component, though, to be sure, no bigotry intervened to lessen its
practical value), namely, the military advantages that could be derived in relation and
opposition to the Confederacy. Thus, Grant writing to Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas (after he had
been assigned to Vicksburg by Lincoln to raise 100,000 black troops in the Mississippi Valley)
stated: "The Negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than are white troops, and I
doubt not will prove equally good for garrison duty. All that have been tried have fought
bravely."845 The anticipated advantage here was additional manpower. The importance of the
advantage, when it was finally realized in early autumn 1864, cannot be overstated. Grant,
knowing full well it was impossible for the war to be victoriously concluded unless Lincoln won
in November and hoping to convince anybody who would listen that the war was nearly
concluded, himself noted in August 1864 when Union fortunes appeared to hit another low
point: "The rebels have now in their ranks their last man. The little boys and old men are
guarding prisoners, railroad bridges and forming a good part of their garrisons for intrenched
positions. A man lost by them cannot be replaced. They have robbed the Cradle and the grave
equally to get their present force."846 Implicit in this analysis is the subjective certainty that
Unionists would have access to all the soldiers needed to the extent blacks and "free men"
continued to volunteer in the manner they had in the past. Of course, "free men" did not
continue to volunteer in that manner, and, as we have related above, the combat efficiency of
Union armies, in particular the Army of the Potomac, suffered as its effectively conscripted
lumpenproletarian component increasingly transformed the social composition of these
armies.847
In this light, there was even a calculated military reason to allow blacks to mass behind and
follow Union columns in march. In Georgia, Grant imposed this strategic requirement on
Sherman. Sherman, who considered blacks constitutionally incapable of fighting on a level
with white soldiers and whose army contained only a small pioneer battalion of blacks,
allowed self-freed slaves to follow his columns. That is as long as they could keep up with his
844For combat performance of freemen, e.g., Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 92-112.

Grant's remarks appear in his Memoirs, 321. (We believe those "colored" troops were the 49th USCT.) Reflecting on
enormous but lost opportunity to measurably short the war a year later, Grant, referring to the outer defensive line of
the north side of Petersburg (15 June 1864), stated laconically, "Smith assaulted with the colored troops, and with
success" (Ibid, 516). Catton (Grant Takes Command, 288) elaborated: In Smith's formation in front of Petersburg, "off
to the left General Hincks' colored infantrymen the men to whom little had ever been given and from whom nothing in
particular was expected, marched up to the dominating ridge, fought their way over the massive trenches and went
storming on into the forts. ... In half an hour or a little more it was over. The salient was gone, the ridge to the south
was crowned with black men in blue uniforms yelling and brandishing their weapons and climbing all over the
captured guns, and when the sun went down Smith's troops had taken a mile and a half of trenches, five forts, sixteen
pieces of artillery and several hundred prisoners. Between them and Petersburg there was nothing they needed to be
afraid of "
845Cited by Catton, Ibid, 16.
846Letter to E. Washburne, 16 August 1864, cited in Ibid, 354. "Little boys and old men" referred to a promulgated law

in which the Confederate Congress broadened the draft age to include all white males between seventeen and fifty.
847See the section "A Note on the Siege of Petersburg" in chapter 6, above.

attempt to avoid contact with rebel forces, and hence with rapid marches eastward in the
Georgia countryside. The strategic reason that Grant imposed this required on Sherman, and
Sherman unwillingly complied, was that blacks following Union columns withdrew labor from
southern production of militarily destined foodstuffs, and also put increasingly pressure (on top
of letters from wives and relatives) on rebel soldiers to return home to insure some production
was carried on their individual farms. Grant instructed Sherman to "move every wagon, horse,
mule and hoof of stock." He indicated that Sherman must allow blacks to follow his columns,
and he went a whole lot further in instructing Sherman, to "move ... the negroes" from the
country he intended to march through, and "as far as arms can be supplied, either from
surplus or by capture, I would put them in the hands of the negro men. Given them such
organization as you can. They will be of some use."848 Here was Grant sounding a radical
Republican theme, suggesting blacks be used to terrorize their former masters. 849 It was a
suggestion that Sherman, probably as horrified as any planter aristocrat would have been,
recoiled from and did not implement.850
Blacks and Whites in the Union Armies
Sherman, an open bigot, was, if anything, far more typical of the Union officers and enlisted
men in his views of blacks. At the war's outset, Grant brought a studied indifference toward
blacks as slaves and human beings. Sherman, to the contrary, held blacks in contempt,
intensely preferring to keep his distance militarily from them. It is hard to believe that a man
who thought blacks, regardless of proof to the contrary, simply incapable of performing at the
same level, militarily and otherwise, as "whites" could have found any intrinsic merit in
emancipation. Similar attitudes prevailed among the majority of the Union officers corps, and,
unfortunately, this was far too often the case among the very men who officered in black
regiments. The inequitable pay structure between "free men" and the ex-slaves, for example,
often led to black discontent. The latter was exacerbated by abuse, sometimes drunken, and
the harassment of white officers (some who were formerly mere privates raised up to
command of blacks, men seeking power and little more). This, in turn, led among black troops
to soldier strikes, "mutinies," that called forth court-martials, lengthy sentences for trivial
offenses of hard labor without pay, and even executions. By and large, the officers' corps was
only too willing to make an example via court-martial and sentencing to hard labor for blacks.
The issue was, of course, unquestioning obedience, demanded all the more unreasonably
because of white fear of blacks as an "alien" people.851
The mass of "free men" volunteers in the Union army were little better, often worse, than black
regimental officers. The debacle in the aftermath of Burnside's Petersburg mine explosion in
August 1864 suggests just how easily racist attitudes on both sides of the war could have
848WR, Ser. 1, V. 39, Pt. 3, 222.
849Catton (Grant Takes Command, 390) remarks, "Grant ... was proposing that the South's worst nightmare be

brought in from the far edge of the night. He further suggests that, "to put the Negro into Federal uniform struck
Mississippians as terrifying and unnatural. ... During this month of August [1863], bands of former slaves were flitting
across the lower Delta country, and a number of planters had been killed by them in the area around Deer Creek.
Grant reported that this 'probably was but a case of retribution,' since 'some of the citizens in that country have
attempted to intimidate the Negroes by whipping and (in a few instances) by shooting them.' The onetime slave knew
nothing about legalities, and that he had at last discovered the cruel effectiveness of the law of the fang and the talon
was just the planters' bad luck; especially so, in that Grant would not send out troops to restore the former chattels to
obedience, holding that citizens who felt unsafe could come inside the Federal lines for protection" (Ibid, 16-17).
850Similarly Grant had earlier instructed Sheridan who he had detailed to the Shenandoah Valley, "Do all the damage
to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions, and Negroes so as to prevent further planting. If the
war is to last another year we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste. Sheridan, Memoirs, I:486 (New
York, 1891), cited in Catton, Ibid, 361.
851For an analysis of officer bigotry and abuse, Westwood, Ibid, 125-166.

murderous translations.852 A "progressive" attitude in this context would be found merely in

support for emancipation whatever the motives. According to Castel, in fact, "most" "Northern
[i.e., Westerners engaged during the Atlanta Campaign] troops [did] support emancipation ...
[but] rarely out of idealistic humanitarianism. Instead they favor[ed] it for the same pragmatic
reasons that they ... [justified] terror against Southern civilians. 'Slavery,' to quote the letter of
an Indiana soldier to his wife, 'was the cause of the war, and unless it is abolished our free
institutions will again be endangered by a 2nd rebellion.' Or as a chaplain in the XVII Corps
puts it, 'We do not fight to free the slaves, but free the slaves in order to stop the fight.'"853
Even among those with impeccable abolitionist credentials, almost exclusively officers (with
the singular exception of revolutionary democratic German element assigned, largely, to the
Army of the Potomac's XI Corps prior to January 1864),854 there was a pronounced aloofness,
an ubiquitous if only tacitly expressed demand for deference, and a personal, often
suppressed, visceral distaste, not for the soldiery as such but, for black soldiers. Here
again,855 repressed longings and suppressed sexuality (once the province of English-Puritan
and Spanish-Catholic awareness, but now generalized as elements of the culturally
transmitted personality formation of whites strengthened, i.e., further repressed, by the
assimilation and internalization of capitalist rationality and capitals requisite work discipline)
emerged into consciousness as fears, anxieties, and fantasies about black lasciviousness,
savagery, etc. (or, alternatively, innocence, naivet, and uncivilized comportment).
In this light, given that he fully and energetically supported military emancipation and
enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment as well, Grant's position, his bigotry "mild" by
historical standards and militated against by his own fair treatment of blacks under his
command, was advanced.
An Anonymous Popular Subject
The very action of abandoning settled slave life was doubly revolutionary: In an objectively
subjective sense, it was a revolutionary act of self-liberation in which slaves initially
transformed themselves into a freepeople, and in the objective historical sense it was
revolutionary because it fatally undermined planter property as the foundations of southern
society.
The abandonment of settled slave life and gravitation toward Union encampments (which
were more or less compelled to offer protection because, as the Republican Lincoln
852In an ill-prepared assault by Union forces following a massive explosion underneath entrenched Confederate lines

east of Petersburg, black soldiers were deserted by men in the same uniform and butchered by rebels who either
refused them the opportunity to surrender or murdered prisoners of war after surrender. See Catton, Ibid, 308, 321,
325-326, 341, for a judicious assessment of the command failings involved in what was once again the loss of a huge
opportunity, this time to open a major, indefensible breach in the rebel defense. See also Richard Slotkin's solidly
documentarily-grounded, fictionalized account, The Crater. Slotkin imaginatively but reliably recreates the soldiery
practices that amounted to betrayal of blacks in the fighting that followed the explosion. Finally, Perry Lentz's novel
The Falling Hills demands citing for its probing account of the emotional dynamics of southern (non-planter) white
hatred of black soldiers as dramatized in his account of the Fort Pillow massacre.
853Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 53-54.
McFeely (Yankee Stepfather, 41-42) cites a letter by Charles Howard (brother of O.O. Howard, XI Corps commander,
commander of Sherman's left wing on the march to the sea, Bureau Commissioner) that provides a short, yet
instructive account of just how deep-seated this racism among Union soldiers often was. See also, Ibid, 47, 55, where
common, institutional forms (e.g., low pay and assignment of menial task to black troops) of and practices (such as
stealing livestock) motivated by this hatred are described.
854See Appendix II, below.
855See "The Meaning of 'Race' in relation to Class" in the Preface, above, and Note "Anti-abolition Mobs and the
2

Psychology of Class Oppression," the text at fn. 93, in chapter 1, above. In this respect (i.e., with regard to the
repression of feeling, sexuality and longings, see Joel Kovel, White Racism, particularly chapter 4 ("The Fantasies of
Race").

Administration and army commanders recognized, desertion of the plantations undermined

the rebel war effort) meant, for better or worse, that the actual course of emancipation
seamlessly linked the fate of blacks to the Republican party and de facto liberation inextricably
tied blacks to the Union army. While the consequences will be explored later,856 it should be
noted here that, in and of itself, Lincoln's proclamation merely legally, and only partially,
sanctioned what was already occurring on the ground. To be sure, consciousness of his
decree among blacks (which all sources dumbfoundedly agree was pervasive) in turn
encouraged further abandonment of the plantations. This awareness did not, of course,
distinguish between an opportunistic, restrictive measure and the incorporation of the abolition
of slavery into the organic law of the land. For blacks, the former had the significance of the
latter. At any rate, in a historically effective sense, it was military victory that secured, and the
Thirteen Amendment, that fundamentally codified, the ongoing self-emancipatory activity of a
class of slaves becoming a free people.
Because blacks throw off their status as slaves, the concept of freedmen is passive. Such a
concept presupposes blacks did nothing, were mere consumers of their own (formal) freedom,
recipients of Union gift - itself a byproduct of war. If the concept caught and fixed a reality all
those, mostly "whites," who thought or felt they had "freed the slaves" (those who fought,
fought and died, militated for passage of or actually enacted legislation "freeing the slaves"),
for us today, the concept is simply racist. Embedded in an entire constellation of latent
attitudes and beliefs concerning white superiority, this concept reproduced the essentially
passivity accorded any group deemed somehow subhuman.
The concept of freepeople (as opposed to freedmen and a freedpeople) meant, and has
immanent to it, black self-activity. Blacks left plantations freeing themselves. Their individually
anonymous, collective presence in and amongst the Union armies - together with their
withdrawal of labor as slaves - was as decisive for black liberation as Confederate military
defeat. This activity constituted, as we suggested, the self-emancipation of free men, women
and children, a self-induced movement from a life as class of slaves to life as a freepeople.
Even if not personal, this subjectivity determined the war's outcome because slavesbecoming-a-freepeople exercised autonomy in action that transformed the material substrate
of southern society.
Outside the national system of citizen formation, hence lacking the political means of publicly
having its opinion heard; lacking in the social practice of daily life, as a matter of fact, all
democratic rights (and even the personal right to control over one's own body); systematically
deprived of any formal education and all contact with the outside world, this was a remarkable
achievement. There was nothing particularly spectacular about it, but in the end it was just this
that was what objectively, historically needed to overthrow Confederate Power.
Subjectivity, that is, Union subjectivity, became decisive in the 1864 campaigns: From the
Union side, in passing into social and military practices, though Lee would never suit the
Union army by bringing his forces out of their trenches, it shaped outcomes roughly along the
lines of intention. That is, in 1864, subjectivity became a compelling historical force,
personally-directively in the figure of Grant, and in effectively in the anonymous, albeit partial
subjectivity of veteran Union soldiers, and, especially, the anonymous subjectivity of blacks as
a slave-class becoming a freepeople.857
856See chapter 10, below.
857"Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them

in the battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks " Lincoln
quoted in Emanuel Hertz, Abraham Lincoln. A New Portrait, II, 931-932 (New York, 1931), cited by Du Bois, Ibid, 100).
The bifurcation between personal and anonymous subjectivities largely originates in the bourgeois era's hierarchical
organization par excellence, its military. Grant appears so prominently because hierarchy, with its detailed division of
labor and fragmentary partial tasks that can only be reunited at the summit, magnifies the subjectivity of those at the

very top. Actually, the Union military, as any military organization, formed a tiered subjectivity (with, as we descend
this hierarchy, increasingly more heteronomous, yet still personal, subjectivities - the army commanders). That tiered
subjectivity, of course, presupposes organization and institutionalization of a collective subject ("the army," armies) on
the basis of the various forms of disciple - as well as partial, anonymous subjects (the most coherent of which were
the veterans in all armies north and south, McClellanist junior officers in the eastern Union armies, and veteran
western soldiers in particular). Both white soldiers taken together and the lumpenproletarian element of the Union
armies were not even partial, fragmentary subjects, since the former are a retrospectively assembled abstract group,
and the latter did not even constitute itself as a group. Underneath and in a very real sense supporting this hierarchy
was the anonymous subject, blacks as a people (which included black soldiers, who were not even primary for this
subjectivity).

9.
The Logic of the War and Emancipation. Summary and Results
[The question concerning] the proper status of the negro [not state rights] was the
immediate cause [of secession and the basis of the Confederacy]... Our new Government
is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.858

Objective Necessity of the Conflict

As different trajectories of societal development began to clarify in the 1820s, contradictory
societies remained tenuously, fractiously unified by an overarching political system, by a still
unfolding, shared history of continental conquest and by different appropriations and nuances
of culturally-shared, practically orienting concepts such as expansion and republicanism. After
the mid-1850s, historically different forms of societal expansion imposed their characters on
the awareness of all Americans, differences in meaning were no longer nuances but
ideologically opposed concepts (e.g., free and slave labor) and once marginal, extreme state
rights elements led the chorus of southern planters threatening to bolt if the South could not
control the political system (that is, if a Republican was elected to the Presidency).
Grounded on qualitatively different regimes of labor formed around fundamentally different
sets of productive relations, the societies of North and South were governed by different logics
of social organization that exhibited different dynamics and generated different trajectories of
historical development. These differences objectively created not just conflict but civil war. In
the socio-historically constituted categories available to them, Southern planters grasped the
well-springs of conflict: They understood that war was from the beginning a struggle over
slavery as the foundations of organized social life. In the North, however, consciousness of
the sources of conflict had not achieved the same clarity.
Class Components and Representation in the Republican Party
In the North, the classes making up the alliance on which the Republican party rested, as well
as most of the major political figures of the Republican party, especially Lincoln, at the outset
fought to preserve the Union. Consider, first, the components of the party at its origins. In the
North and West these consisted in, most importantly, the various strata engaged in capitalist
farming and in particular the large farmers, those strata of the eastern financial and merchant
communities not tied directly to cotton exchange, and middle strata reformers (especially
abolitionists).* Politically and doctrinally, these classes were represented in the actual day-today organizational components of the party by, respectively, Jacksonian Democrats from
border states and (together with Free Soilers) from the North and West, former northern
Whigs, and radicals. With the exception of the reformers and their organizational embodiment,
radicals, all were centrally motivated by Union nationalism. Yet for to each class component
and its political representative this nationalism had different meanings because of the different
consequences it entailed for each class. Consider, second, each in turn.
Following the depression that developed on the heels of the Panic of 1837, a long period of
economic expansion unfolded in which classical relation of town to country in the epoch of
liberal capitalism obtained. On the basis of this rapid industrial growth, after 1843 a number of
858Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, cited by Rawley, Ibid, 261.

_____
*Later a war Democratic layer from within a northern manufacturing stratum found its way into the Republican party.
This stratum, linked for the most part to rail production (and carriage making), was formed in the fifties by a relatively
undifferentiated milieu of master artisan-becoming-industrialists and journeyman artisanate-becoming-waged workers
in metalworking, iron and wrought iron, especially in New York City, St. Louis, and Chicago. This layer was largely
formed by industrialists. For the relation of industrial workers to the war, the Republican party and emancipation, see
"Skilled Worker Stratum" and "Inflation and Wages in the War and its Aftermath" in chapter 10, below.

strata engaged in capitalist farming, in particular large, prosperous farmers and a massive
tenantcy, effectively a disguised rural proletariat, differentiated themselves out of the rural
American yeomanry. The expansive dynamic tied the Northeast and West together as these
farmers found markets for their grain and livestock surpluses in the growing demand of the
exploding laboring populations of northeastern cities while providing the home market for
manufactured machinery, implements, clothing, etc., produced by those same urban workers.
Committed to westward territorial expansion and economic growth as the condition of their
private property in very cheap lands and to the unity of the nation as guarantor of the entire
process, opposed to slavery because it degraded white labor and to slaves because they
might compete with that labor, these farmers as Free Soilers constituted the social
foundations of the Republican party.
Border states, Delaware and Maryland, but especially Missouri and Kentucky, had smaller
populations engaged in capitalist farming as well as major city loyalist urban (largely German)
working classes. A tiny, but potent planter class, and small slave populations also peopled
these states. The political weight of the planters was felt as both Whigs and Jacksonian
Democrats, equally at home here, were divided until late in the 1850s in their commitments.
As a group, these politicians were to generally recognize that the future of their states, largely
oriented to northern markets, was intertwined with expansion of northern capitalist
development. With small slave populations, emancipation nonetheless remained problematic:
Lincoln's attempt to woo border states' planters (especially in Kentucky) by offer of gradual,
compensated emancipation (with freed slaves "colonized" somewhere abroad) failed. Planters
never voluntarily accepted emancipation in the border states. A combination of free soil
farmers and Union army occupation (together with fiercely loyalist urban working classes in
Louisville and St. Louis otherwise of limited consequence in Republican party calculations)
kept these states in the northern camp. Divided commitments in the end were overcome as
Democratic and Whig border state politicians recognized the condition sine quo non of the
economic expansion in the capitalist sense was the political framework of the Union.
The oldest regionally-based ruling class in the United States had more than its share of highly
educated lawyers and literati, and received its unity from high Calvinist, nouveau riche old
families at the center of the banking and financial communities of the Northeast, and not the
"old rich" great families of merchant and textile magnate communities. It produced Whigs,
men of large vision, who held forth for an activist State-interventionist program of internal
improvements to infrastructurally underpin commercial and industrial capitalist growth of
continental proportions. Largely opposed to slavery on economic grounds, its guiding idea
focused on an expanding empire of territorially compact political units, "states," subordinated
to a centralized national-State the key offices of which its class representatives manned.
The Republican party organizationally embodied a vision of a dynamically market-integrated,
territorially expanding society. Because capitalist farmers, manufacturers, and northeastern
merchants and financiers held variations of this vision, they were attracted to the party. This
vision was one, a central, aspect of Union nationalism. Among the popular classes, that is, the
various strata engaged in capitalist farming (including tenants) and the war-Democratic
elements of the working classes of the North, a powerful emotional attachment and
commitment to the State as a transcendent unity that guaranteed political rights unachieved
anywhere else in the world constituted the other side of Union nationalism. (A variation on this
commitment, one holding the bourgeois State incarnated the civilized world's most advance
political forms, was to found among non-party machine, professional politicians as well.) The
socio-economic weight, and commitment of capitalist farmers to both sides of the vision made
them the core class component of the Republican party.

The commitment of middle strata reformers, however, was different. All reformers shared a
moral abhorrence of slavery. Radicals, however, were distinct from the abolitionists, viz., from
a politically amorphous group whose religiously grounded beliefs underpinned their opposition
to slavery and whose social practice exhibited a marked tendency to work altogether outside
the framework of legally sanctioned authority in order to secure the end of slavery. Radicals
were organized party men implacably committed to politically undoing the work of slavery.
Rooted both in the rural and urban middle strata of mid-century American society, these men
were self-consciously committed to liberal capitalism. Their vanguard, the very few
revolutionary democrats (e.g., Stevens, Sumner, Wade, Julian, etc.) among professional
politicians, were, in one of the consistent paradoxes of modern history, centralists: At the core
of their nationalism was a commitment to an activist State power that would erase slavery and
its institutions.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln stood atop a regional party with national aspirations that still largely
bore the marks of its period of gestation (1854-1856), a party shaped at the local and state
levels, a party racked by differences among its class components on the issues of nationalism
and slavery. Lincoln's role was in no way mean, not because he was a "great man" but
because of the institutional role assigned the Presidency, against the background of a
powerful State structure, and the relation of that office to the party in power.
The National State within the Federal System
In the United States, for common sense and political theory as well a concept of the State is
by and large absent. What sense there is of this concept is commonly confused with the
Constitutionally mandated structure of the national or "federal" government. This truncated,
false concept is then opposed to that of transitional "Administrations" of this government or,
alternatively, to that of the "states," i.e., various internal, territorially fixed and defined, limitedly
sovereign political unities within the nation. The State, however, encompasses all the forms
and forces of repression in their interrelatedness and as a unity. In contemporary terms, the
State embraces, at the lowest level, the city cop on the street and ascends to a national police
(FBI), from municipalities to the national center. That cop is the State, so to speak, on the
ground. In terms of mid-nineteenth century America, the State institutionally embraced the
"states" as well as the "general government." The fundamental law, the Constitution, like
statutory law, is an element of the State; and, "Administration," i.e., the Executive at the
national level, is crucial: It is the central lever with which ruling classes throughout United
States history have imposed their long-term interests and class agenda on the myriad groups,
social strata and classes that make up American society.
A strong, national government was designed by its creators to overcome the provincial,
restricted visions of local gentries, or, in the case of New York, the mercantilist merchant
community, that dominated the state legislatures in the period of Confederation (1781-1789).
This national government was at once intended to rest on, by eighteenth century standards, a
"broad" social basis (i.e., officerholders would be selected by all respected gentlemen, "men of
quality," viz., established if not exclusively wealthy white male propertyholders) and to be so
constituted as to remain "remote" from the pressures of daily life, in particular those brought to
bear by local elites not to mention the underlying masses of farmers (and urban mechanics).
The compact theory of self-regulating, internal State structures (checks and balances), which
in the contemporary era has come to ideologically sanction obfuscatory discourse concerning
a "democratic" State, had absolutely nothing to do with a populist impulse. By our standards,
Federalists were not merely early nationalists but also strong centralizers and emphatically
"elitist." The State they constructed was from the beginning a towering monument to the
alienness and objectivity of a structure standing over and against (but allegedly embodying

the interests of) "society": It was consciously designed as an enormous engine of territorial
expansion and infrastructural development in order to expand national wealth, or stated
differently, to augment commercial "capitalist" advance and those ruling class social groups
who most benefited from this orientation. There is a remarkable conformity of intent - of the
true "founders" (Madison, Hamilton, James Wilson and, in our view, Washington also) as
revealed by the debates of the Convention of 1787 - to actual historically functioning State
structure erected in and developed over the subsequent years.859
The Presidency, institutionally modeled on the limited monarchy of the English, stood at the
apex of this strong national government. Like the entire national State edifice, the Executive in
particular - with its veto on legislation, and its ability to call out armed force and to negotiate
with foreign powers - concentrated the powers of the State in the personage of the President
while being, with the whole of active "society" shielded from it by the rest of the State
structure, in principle doubly remote. The institution of an "electoral college" based upon
customary winner-take-all state delegations circumvented the direct, popular election of a
President and eliminated the possibility of a compulsion to base Executive power immediately
on the Presidential party in Congress. Thus, this State structure was completely unlike the
"democracies" developed by nineteenth century European bourgeoisies. There multiple
parliamentary parties each programmatically represented distinctive classes while the largest
such party generally ruled through a parliamentary-based cabinet system of national
government. Rooted in the original form and construction of the national State, the American
structure has functioned if at all best with two parties, each predominately representing a class
coalition pulled together around and subordinate to a specific ruling class social group
interest. This structure plays to personalities, and neither to ideas nor to programs. Erected on
the foundations of an enormous distant from the underlying classes, pushing power upward
and concentrating it at its pinnacle, this State structure creates the need for a "great man" and
characteristically appears to totter whenever a "weak man" inhabits its highest office.
The institutionally based power of the Presidency was enhanced by "the patronage."
Presidential appointments from the time of Jackson onward were no longer selected forn
competency or in an effort to sectionally or politically balance a President's Administration.
Jackson used the power of Presidential appointment in order to, allegedly, drive "aristocrats"
and "the money interests" out of government positions. De facto he and every President that
has followed him have used Presidential appointments to strengthen their party's hold over
the State at every level at which it functions. With appointments ranging from Cabinet
secretaries and their subordinates and clerks through agency heads and their subordinates
and clerks down to very lucrative positions in federal customs houses, as postmasters, etc.,
unquestioning loyalty to the leading political figure within the party had become the only sure
means of advance. Patronage led directly to a massive coterie of hanger-ons, hacks,
opportunists and "spoilsmen" surrounding every potentially rising political star in American
party politics. Patronage, an integral part of the political system since Andrew Jackson's
Presidency (and even after the civil service reform of 1883),860 recreated the American State
as a vast terrain to be plundered while simultaneously multiplying and concentrating still
further the already enormous power of the Presidency.
859For this intent, well expressed in Madison's letters during the period (1785-1787) leading up to the Convention,

see The Papers of James Madison, V. 9, as well as Madison's Convention notes, edited by Max Farrand as The
Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, esp. V. I. We have attempted to capture the historically and culturally
specific favor of this intent in our play Commerce is Liberty. Federalists at the Convention of 1787.
860On the heels of the death (18 September 1881) of President James Garfield following his 2 July 1881
assassination, Congress enacted the Pendleton Civil Act of 1883 that undertook the reform of the State's
bureaucracy. The assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, had been rejected in his efforts to find patronage employment
following Garfield's 1880 election.

Beginning with Jackson's first Presidency, a new planter dominated class coalition based upon
the emerging second party system took control of the State at the national level. Housed in
the Democratic party, and riding a classically republican resentment of monopolies, during
Jackson's second term planters were able to effect a dismantling of the major prop of the
Federalist constructed national State, the Second Bank of the United States. The
development of a dispersed American banking "system" effectively slowdown the broad-based
tempo of nascent capitalist development in the North, and thus exacerbated, ongoing socioeconomically grounded sectionalization. Thereafter, decentralized banking, by shifting power
in the name of "state rights" to "states" in the federal system, gave the appearance that the
State, misidentified solely with a national center, had largely ceased to exist. The high tide of
planter power (i.e., of planters with an expanding awareness of distinctive, class-based
interests, planters as a class), 1833-1860, thus necessarily coincided with these
developments.861
Lincoln presided over the one of two greatest concentrations and augmentations of State
power in United States history. (The other great concentration occurred during and in the
immediate aftermath of the second imperialist world war.) Creation of a massive standing
army, enormous expansion of the federal bureaucracies - especially in the War Department,
and generation of a stable, dependable source of revenue through a host of taxes (income,
sales, tariff, etc.) were all developments characterizing his first term. As both party leader and
as President, then, Lincoln's pronouncements carried the greatest weight. His position on and
his policy with regard to slavery, very clearly and unequivocally articulated the sentiments of
the vast majority of those individuals and groups making up the class coalition on which
Republican power was established.862
The Compulsion of Slave Activity on Presidential Policy
In this context, as late as 25 August 1862, Lincoln stated, "My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the
Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing some
and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I
do because I believe it helps to the save the Union ..." Note that Lincoln did not oppose
freeing any to all slaves, but merely any to some slaves. Coming from a moderate Whig these
remarks should surprise no one. Clearly, they throw light on Lincoln's Emancipation
declaration formally announced to his Cabinet just one month later on 21 September 1862.
(Public pronouncement of that decree, to become effective 1 January 1863, appeared in
newspapers on the morning of 23 September.) On the heels of these remarks, the
Proclamation revealed that the force of events, not conviction, compelled Lincoln to proclaim
his decree.
In point of fact, the problematic issue of slavery was forced on the Union very early on. It was
forced on the Union at once by military development on the field of battle and by the slaves
themselves; and, the problem did not abate, but to the contrary grew more insistent as the war
unfolded.
Union armies penetrated deeply into the South, establishing bases and regional control, long
before the final outcome of the war had become clear. Military bases in southeastern Virginia,
Port Royal in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Fort Donelson in middle Tennessee near
861For elaboration of the relation of the State, centralization and the banking system in the United States during this

period, see the Conclusion, "Foundations of a Centralized, Modern State, below.

862For concentration of power at the national level of the State in the last imperialist world war, see the section
headed "Bourgeois Political Forms" in chapter 10 of our Whither America?

Nashville as well as the city of Nashville itself, and the city of New Orleans had all been
occupied before summer 1862.
Where Union armies had established regional control, in fact wherever and whenever these
forces entered slaveholding southern territory, Negro slaves deserted their masters and
plantations en masse. In a precedent established by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler at Fortress
Monroe (on Chesapeake Bay just southeast of Hampton, Virginia) in late May 1861, runaway
slaves were deemed "contraband," that is, abandoned Confederate property seized and held
by the Union army. Butler, a Massachusetts politician of national importance prior to (and
after) the war, understood that Lincoln would not tolerate simply freeing runaway slaves, but
he, a supremely able administrator, recognized the growing Union army need for labor. (At any
rate, by conviction, Butler, at least prior to the war, would not have been inclined to free
slaves.) Lincoln was worried about the response to any such action by slaveholders in the four
border states that had remained in the Union. In early September 1861, he demonstrated his
concern that border state planters would bolt the Union when he rescinded the order by Gen.
John Frmont freeing slaves in Missouri. (Commissioned a brevet major general of
volunteers, explorer of the Rockies and an ex-Democrat, he was also a nationally important
figure, having been the Republican party-supported candidate for President in 1856.)
Frmont, operating in Missouri, had days earlier placed the state under martial law,
confiscated rebel property and declared slaves free. (Similarly, on 9 May 1862 Lincoln
disavowed and rescinded an order by Gen. David Hunter, commanding officer in the Sea
Islands, freeing slaves and drafting them on the spot into the army.) Prior to 1 January 1863,
commanding army officers generally accepted slaves into Union army camps, keeping strict
records of whom these slaves "belonged" to and the labor they were put to work at. The
record keeping was in accordance with the views that the war would be over shortly (a view
seriously entertained unto May 1862) and that slaves would be returned to their old masters,
or masters would be compensated for any slaves actually freed. In Union army camps, slaves
qua contraband were originally put to work at fortifications construction. Later they were
employed in an assortment of non-fighting related tasks (in railroad repair, guard duty, as
teamsters and army cooks, etc.) to take pressure off Union soldiers and free the latter up for
combat duties. Still later, and particularly in the Mississippi Valley, slaves were sent back to
work in the cotton fields to raise a crop the receipts from the sale of which were intended for
the U.S. Treasury to help defer some of the costs of the war. In all cases, the design was to
deprive Confederate forces of the similar use of slave labor, especially rebel use for
fortifications construction and food crop production to feed armies in the field.
Negro slaves fleeing plantations as Union armies approached followed these armies, set up
camps in their immediate wake and, in fact, flooded the Union army camps themselves. Their
presence, some 500,000 (by war's end), created enormous problems of feeding, clothing and
sheltering a refugee population and added to the barrage of abolitionist demands in the North
for a principled stand on the war. Though little was officially said about it, this massive
presence brought qualitatively new pressure to bear on the Administration to recognize the
new reality created by slaves: As things stood, they were slaves without masters. Putting
slave "contrabands" to work and paying them a minimal wage did not solve the Union problem
of a refugee population, nor did it clarify the social identity of a runaway people. Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation resolved the latter issue but could not solve the former problem.
(It would only be the war's end, and the return of ex-slaves, now a freepeople, to the fields
under terms of labor contracts enforced by first the army and later the Freedmen's Bureau that
would end the refugee crisis created by the slaves' choice to free themselves.) Lincoln's
decree was only a de facto ratification of an fait accompli - of a reality that slaves were
creating, so to speak, on the ground in the first place. In the long term, without masters the

slaves themselves grievously hurt the rebel cause by massing in and about Union army
camps and thereby depriving the Confederates of labor in the fields producing food for troops
and labor to construct fortifications.863
The enormous presence of slave populations accompanying, and trailing, Union armies, and
the concomitant problems of feeding and sheltering these populations, had, then, put
tremendous pressure on the Republican Administration and pushed it in the direction,
however tentatively, of preparing for a postwar settlement in which slavery would have no
place. But pressure was also coming from other directions, ones which Lincoln, old Whig
politician, party leader and head of State that he was, personally felt much more keenly. First,
pressure was constant brought to bear on Lincoln by party radicals who were committed to
emancipation in a way that Lincoln found hard to understand. The President, much as he was
at odds with them over conduct of the war for most of the years of the conflict, needed the
radicals to support his "left turns" (e.g., the Emancipation decree, financial measures, etc.) in
the Congress. Thus, if only in part, he had to listen to them to gain their cooperation on
wartime legislation. Second, the military course of events itself brought enormous pressure to
bear on Lincoln to abolish slavery. This deserves elaboration.864
The Compulsion of Military Developments on Presidential Policy
Even as the secession crisis in winter 1860-1861 unfolded, neither northern nor southern
political leaderships wanted war (least of all the bloody, devastating form it took). Following
the attack on Fort Sumter in spring 1861, politicians and military leaders from both sides
thought a short war would follow, one which would bring the other side to its senses and
create the basis for a settlement. Each side, of course, believed that settlement would be
favorable to it. In the first year of the war, the North had successes in the border states,
captured coastal outposts and begun a blockage, but a real campaign that was suppose to
bring the South to its senses, or to its knees, had yet to be undertaken. And no one (with
exception of radicals) had as of yet accepted the possibility of a long, costly and bloody war.
On the heels of Union successes at Bowling Green, Donelson and Nashville, successes
attributable to Grant's leadership (in the latter two cases) and to northern technological
superiority on the waterways of the West, the belief in a short war was reinforced. It was an
early April 1862 bloody encounter in which Union forces under Grant were surprised by
Confederate forces under Johnston along the Tennessee River at Shiloh (between Savannah,
Tennessee and Florence, Alabama) that provided northern leaders with the first in a series of
eventful experiences that by mid-summer dissuaded them from this belief. Without
breastworks, scouting reports or intelligence based on advance patrols, Union forces were
completely unprepared: The battle officially cost the North 13,047 casualties, the southern
forces 10,699. But events in the West did not by themselves lead northern politicians,
particularly Lincoln and men inside his Administration, to the conclusion that the war might be
painfully, agonizingly long.865
The first ostensibly real campaign undertaken to bring the South to sue for peace, one to
which Lincoln's government at least looked for a decisive victory, got underway in early April
1862. It was aimed at the capture of Richmond, new capitol of the new Confederacy.
Beginning in southeastern Virginia, with approximately 121,500 men fit for duty at the height of
863For the figure of 500,000, Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 79.
864Lincoln's reluctant attitude to promulgation of the Emancipation decree is well described in George Julian, Political

Recollections, 226-227.
865Grant in his Memoirs (218) stated, "up to the battle of Shiloh, I ... believed that the rebellion against the
Government would collapse suddenly, and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies"
(emphasis added).

the campaign, chances for success disappeared not merely in the face of the brilliant tactically
offensive, rebel generalship of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson. Such leadership could not
have overcome a well thought out plan, one based on a careful reconnoiter of projected battle
terrain and one rigorously pursued. These chances were squandered by the indecisive,
temporalizing military leadership of Gen. George McClellan, commanding officer of the Union
Army of the Potomac. Embedded in this indecision was both a hubris and a political
conception of the goals of the war, best expressed by McClellan's high ranking subordinates,
that undermined the Union military effort.
The military leadership's objective was a limited war that would bring about a peace without
victors and without destruction of the slavery-based, planter dominated southern form of life.
For the time being, this objective converged with that of the informal party of property in
Congress and with the popular, largely farming-based soldiers' conception of the war, a
patriotic fight to uphold the integrity of the Union. It was an objectively-grounded (i.e., classbased) illusion, not because Confederate military commanders and political leaders clearly
and correctly understood the objective historical trajectory of war (which they did) but,
because the defense of slavery as the central institution of southern life was at stake in the
war: The war could not be ended short of either dissolution of the Union or wrenching
southern defeat.
By July 1862, numerically inferior, poorly clothed and vastly underarmed Confederate forces
under Lee, though incurring greater losses, had demoralized McClellan, if not his army, in a
series of battles known as the "Seven Days" east and southeast of Richmond, while in late
August an army under Jackson had crushed Union forces near Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull
Run Mountains just 44 miles west southwest of Washington. In late May and again in early
July, military leaders, Republican politicians and party regulars in Washington, and Unionist
newspaper editors all feared a Confederate march on the nation's capitol, a Washington left
largely unprotected by McClellan's pathological anxiety over adequate troop strength in the
field. Cries went up in the northern Republican press (and not just in the abolitionist press), in
the Congress and among the largely Republican state governors for a sterner, more severe
approach to battle including the use wherever of blacks (e.g., in ditch digging, driving teams,
as servants in the camps, as spies among Confederates). On 12 July, the Senate passed the
Second Confiscation Act and sent the bill for signature to the President: For its measures,
basically authorizing Lincoln to employ blacks as he saw fit, Hay and Nicolay - Lincoln's
secretaries and biographers, indicated it should have been titled "'an act to destroy slavery
under the powers of war.'"866
Diplomatic Pressures on Presidential Policy
The massive present of slaves without masters in and among northern armies and Union
military failures in the field were immensely complicated by the posture of the European
powers, particularly Britain and France. The Lincoln Administration dreaded the prospects of
foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign state. Recognizing the unitary character
of the Atlantic economy (of which the financial community of the American northeast, the
agricultural American South, and the industrialized English heartland were major
components), underlying this dread was the fear that successful secession would not merely
territorially balkanize but would destroy the wealth and power on which the United States
rested. Given the disastrous military reversals in the field, European intervention would have
taken the form of British and French mediation in the war, viz., an imposed European
settlement the consequences of which would have invariably led to the end of military
hostilities, a territorial division on former Union soil one side of which hosted a hostile slave
866Nevins, The War for the Union, III, 146, citing Hay and Nicolay.

nation, and the realization of the Administration's great fear: It would have led, further, to the
enduring presence on the American continent of European powers supporting a
technologically inferior slave nation, and the corresponding end of continental expansion, the
severe constriction of the prospects for future industrial development, and the reduction of the
Union to an at best second-rate world power.
The Lincoln Administration, of course, was not passive, and held its own trump cards. Though
dreading the prospects, it threatened war should the British recognize the Confederacy. It
would deprive Britain of Northern grain, attack her merchant fleet, and promised to invade
Canada. The British were hardly deterred: From the commanding heights of British political
power, Gladstone had congratulated Jefferson Davis on having "made a nation." By mid-1862,
in England important strata of the ruling class were decidedly opposed to the Union. The
motives were mixed but included concerns, heightened by a stiff tariff and the northern
blockade, for the transAtlantic economy centered on cotton; anxiety over the prospects of a
prolonged conflict seriously disrupting international commercial and perhaps leading to
domestic disorders; concern about the growing industrial power of the United States; and,
outright fear in the event of a northern victory of the ideological diffusion of views of a likely
ascendant radical democratic elements within the American State. With their mouthpieces in
the Times, Morning Post and Saturday Review, those strata themselves consisted in
armaments manufacturers, shipowners and the industrialists involved in shipping construction,
textile manufacturers and the entirety of those merchant strata (importers, brokers, bankers)
directly involved in cotton exchange, and, in particular, the old landed aristocracy all of whom
supported the South. Lacking a moral center (viz., a Union policy aimed at freeing slaves),
with the northern blockade of southern ports and a high tariff legislated in Congress, British
ruling class opinion, unambiguously oriented toward free trade, was at once offended by and
cynical concerning what it took to be northern motives. The liberal middle classes and the
profoundly democratic industrial working classes could hardly voice their views as long as
Lincoln's government denied the centrality of slavery to the outcome of the war. At the same
time, the actual day-to-day governing body, the Palmerston Cabinet, was divided with
Galdstone and Russell pushing strongly for intervention. Prime Minister Palmerston, a
conservative and cautious politician, had even suggested intervention in September, but the
(incomplete) Union victory at Antietam found him retreating to a wait and see posture.
In France, the regime of Louis Napoleon rested on the double foundations of military force,
the army, and the memory of the past, that is, peasant passivity deriving from the practical
accomplishments of his famous namesake (i.e., the destruction of feudal rents and the
establishment of private peasant property in the land). Without a forum for the constitution of
public opposition (e.g., a parliament), this king of bandits, pimps and thieves pursued a foreign
policy that, while mindful of a powerful, emerging industrial bourgeoisie as well as its
commercial counterpart, was largely self-directed. Louis Napoleon, having already involved a
French expeditionary force along with now withdrawn British and Spanish forces in Mexico (in
order to preserve European life and property in the context of a civil war), sought the
overthrow of the existing Mexico state and the recreation of a French dependency. Louis,
himself a commoner-become-aristocrat on the basis of his grandfather's appropriation of the
title of French "emperor," held Old World fears of a "democratic Republic." He, it appears,
sought to create out of Mexico a buffer state on Union borders. Neatly fitted to this design, the
southern government was anxious to negotiate a French Mexico-Confederate alliance for
recognition. Louis, obviously also willing, lacked the standing on the Continent to unilaterally
engage in such negotiations. From the Anglo-Franco standpoint, though respective ruling
classes could agree on little else, the prospects of a long war foreshadowed a dramatic
disruption in world trade, and with it the further prospects of potential political upheavals on

the continent. Thus, with a long war in the making the chances of intervention, that is,
"mediation" entailing recognition of the Confederacy, had become very real.867
Lincoln's Emancipation Policy
With the refusal of border states Congressional representatives to endorse an emancipation
plan that included federal compensation for and colonization of slaves-to-be-freed outside the
United States; with the government in crisis (i.e., Lincoln's party torn) and radicals in Congress
posed to assume control of war policy if the Administration itself did not demonstrate a greater
willingness to prosecute the war through more drastic measures; with volunteering flagging in
the country at large and publicly articulated opinion calling for needed reorganization of the
military command as newspaper accounts, which military families read in fearful horror,
presented the ghastly details of thousands of helpless, wounded and dying soldiers laying on
battlefields for up to two days without any medical attention; with Louis Napoleon ready to,
and attempting to marshal British support in, recognizing the Confederacy, and English
neutrality now in doubt; Lincoln was compelled to recognize that some form of emancipation
policy had to be implemented at once.
Limited (i.e., restricted to rebel states at war, and only those parts of states actually in
rebellion where it was unenforceable) and politically expedient as it was (i.e., designed only to
advance the war effort, not to liberate blacks), the Emancipation decree nonetheless provided
the North with the high moral ground. Lincoln's Proclamation, together with the partial victory
at Antietam, temporarily saved the situation by rallying Congressional support and newspaper
editors behind him, polarized the popular classes in the North (at once giving a huge impetus
to Copperhead opposition and intensifying Administration support, thus permitting creation of
a massive institutional complex for domestic repression), encouraged a cautious Palmerston
and his divided Cabinet to continue in its wait and see posture, and, most importantly abroad,
provided enough breathing space for the English middle and working classes to rally, engage
in public demonstrations supporting the North, and thereby in the longer run to compel the
government to make neutrality official British policy.
By summer 1863, the military situation had yet to turn in the North's favor. Battlefield
casualties (not to mention war-related deaths due to disease) were horrendous, and the term
of enlistment of some 88,000 soldiers had expired in May. These losses conjoined to a federal
policy that now explicitly recognized the centrality of slavery in the war created a large
problem of desertion in, especially, the Army of the Potomac and made voluntary enlistment
very unpopular among eastern working class and poor western and border state farming
males who formed the backbone of the Union armies; while the same casualties and the end
of a tour of duty for so many soldiers left the Union armies severely undermanned. In the fall
1862 elections, Republicans had taken a beating over Lincoln's Emancipation decree as the
867Good summaries of the class forces operating in and positions of England and France vis--vis the Union in

summer 1862 can be found in Nevins, Ibid, 247-250, 258-259, 260 and Du Bois, Ibid, 87-89.
For the attitudes of the British and the French and English doubts about the northern will to victory, Nevins, Ibid, 272274.
For Gladstone's remark and Louis Napoleon's designs, Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, 28.
In his memoirs (Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences), Benjamin Butler recalls after his arrival in New Orleans
in mid-May 1862, he learned that Louis Napoleon proposed to the English the recognition of the Confederacy. Louis
intended to launch an assault on Mexico (which meant Mexico City), and to use New Orleans as his base of
operations. He would attempt with Confederate support both within and without the city to dislodge Union forces from
their occupation. The rebels agreed to an annexation of Texas, retaking it for what would become French Mexico. This
information was forwarded to Seward as Secretary of State. Ibid, 464-465. By August, Seward, ever the intriguer, had
cut the Confederacy out by winning Louis Napoleon over to a scheme of a joint Union-French assault on Mexico City.
In this case being a Mexican partisan, Butler did what was in his power to undermine the scheme, one that came to
naught. Ibid, 489-491.

party lost thirty-five Congressional seats as well as numerous statewide offices to peace
Democrats. Hostile Democratic party-controlled state legislatures and municipal governments,
taken together with the northern Democracy-controlled and popularly supported big-city party
machines (such as those in New York and Boston), not only dragged their feet in fulfilling
enlistment quotas but in many cases actually refused to do so. So on 3 March 1863, Congress
passed and Lincoln signed a national conscription law that altogether bypassed antagonistic
state and local bodies by creating a (War Department) Cabinet-centered office of the Provost
Marshal General and by providing district provost marshals with the wherewithal to directly
discipline recalcitrant individuals. The burden of the Conscription Act fell, of course, on the
white working class and farming tenantcy: The Act called for conscription of citizens, while
blacks generally speaking were not enfranchised even in the North; and, with a three-hundred
dollar commutation clause, the well-to-do could simply buy their way out. The response,
especially among Irish laborers, was to resist. Draft riots erupted in several northern cities, the
most notorious being an explicitly racist five-day affair in mid-July in New York City.
If the Emancipation decree was unpopular among white workers and poor farmers, it was an
undisguised blessing to the newly freepeople. From its perspective, whatever Lincoln's
motives he was now the Emancipator, the Republican party was the party of black freedom,
and the Union was the country of a newly free people. Lincoln's decree had made provision
for the enlistment of blacks, and freemen enlisted by the thousands. State governments such
as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania began to immediately raise black regiments. While there
was resistance from many Union officers, the need for a new infusion of recruits was
overwhelming. Nearly 200,000 black males enlisted, were trained, often poorly by white
officers, and armed before the war's end. They did not, to a man and unlike white males,
desert. Most engaged in combat at some point late in the war. When they fought, they
requited themselves well, fighting with bravery, distinction, and often ferociously. In the end, as
slaves they had withdrawn their labor that had supported the Confederacy; as freemen they
provided the northern armies with a fresh, willing soldiery to assist in the defeat of an
exhausted, ragged and starving but determined rebel army.
It was the course of war itself, that is, the early and disastrous northern military defeats
resulting in massive loss of life and property, that compelled the revolutionary action of
expropriating southern slaveholders thereby transforming a war for the Union into a war to end
slavery. And, as even Lincoln freely admitted, it was the freemen who formed the crucial
component in the military balance: Blacks, slaves-becoming-a-freepeople and soldiers, were
the difference in the suppressing the Southern rebellion.

Postbellum Outcomes

Progress is to be made only by fidelity to the great cause by which we have stood during the
past four years of bloody war. For twenty-five years we had a conflict of ideas, of words, of
thoughts - words and thoughts stronger than cannonballs. We have had four years of bloody
conflict. Slavery, every thing that belongs or pertains to it, lies prostrate before us today, and
the foot of a regenerated nation is upon it. There let it lie forever. I hope no words or thoughts
of a reactionary character are to be uttered in either house of Congress. I hope nothing is to
be uttered here in the name of 'conservatism,' the worst word in the English language. If there
is a word in the English language that means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that
word, 'conservative.' ...I have always noticed when I hear a man prate about being a
conservative and about conservatism, he was about to do some mean thing. I never knew it to
fail; in fact, it is about the first word a man utters when be begins to retreat.
Maine Republican Henry Wilson, speaking
on the floor of the U.S. Senate, late
December 1865.868

868William Barnes, History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States, 101.

10.
The Immediate Aftermath of the War: Winning the War and Losing the Peace.
[The masters son] is an intelligent lad of ten or twelve years Mounted on his pony, he
often rides into the field with his whip, playing the overseer, greatly to his fathers delight.
Without discrimination he applies the rawhide, urging the slaves forward with shouts
while the old man laughs, and commends him
[Slaveholders] betrayed the secret of their souls They look down upon the simplicity of a
Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat
negroes like dogs869

Prologue
Class Geography and Class Structure of the White South870
In Louisiana, a ruling class of great planters, together with the very wealthiest merchants,
factors and bankers (and big newspaper editors) of New Orleans constituted a mere 3.1 % of
the free population. Roughly half the total counted population, 71% of the whites, did not own
slaves. (Across the South, approximately 75% did not.) Only Mississippi and South Carolina
had larger black populations (as well as black majorities), which is why these three states will
be crucial to our historical reconstruction.871
Who were these (white) people? And what role did they play in the balance of class forces and
political settlement of southern affairs in the aftermath of the Civil War? To undertake a
response to these questions, we must distinguish several strata of the white population along
class lines: In the antebellum era (and afterward), the description of these strata is bound
upon with their productive activity which is, in turn, inextricably tied to a class geography.
While the figures we cite are based on Louisiana and are only representative of the South in
the roughest way, the Louisiana-based, class geography of (increasingly) bad lands (property
of increasingly poorer whites) can be said to fairly represent of Mississippi and Florida, and
with slight modifications, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and
Tennessee.872
869Ex-slave Solomon Northup recalling his experiences in the 1850s (first citation), cited by James Oakes, Slavery

and Freedom, 19; the speaker in the second citation is John Quincy Adams referring to the Missouri debates of 18201821, quoted in Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 88.
870Materials on the slaveholding and non-slaveholding, southern yeoman and "poor whites" in relation specifically to
the war's aftermath can be found in any number of sources. We have relied on John De Forest, A Union Officer in the
Reconstruction,, chapter 8; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama; Steven
Hahn, "The 'Unmaking' of the Southern Yeomanry"; James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom; Roger Shugg, The Origins
of Class Struggle in Louisiana, esp. chapter 2; and Albion Tourge's Reconstruction novel, A Fool's Errand.
871For the size of the Louisiana ruling class, Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana "Appendix" (Table 4), 319.
In Louisiana, as elsewhere, the 1860 census on which Shugg's calculations (which amount to mere estimates) are
based list only heads of households, i.e., free enfranchised males. We did not say white males, since Louisiana,
unlike most other southern states, had a small population of free blacks and mulattoes. Moreover, most of the poor
white, backcountry squatters, without title to property, went uncounted in the census.
With New Orleans as the largest urban area in a South that was overwhelmingly rural and could boast of (many towns
but) few cities (Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Memphis), Louisiana was peculiar in that a significant
fraction of its ruling class (almost two-fifths) actually was urban based.
Roughly half the Louisiana population was white, half black according to figures provided by Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction, 451. Based on figures provided by Du Bois we calculate that 50.5% of the population of Louisiana
was white, and 2.6% (18,647) of this total population consisted in free blacks.
For the percentage of non-slaveholding whites, Shugg, Ibid, 24. (For the South as a whole, Shugg cites Ulrich B.
Phillips.)
872Historically, wave after wave of 18th and 19th century colonizing settler immigrants, once settled, formed the
yeoman farmers and poor white populations of the South. For example, the mountains of southwestern Virginia,
eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and the western Carolinas were settled by Scottish and Irish peasant farmers and
farm laborers fleeing oppressive economic conditions, or famine and starvation (David Hackett Fischer, Albion's

Lowland Non-Slaveholding Whites

If we begin at the Mississippi (or Savannah) River, circa 1860, along either side (i.e., in
Louisiana and Mississippi, Mississippi and Tennessee, Tennessee and Arkansas, or Georgia
and South Carolina), large plantation agriculture exclusively dominated the fertile, alluvial
bottoms. The river bottoms constituted the home of the great planters. Smaller planters
occupied the "second" bottoms. Both classes were engaged in cotton production for the
national and European markets. Further west (and east or north and south) of the river, two
classes can be distinguished, first the yeoman farmer, and second the landless peasants and
hunters, including squatters, fishermen and trapper-hunters. If we bracket the free blacks, the
yeomanry as a whole formed about 15% of the free population, while rural poor whites formed
approximately 35%. Since the financial panic of 1819, the South, especially in the most rural
hinterlands, had been undergoing an involution: Though tied to the world market by scores of
thousands of ties (literally by millions of strands of cotton), even the large plantations were
tendentially autarkic and, in years of economic contraction, actually became so. On the other
hand, yeoman farmer and landless peasants and hunters - especially the latter, bound by ties
of kinship, were largely unshaped by market relations.
Among the yeomanry, middling farmers held slaves (or, just as often, hired them out from a
big planter), usually less than six, and small farmers did not. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the
middling yeomen occupied the oak uplands and prairies. (In Alabama, Georgia, and the
Carolinas the yeoman occupied the wooded upcountry.) Relative to plantation lands, these
regions were obviously hillier, less fertile and the climate was generally a little cooler. Since
many parishes and counties embraced all these geographies, they also embraced the
difference classes, separated by terrain and geography. The middling farmers, with
homesteads seldom larger than fifty acres, were engaged in a self-sufficient agriculture of
food and livestock production such as hogs, chicken and cattle. (Hence their characterization
as yeomen.) They also set aside a few acres for cotton and, when they could generate
surpluses - which was only occasionally, they made forays into the market. Among
neighboring farmers, they swapped goods and labor (e.g., assisted one another with planting
or harvesting): The fabled independence of yeomanry was not an individualist or even familial
phenomenon, since it centered on local communities.873
Seed, 605, 611, 613, 633-634); and, in Louisiana, French and Spanish families settled the eastern "Florida" parishes,
while poor German families worked the soils of the marshy fringes of the Gulf coast (Shugg, Ibid., 46). The so-called
"frontier" was a "rolling" one, so that, for example, in the 1850s Texas was still being settled, now a century later, by
generations later, same social strata of Irish and Scottish immigrants (Ibid, 45; Fischer, Ibid, 634).
873The great planters owned more than 50 slaves, the smaller planters 10-50 slaves. Shugg, Ibid, 27. The "smaller,"
i.e., middling, planters formed about 7% of the free, white householders. Calculations based figures appearing in
Ibid, 319 (not all, in particular the squatters, were counted, Ibid, 86); concerning the class geography of the nonplanter white populations, see Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 83-84, 92, 108-9. Fleming (Ibid, 711) states, "Their [the
planter's] greater wealth had enabled them to outbid the average farmer and secure the rich lands of the black
prairies, cane-brakes, and river bottoms. The small farmer who secured a foothold in the Black Belt would find himself
selling out to the nearest planter, would go to poorer and cheaper land in the hills and pine woods, where most of
the people were white. ... In the white counties ... the land was less fertile and the methods of cultivation less skillful.
In the richer parts of these white counties, there was something of the plantation system with some negro labor. But
slavery gradually drove white labor to the hill and mountain country, the sand and pine barrens." Similarly, Oakes,
Ibid, 105-106.
In New Orleans, middling and non-slaveholding white farmers had urban counterparts in petty shopkeepers and
artisans on the one hand, and clerks and laborers on the other. Together these urban groups made about 1/3 - each
composing roughly half that total - of the free white population (Shugg, Ibid, 24, 319.) As urban groups in the South,
this figure represents an exceptionally high figure; on hiring slaves out (as opposed to owing them), see Shugg, Ibid,
52, 87. In the northern Georgia upcountry, these farmers usually owned no more than five slaves. Steven Hahn, "The
'Unmaking' of the Southern Yeomanry," 181; for the climate and terrain of the uplands, Hahn, "Ibid," 184. The
exception with regard to terrain and climate was, of course, the stratum of landless dwellers engaged in hunting and

The historical meaning, socially subjective sense, and the assessed value of good and bad
lands changed (as, for example, the development of southern society approached the Civil
War, yeomen were driven out of better bad lands they had once occupied by an expanding
plantation system they were unable to compete with). It should be remembered that over time
the Southern plantation economy had an expansive dynamic rooted in planter failure to
replenish soil leading to exhaustion, and hence, a search for new lands to cultivate.
Expansion was east to west; the further east, the more complex the social structure, the
further west, the more simplified approaching "frontier" conditions. Nonetheless, small farmers
and poor whites always occupied the worst land: They farmed and squatted in the pine hills
and flats. These secluded sandy, pine ridges provided fuel and shelter, a free range for cattle
and hogs. Like the poor whites in the southernmost bayous (and along the Sabine River that
separates Louisiana and Texas, the piney forests in southern Alabama or the Florida
Panhandle), growing corn, (sweet) potatoes and perhaps some other vegetables (such as
pumpkins or peas) but predominately engaged in hunting and fishing, those in the "piney
woods" hunted deer, birds and small game. Poor whites, mostly isolated from the planters,
yeomanry and all urban life, lived for the most part completely outside the market874 (see Map
12).
Upcountry Non-Slaveholding Whites
The distinction between middling farmers and poor whites corresponds to another that
characterized those inland regions radiating out from the Appalachians. Here the distinction
was between upland farmers and mountain people. The upland farmers were predominately
non-slaveholders, engaged in self-sufficient agriculture with limited products of surpluses for a
market, and bound by ties of family and kin. They were important social actors in South
Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The mountain people lived in the long, narrow valleys that
formed in the Allegheny, Smokies, Snowbird, Blue Ridge and other Appalachian ranges and
their foothills in northern most Alabama and Georgia, northwest South Carolina, western North
Carolina and east Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southwest and northwest Virginia. The
harsh terrain and climate decisively shaped the economic and social life of the mountain
dweller. The normal "productive" unit was the small self-contained family farm. A poor soil,
relatively short planting season and primitive agricultural implements meant that all produce
was immediately consumed by the family, and that limited duration farming was supplemented
by hunting. Most farmland was listed as unimproved in the federal census reports.
Slaveholding did not really exist in the mountain "economy."875
fishing in the coastal bayous of southernmost Louisiana; on the fifty acre middling farmers' homestead, Shugg, Ibid,
77-78. (This figure is based on Louisiana census materials.) On relations between yeomen and their relation to the
market, Hahn, "Ibid," 181-182. "These petty producers generally owned basic productive resources or were related to
those who did; they devoted their energies principally to family subsistence, supplementing it through local exchanges
of goods and labor; and the exchanges cast a net that brought producers face-to-face in a market very much
governed by local custom." "Ibid," 183; for the interdependence of yeoman families of local community, Oakes, Ibid,
98, 110-112, 114-115, 118.
874On planters appropriating lands of farmers, Shugg, Ibid, 95, Oakes, Ibid, 105-106 and Fleming, Ibid, 711-712; for
the complex dynamic centered in soil exhaustion that drove planter expansionism, see the "Introduction," above, and
also Shugg, Ibid, 105; on the movement of expansion, A.O. Craven, "Poor Whites and Negroes in the Ante-Bellum
South," 14; for the farming and hunting activities of poor whites, Shugg, Ibid, 77, 44, 104-105; Fleming, Ibid, 712; poor
whites were not entirely and in all places outside the market, e.g., along the Mississippi River, landless poor white
squatters cut wood that was sold to the barge and steamboat river traffic and to planters. Shugg, Ibid, 52.
875Jonathan Wiener, Social Origins of the New South, 83, 91-93, identifies the upland farmers of Alabama as the
white yeomanry of the hills outside (north of) the Black Belt; and William Rogers (The One-Gallused Rebellion, 7)
refers to both the northern mountain and mining regions and southern wiregrass and piney woods counties where
land concentration was not as great as in the Black Belt, i.e., where "subsistence" farming was conducted; for
Appalachian mountain dwellers, Gordon McKinney, Mountain People, 1-2. The mountainous regions of Arkansas

Economic Stagnation
In all cases of non-slaveholding farmers and poor whites, the inadequacy of any sort of
transportations facilities, roads or waterways with barge traffic, meant that even in the rare,
good times when they did manage to raise a marketable crop, efforts to dispose of a surplus
were often unsuccessful. Thus, poor, undeveloped infrastructure, and a constricted market made up of the plantations and the limited, thinly populated southern towns - for sale of food
stuffs conjoined to kinship based productive relations all insured that in the antebellum era an
internal economic dynamic that would have led to commercialized agriculture among the
yeomanry did not develop.876
Kinship among Poor Whites
It is with the second group of rural whites, landless peasants and mountain people, that the
pejorative term "poor white" (or "po' white trash") originated. The term varied according to
region: "It came to be applied as an expression of contempt to the so-called 'hillbillies' in
Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, 'Tarheels' and 'sand-hillers' in the Carolinas, 'crackers' in
Georgia, 'red-necks,' 'wool hats,' or 'swamp-dwellers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana,
and in scattered parts of the South the 'clay-' or 'dirt-eaters' who suffered from hookworm, and
'piney woods folks.'" Lacking slaves to labor for them, poor whites refused to work.
Characteristically, because they did not engage in regular yeoman-styled work, they were
impoverished. The term itself is one of contempt: "Poor whites" were considered ignorant (or
stupid), lazy, violent, and depraved. It was a class-based term that allowed the gentlefolk, the
Southern well-to-do slaveholding planters and their families, to distinguish themselves, that is,
their good manners, grace, culture and cultivation (and, most importantly, their money), from
the/ir less prosperous, non-slaveholding white neighbors.877
Outside the market, exploiting their own families in a household-based "economy" to socially
reproduce themselves, social relations among both small farmers and poor whites were
kinship structured, organized patriarchally around a male household head. Thus, the forms of
social relations (and the rationality) developed on the basis of kinship ties at once reinforced
this ruling class caricature and masked the similarities among all Southerners. These relations
of dependence account for one of the characteristic features of the many post-war accounts of
southern small farmers and poor whites: These accounts sketch, as it were, a portrait of a
social type, a social class characterized by a "lack" of rationality, i.e., by the absence of
calculative rationality of the bourgeois type, or, more adequately, by a kinship-based, feelingcentered rationality within which market-based assumptions were not made and family and kin
obligation took priority. This lack of bourgeois rationality was invariably related to a subtle ad
hominem strikingly characteristic of the post-war literature concerning poor whites, a literature
witnessed the same practical distinction. Northwest Virginia is the region (excluding its lowlands in the southwest part
of the state) that makes up present-day West Virginia. The latter was formed during the Civil War out of opposition to
the secessionist stand of planter Virginia; for productive activity among mountain people, McKinney, Ibid, 2.
For purposes of property assessments-based taxation, farmland was listed as either "improved" and subject to
taxation or "unimproved" and not so subject. In a more basic sense, this category presupposed the transformation of
surrounding nature, e.g., the clearing of trees and then rocks for creation of planting acreage, by human labor for the
purposes of social reproduction. The point in this case is that the harsh terrain made it difficult, if not impossible, for
the mountain people (assuming they wanted to) to clear land for farming. For the absence of slaveholding in the
mountain regions, McKinney, Ibid.
876On the difficulties of marketing a rare surplus, McKinney, Ibid, and Hahn, "Ibid," 184; for an alternative which
stresses an historical tendency toward market integration on the model of the 17th century English peasantry, see
Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 111-112, 113-114. Oakes thesis is suspect since it relies almost exclusively on
evidence derived from studies of the northern Georgian upcountry.
877Shugg, Ibid, 20-21 (citation).

that ends up painting a picture of a distinct physical type of white as well. And this picture was
just as invariably related to an underlying fear that this type inspired, for it appeared menacing
or threatening, the overwhelming impression being rooted in the "wild" eyes, lanky or bony
appearance, etc. Now this description was related first and foremost to the historically specific,
actual difficulties of social existence during the war and its aftermath difficulties that will be
discussed below.878

878With reference to the male householder, Hahn ("Ibid," 181) states, "Relations of legal and customary dependence

- slavery being the extreme and absolute representation ... linked household members to the male head."
For an example of the bigoted accounts of poor white appearance, De Forest, Ibid, 161-162. This morphological
distinctiveness in a socio-human body type (characteristic height, weight, bone structure, hair, eye color and
complexion) is rooted, first, in a culturally specific diet (corn and sweet potatoes supplemented by small game and
occasional fish with the absence of red meat - beef), and, second, by the very historically specific and transient
conditions of near starvation in the immediate postwar period. For those conditions, see "Southern White Populations
in the Civil War and its Immediate Aftermath," below.

Part I
Class Struggle over the Land
State of Nature
At least once in the Anglo-American past, a civil war had resulted in the kind of destruction,
economic collapse and demoralization that gripped the South in spring 1865. The English Civil
War, unlike the American one, yielded a theoretical reflection on its actual outcome. This
reflection was produced by the Levellers, the first profoundly democratic theorists in the West,
in articulating the world vision of the yeoman, artisan and shopkeeper "middling sort," the
"people" in mid-17th century England. The Levellers identified the historically actual,
wrenching experience of the entire period of civil war in terms of a "state of nature." The state
of nature was formed by "the civil war generated dissolution of political society and collapse of
settled social life as a recognizably historically constituted, yet absolutely self-evident, given
fact."879
In these terms, a state of nature adequately described conditions across the South at the end
of the Civil War. Those conditions? In those areas of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia,
Alabama and Louisiana which had undergone heavy fighting in the course of the war and
where Union armies had cut paths of destruction across the South in the war's final
campaigns, "barns and dwellings [were] burned, bridges demolished, fences, tools, and
livestock [were] destroyed." Whole cities, such as Richmond (VA) and Columbia (SC) were set
ablaze, and not by Union forces but by retreating Confederate troops ordered to deprive
Yankees of stocks, staples and anything useful. Cotton, rice and sugar production in most
areas was at a virtual standstill as gins were destroyed and blacks fled behind Union army
lines or simply refused to work. Similarly, the cotton and sugar trades had largely ceased.
Towns had been occupied or overrun, and plantations in some regions (e.g., Louisiana), fallen
into disuse, occupied and broken up, no longer could even be expected to produce. From the
start to the end of the war, property values, the single largest components consisting in slaves
and land, had fallen precipitously. In some states, such as Alabama, Mississippi, South
Carolina and Virginia, these values, including livestock and particularly land, had fallen 6070% by the end of the war. For the South as a whole, property values fell 30% from pre-war
levels. Rails, if not captured and used by Union forces, had either fallen into disrepair or been
destroyed by wartime sabotage. In Louisiana, Mississippi and other states bordering the
879Barnes, Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War, 44.

"The war exacerbated the ongoing historical decline of the woolen industries: Artisans and shopkeepers, were ruined
by slowdowns in the transportation of raw materials due to the ubiquitous presence of armies, and, most importantly,
by monopolies that- abolished in the first year of the Long Parliament - later reappeared with legislative sanction,
ruined, in other words, by, in the face of the collapse of trade the civil war produced, their inability to compete with
those monopolies. Yeoman farmers were ruined as their estates (farms) were trampled and set upon for quartering
soldiers, and livestock and crops were plundered for food for the armies. Lives were ruined as vast numbers of the
widows and the orphans of dead soldiers appeared without the economic means of meeting daily needs, as
incapacitated, because maimed, soldiers in particular, and all soldiers generally, faced loss of their trades or estates
without compensation (for the maimed), without arrears promised to them, and without indemnity from postwar legal
reprisals for acts committed in battle.
The 'people' were further afflicted by excise taxes and impositions, glaring inequities in the distribution of these levies
(as the parliamentary gentlemen and their social class cohorts were able to legislatively shift the burden of taxation to
them), by the injustice of an unintelligible law written in French and Latin and judges and lawyers who plied their
'trades' in these arcane, secretive vocabularies, and by debtor imprisonment if the 'people' failed to meet these (tax)
'obligations.'
The (civil) war, then, had greatly magnified and concentrated all the class-based inequities of English society." Ibid,
44-45.
This was, of course, not the sense of Hobbes (not later, of Locke) for whom the "state of nature," though conceptually
formulated against the background of the English Civil War, referred to the absence of a(n) (absolute) sovereign who
ordered social relations and created the conditions of settled social life in the context of a social order the
fundamental datum of which was a "war of all against all" (bellum omnes contra omnium). See Ibid.

Mississippi River, river transportation (steamboats) had been destroyed. Levees and dikes
went unrepaired throughout the course of the war. As a result, towns in the Louisiana lowlands
actually disappeared into expanding swamp. As the river overflowed at more or less regular
intervals, flood waters extensively damaged crops. Food was scare, families had been torn
apart, and large numbers of people who were "landless, homeless, helpless" fled north from
border states. Worse of all was the loss of life. Almost 260,000 Confederate soldiers and
officers died during the war - nearly one in every five white Southerners - and this does not
account for the maimed and permanently injured. Families were broken up, and in an
atmosphere of generalized destruction, with disease on the rise, with an useless currency and
burdened by debt, food shortages and hunger and little or no (self-) employment, small, armed
groups of deserters and marauders, "jayhawkers," plundered the smaller towns and
countryside of the South outside Union army occupied areas.880
The collapse of the war effort and its end had left Southerners confused and bewildered.
Government at all levels, municipal, county and state, did not exist for several weeks after the
formal end of the war. The normal, daily transactions of southern "civilization" had, in other
words, by and large sunk below its historically achieved level - returning, as it were, to a state
of nature - as confusion and desperation reigned, lawlessness marauders roamed parts of the
rural South, as production and exchange collapsed and as political society ceased to
function.881
The subjectively lived and experienced shock, disorientation and confusion was characteristic
of all those who - regardless of class position in southern society - had supported the
Confederacy. This experience had a singular objective, that is, behavioral, corollary in relation
to the North: In the immediate aftermath of the war, Southerners were willing, perhaps even
anxious, to submit to the terms, any terms, which the victorious North offered. This, then, was
the historically propitious moment in which a truly radical settlement, say, along the lines
proposed by Thaddeus Stevens, could have been imposed on the South. Coherent, radical
reconstruction was not forcefully and effectively put forth (much less implemented), first,
because the radicals were not, being merely a loose collection of similarly minded individuals
within the Republican party, organized and as such did not possess a programmatic
perspective, second, because the medium of that activity in and through which they could
become effective, the Congress, was not in session and, third, because a southern Unionist

880Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 124 (citation).

For rebel destruction of Confederate cities, William Anderson, The Influence of Military Rule, 1; for flight or refusal to
work by blacks, Foner, Ibid; for the destruction of plantations, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 453.
In the Natchez district of Mississippi, on the other hand, the plantations were mostly untouched by the war (Ibid, 431);
according to Shugg, (Class Struggle Louisiana, 192, 384, 432), chattel slaves were the most valuable category of
"property" in the Louisiana Black Belt; for property values in Alabama, see Walter Fleming, Civil War and
Reconstruction in Alabama, 253-255, for Virginia, Anderson, Ibid, 2-3, for Louisiana, see Shugg, Ibid, 193. (The
collapse of property values is mooted, and properly speaking should be considered state-specific. For a less dramatic
view in Louisiana, see Joe G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 315. For their precipitous decline in the South as a
whole, Foner, Ibid, 125. The figure of 30% excludes the pre-war value assigned to slaves).
For the fate of rails, Taylor, Ibid, 318 and Fleming, Ibid, 259-261; on river transportation and levees, see Fleming, Ibid,
259 and Shugg, Ibid, 194, respectively; on flooding, Taylor, Ibid, 319. (Without the massive "input" of slave labor, the
state of Louisiana was unable to keep up with repairs in the era following the Civil War. As a result, flood damage
occurred well into the twentieth century. Ibid.)
On flight north, Du Bois, Ibid, 64 (citation); on southern loss of life, Foner, Ibid. (For a specific accounting of deaths in
Alabama due to fighting, see Fleming, Ibid, 251-252); and, for examples of lawless behavior, see, Fleming, Ibid, 253269, Shugg, Ibid, 179-180, and Taylor, Ibid, 323.
881For collapse of the Confederate State, Fleming, Ibid, 262 and also Taylor, Ibid, 63; and for generalized confusion,
Fleming, Ibid, 654, and Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 23.

committed, not to reconstruction but, to Presidential restoration was empowered as the

nation's Chief Executive.882
Andrew Johnson and Presidential Restoration
[Blacks have] less capacity for government that any other race of people. ... [Providing
blacks with the vote] would be worse than the military despotism under which [the lately
rebellious states] are now suffering. ... [Blacks are] corrupt in principle and enemies of free
institutions. ... If the inferior [race] obtains the ascendancy over the other, it will ... create a
tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed.883

In military terms, the Union effort had faltered badly in spring 1862 reaching its lowest point
early in early winter 1862-1863. Lincoln's leadership appeared to be tottering. The
Emancipation Proclamation finalized and preliminarily announced 22 September, and decreed
at the first of the year (1863), heightened loyalist and party fears of Republican defeat in the
Presidential election of 1864. To prevent a real catastrophe, Republican leaders fell back on
the ex-Democratic Free Soilers that had entered as a constitutive element of the newly
forming party in the mid-1850s. They offered the vice-Presidential nomination to a Jacksonian,
Tennessee Unionist Andrew Johnson. Johnson had been the only Southern Senator who had
rejected secession. Campaigning in areas where each was strongest, Lincoln and Johnson
won the election against the Democratic, Unionist ex-commander of the Army of the Potomac
George McClellan, victory for which the ballots of soldiers and Unionist Democrats were the
difference.884
As Vice-President, Johnson assumed power immediately following the assassination of
Lincoln (14 April 1865). In the context of the Lincoln Administration's Civil War years,
Johnson's credentials were impeccable: For the three years prior to his choice by Lincoln as a
running mate in the 1864 national election, Johnson had served as an isolated, embattled
military governor of Union-occupied Tennessee - thereby, in a practical sense, proving his
staunch Unionism. All his life, he had been profoundly anti-planter, articulating the "visionary"
cum Jacksonian populist politics of the southern yeoman. He was committed to a strictly
Presidential concept of reconstruction - much more inflexibly than Lincoln as his practice was
shortly to demonstrate. But he was also an embittered populist demagogue, individualistically
antagonistic; highly importantly, a racist; a strict constructionist on Constitutional matters (and
thereby committed to the historically refuted view that the secessionist states had never been
out of the Union), and, accordingly, a firm believer that reconstruction itself was not an
institutional and a political problem, but a question of the rehabilitation of the evil, planteraristocratic personalities who had created the secession crisis in the first place.885
882Relying on part on insightful observations made by Northerners, particularly Sidney Andrews and Whitelaw Reid

(and the Southerner, John T. Trowbridge) who had toured the South in Spring-Summer 1865, recognition of the
willingness of Southerners to submit is the universal judgment of contemporary Reconstruction historians. For the
original sources themselves, see Andrews, The South Since the War, 95, Reid, After the War, 18-19, 154-155, 296297, and Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, 589. For historians who are our
contemporaries, see, Foner, Ibid, 189-190; McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 157-158, 210-211; Rable,
But There was No Peace, 4; and, Taylor, Ibid, 63, 115. For the evidence of a Northerner who had fought in the war
and returned to the South, not to tour, but to live in North Carolina, see Albion Tourge's literary treatment, A Fool's
Errand; and, for the evidence of army officers stationed in the South during the war and employed by the Freedmen's
Bureau after the war, see the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session Thirty-Ninth
Congress. e.g., Part I (TN), 114 (Clinton Fisk); Part II (VA), 6, 9, 11, 33-34, 81, 89; (NC) 181.
883Andrew Johnson, December 1867 annual message to the Congress, Richardson (comp.), Messages and Papers
of the Presidents, 6:564-566.
884For Lincolns adoption of Johnson, Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 254.
885The elements of this characterization of Johnson are drawn from McKitrick, Ibid, 85-92 and Foner, Ibid, 179-181.

Johnson was an absolute disaster for the freedom of a newly freepeople, as his implemented
policy of Presidential restoration was shortly to made clear. He was, in a historically effective
sense, reaction in the saddle nay, the potent threat of counterrevolution mortally
endangering the gains that flowed from the emancipatory logic of the war. His anti-black, proSouth commitments were exhibited, first, in his immediate recognition of the fitness of the
unreconstructed wartime military governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and
Virginia to re-enter the Union. Such suitability meant these unreconstructed governments
could send representatives to the Congress. Johnson's historically reactionary character was,
second, demonstrated in his hollow insistence that "reconstructed" states formally recognize
the 13th Amendment (in order to re-establish a presence in the national bodies of the Union);
that is, he insisted nothing more was required. He simultaneously pursued a pardons-policy.
But that policy flatly abrogated disenfranchisements of the most important classes of exConfederate supporters, i.e., allowed objectively and subjectively treasonous individuals to be
resume roles in state and national government. These commitments were further revealed in
his appointment, by and large, of ex-Confederate supporters instead of Union loyalists as
provisional governors, in his instructions to reduce and then altogether remove black troops
from the South, in his allowance for the formation of state militias consisting largely of exConfederate officers and soldiers, in his sanctioning of state government made up of traitors,
and, in his failure to even say so much as a word in opposition to the "Black Codes" legislated
in l865-1866 by Presidentially restored states.
Such was Andrew Johnson's "reconstruction" policy. Because ex-Confederate politicians and
planters already recognized by early summer 1865 that he was their man, practically
developing a legal-political context in which southern "conservatives" were free to act without
federal restraint, the way was cleared for the anti-Unionist Southerners to reassert their
control over a newly freepeople. In this context, it was (and continues to be) social class
conflicts over surplus value, and struggles over the control of labor that produced surplus
value and over the culturally meaningful forms that value assumed, that propelled social and
political developments within the overall framework of a world capitalist system and
determined which longer term tendencies of southern economic development within this
system were realizable. Thus, it should hardly come as a surprise that the central issue (and
the issue which would shape the social and economic structure of the South for the next 85
years) was control over black labor. On the one side, a freepeople was engaged in attempting
to carve out a sphere of autonomy based upon its newly won freedom; and, on the other side,
planters were desperate to compel freemen to work on their plantations in order to get cotton
production moving again, salvage their fortunes, and re-establish hegemony over southern
society. A confrontation of irreconcilable class subjectivities was exhibited in and defined the
struggle over labor.886
886For Johnson's relation to planters, Foner, Ibid, 189-190; for the centrality of labor control (in terms dissimilar to

ours), Daniel Novak, The Wheel of Servitude, 84.

The social structure established in the wake of the defeat of Reconstruction - and with it, the Jim Crow legislation that
provided its legal framework of racial apartheid, and the race-class alliance of white farmers and merchant-landlords
that underpinned it - was not challenged until its historical presupposition in sharecropping tenancy began to breakup. It was the industrialization of the South, beginning in the 1940s with the mechanization of cotton picking, with
large northern industrial firms seeking cheap, rural unorganized labor, and with the creation of a massive complex of
southern-based, interrelated federal defense industries - forming the foundations of the contemporary "Sunbelt," that
destroyed southern agriculture. Industrialization created a modern work-based economic prosperity that undermined
this race-class alliance by providing higher-waged jobs for both whites and blacks. This "real economic movement"
proved to be the material presupposition of the Civil Rights movement.
On black self-activity, Foner, Ibid, 132, 138, 142; Ronald Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 3-5; and John Scott
Strictland, "Traditional Culture and Moral Economy: Economic Changes in the South Carolina Low Country, 18651910," 144.

The Conservative Historiography of Postwar, Black Labor

There are two broad views concerning labor control in the immediate aftermath of the war.
The first centers on hard class struggle and the second, although historically prior, revolves
around the much boarder, "conservative" interpretation of Reconstruction as a whole, that of
the alleged reality of emancipation-grounded, southern oppression. The latter perspective
reigned as orthodoxy from the 1870s until the late 1950s, i.e., until a liberal revision of
Reconstruction historiography motivated by and undertaken against backdrop of an unfolding
Civil Rights movement in the South was elaborated. Other than pointing out that with regard to
labor control this view constituted an ideological defense of what might be termed a "second
serfdom," that is, an attempt to de facto re-enslavement of blacks through productive relations
of sharecropping tenancy, we need not pause to trace out this historiography, since its critique
has been devastating formulated on many occasions. Instead, we shall briefly discuss a single
instance exemplify this view in relation to labor control as a way of developing the former,
class struggle perspective.887
In a classic statement of the "conservative," i.e., politically reactionary, view of labor control,
Walter Fleming describes Alabama planters' struggle to compel freemen to labor on formally
different, but practically identical, antebellum terms. According to Fleming, in the early months
following the formal end of the war, freemen outside the towns and away from the Union army
chose to stay on "their" plantations. In the interior, "Affairs were little changed for several
weeks after the surrender, which there hardly caused a ripple on the surface of society."
Freemen "chose to stay and work" and it was only the intervention of, first, the insidious
Freedmen's Bureau in fall 1865 and, second, black troops among occupying Union armies
that poisoned otherwise long developed harmonious relations between masters and their
former slaves. With these interventions the die was cast: Once infected with frivolous ideas of
"freedom," freemen began to abandon their ex-masters, following movements of army troops,
migrating to towns and going to neighboring plantations; gathering at night to "frolic" thereby
rendering themselves in poor condition to labor the next day; and leaving work in the fields to
fish and hunt without regard to the tasks at hand. Thus, in his refusal of regular work, the exslave expressed his essential nature, slavish laziness, shiftlessness and lack of ambition, an
indifference to the social necessities of production, a "style of living" that entailed "living 'from
hand to mouth'," the childishness and naivet of a race of people that was naturally inferior.888
887For a relatively early dissection of this view by perhaps the dean of liberal Reconstruction historiography, see

Kenneth Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction, 23-23. For a contemporary review, see Foner, Ibid, xix-xxiv.
888Fleming, see his Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama; for the citation, Ibid, 714. The "interior" refers to the
remote areas of Black Belt Alabama far from any urban influences, areas where planters more perfectly approached
the tendency of seigniorial domination over a more or less self-contained plantation society. What Fleming
consciously fails to note is that planters deliberately refrained from telling blacks in these remote areas that the force
of the Emancipation decree was compelling and would stick. They desperately hoped to maintain pre-war conditions
unchanged. In this regard, for the cases of Mississippi and South Carolina, see Vernon Wharton, The Negro in
Mississippi, 47, 48 and Williamson, After Slavery, 33, 34, respectively; for allegedly harmonious relations between
masters and slaves, Fleming, Ibid, 715-717.
The Bureau had at most 901 agents at any one time in its history to enforce Congressional legislation in the eleven
former Confederate states (Bentley, A History of the Freedmen's Bureau, 136). The bogey of "conservative"
Reconstruction historiography, the Bureau's "destructive" influence has been largely overrated, as Taylor (Ibid, 330)
points out. Its most vocal critics, namely, the planters and "old South" newspaper editors in the many towns and few
cities of the South were, of course, originators of this political hysteria. The crux of their criticism, mostly unspoken but
always understood, was that the Bureau's agents treated the freemen with a semblance of formal equality, often but
hardly always compelling their ex-masters to do the same, and, motivated by their "'free labor' ideological" orientation,
were in a position to insure a return to essentially identical antebellum social relations of production was impossible.
All this was both intolerable and unintelligible to a social class accustomed to unquestioned rule. For brief, albeit,
balanced assessments of the role of the Freedmen's Bureau, see Taylor, Ibid, 330-331, 334-337; and, Foner, Ibid,

A racist, empirically and historically blind perspective such as this, to be sure, led straightaway
to the conclusion, already present and presupposed as white planter anxiety over the meaning
and prospects of freedom for the freemen, that the Negro had to be compelled to labor. It was
a short passage from this perspective and anxiety to an attempt to legally codify enforced
labor in the "Black Codes." We shall turn to a discussion of these legislative enactments
shortly, but before reviewing them as a component in a broader class struggle against laboring
freemen, we note there is a generalized characterization of freemen's activity that identifies
with the "conservative" perspective on labor control. That characterization has been called
"testing," as in 'the freemen "tested" the extend and limits of their newly "granted" freedom':
He foolishly deserted the fields, refused menial domestic servant tasks (cooking, washing,
etc.), abandoned artisan work on planter's property, etc., because holidays were the order of
the day, because he knew the government would support him, because, folly of follies, he and
others like him could expect a land distribution, because he could steal the chickens and pigs
of the good white folk to sustain himself, etc. To "test" was a euphemism for this foolishness,
naivet and childishness of a people which could not grasp the political intricacies of real
freedom, who failed to recognize their essential role in society was to engaged in
commanded, discipline labor, who could not develop the awareness to grasp their own
interests and to act accordingly, who, in other words, were constitutionally unprepared for a
self-directed struggle for autonomy and self-definition. Those Southerners and "conservative"
historians who defended the structure of labor in the "old South" have been altogether
incapable, "by [culturally formed racist] nature" incapable we might suggest, of taking
seriously the freemen's subjectivity and action in the constitution of a new social order.
If, however, we take the freemen's subjectivity seriously, their actions appear altogether in a
different light.
Ideological Characterizations of Freepeople and Forms of Struggle Underlying Them
To begin, the forms of "desertion" of the slaving condition varied depending upon the type of
labor involved. Domestic servants especially, but also mechanics (artisans) and laborers both
in the extractive industries and on smaller plantations, left at the first reasonably convenient
opportunity. Field hands on the large plantations, however, tended by and large to finish out
the year on the plantation where they had slaved. The overwhelming evidence suggests, in
fact, it was not a question of unmotivated activity - aimless migration to army camps, towns
and neighboring plantations, but that "desertion" expressed either a desire to be free of the
master or an effort to search and find family members separated under slavery, or both.
Leaving home was a distinctive effort by the slave to decisively separate herself from slavery,
to determinately put an end to the absolute, petty and authoritarian control exercised over her
by the master, an end to the "infinite minor regulations" (Williamson) governing her behavior. It
started off not so much with a celebration but with a search for another form of employment. It,
in other words, constituted a form of breaking with slave labor, of the initial assertion of self as
a free person. (It might be noted that it was this assertiveness as much as any alleged
unwillingness to work that offended and outraged planter masters.) In this context, these
forms of activity that have been degraded and disguised under the rubric of "testing" can be
comprehended precisely as forms of activity in and through which freepersons sought selfdefinition and autonomy.889
142-170. For more detail, see "The Army and Freedmen's Bureau," and the sources cited therein, below.
For "frolicking," etc., Fleming, Ibid, 262-272, 715, 731. Because little or none of the freemen's practical subjectivity
appears in Taylor's account, elements of the reactionary, "conservative " view occasionally creep into an otherwise
impeccably "scholarly" study. See Taylor, Ibid., 99-100; for "living hand to mouth," Fleming, Ibid, 731; for "testing,"
Ibid, 269; Taylor, Ibid, 99; on black follies, Fleming, Ibid, 715, 271-272.

"Desertion," migration and "idleness" were not, however, permanent features of a freepeople's
practice in the immediate aftermath of the war. Ex-slaves who had left the sites of their
previous condition of bondage often returned home. Returns "home" must be taken seriously,
first, because, freemen and freewomen remained strongly attached to the land where they
had been born and which they had worked, and, because they one and all experienced the
economic necessity that compelled them to find work - if not available in the towns or
neighboring plantation, then in an atmosphere with which they were intimately familiar. To be
sure, waged employment was to be conducted, as freepersons intended, fairly and with fair
compensation, that is, under conditions qualitatively different from slavery, or not at all.890
"Idleness" has been another self-serving myth of all those contemporaries - merchantlandlords, Bourbon politicians and newspaper editors of the South, industrial capitalists and
white workers, bourgeois politicians, middle strata reformers and newspaper editors of the
North (as well as twentieth century, successor social groups) who were to sacrifice freemen
on the altar of reactionary restoration. One action of freepeople that their enemies found
particularly offensive was the withdrawal of female and child labor from the fields. Black men
wished to assert their dignity in providing for their families, and black men and women
intensely desired to remove white masters from control over black women (and children) while
placing control over labor squarely in the hands of black families. Idleness? Williamson relates
that enforced idleness made freemen anxious. The historically indisputable fact is that
freemen wanted to work provided they were treated fairly, but they wanted their own land to
work and farm. If, on the other hand, planters in 1865-1866 found their ex-slaves "unreliable,"
"lazy" and "inefficient," "indolent," it is because they, as self-consciously freemen and
freewomen, no longer were subservient, docile laborers or, in the planters' language, "good
and faithful labor." Not merely was black labor not self-consciously "free labor," which had its
socio-historical presupposition in the development of a market economy (and not nonbourgeois slave production), freemen appear to have had an aversion to labor in cotton fields
but were more than willing to engage in self-work and the self-sufficient production of food for
themselves and their families. And while it still appeared either possibly or likely, depending on
just where in the South freemen were situated, that there might be some sort of land
distribution, it was only the whip of economic necessity that forced them to work for their exmasters at all. This necessity was negotiated in army-imposed and Bureau-imposed wage
contracts, and it was these contracts that constituted one of the two poles of hard fought class
struggle in the South in the immediate aftermath of the war.891
889On the departure of domestic servants and mechanics, Williamson, 33-36, 44. "Desertion" is Williamson's term; on

the departure of field hands, Ibid, 34; Du Bois, Ibid, 384 (citing William Henry Trescott); and Wharton, Ibid, 46, 47, 52;
for the evidence of directed activity, Williamson, Ibid, 33, 39-40; Wharton, Ibid, 51; Davis, Good and Faithful Labor,
60.
Shugg (Ibid, 184) points out that mass migration to New Orleans was a result of famine conditions in the countryside
where all means of producing crops (including crops themselves) had been destroyed (and expropriated) by the
armies of both sides. Similarly, gunpowder (all of which could be manufactured had gone to rebel armies) was so
scarce that it could not be had. Hunting small game was thus impossible. In New Orleans, the occupying Union forces
first under Butler, then Banks, rationed food to the otherwise starving blacks and poor whites; on the search for
employment, Williamson, Ibid, 40; Wharton, Ibid, 51.
Leaving was also undertaken at times to search for members of a family that had been broken up by planters. Davis,
Ibid, 98, and Williamson, Ibid, 108.
Williamson (Ibid, 33-34, 39-40, 44, 45) nicely dismantles the racist myth of the happy ex-slave dropping everything
and without second thought running off to town upon receiving the news confirming her freedom.
890On the ex-slave attachment to the land, Williamson (Ibid, 41) notes, "white contemporaries, perhaps obsessed
with the idea that theirs was a white man's land, never fully appreciated the fact that Negroes, too, were strongly
devoted to the soil upon which they had been born and labored." For freemen's demands for fair treatment in
laboring, Ibid, 41, 43-44; Wharton, Ibid, 51, 52; Taylor, Ibid., 322; and Fleming, Ibid, 271.

Planters and Freemen (I)

Before the end of the war, army and Treasury agents had already confiscated lands
abandoned by planters in areas the victorious Union armies had occupied. These lands were
confiscated for their crops - to raise revenues through imposition of taxes on the sale of crops
in order to feed and cloth troops and freepeople themselves. Especially in South Carolina,
Georgia and Mississippi, these lands had been partially redistributed, or, rather, sold at cheap
rates with deferred payments to large numbers of emancipated slaves. By war's end, freemen
had had the practice of working their own lands in some places (e.g., Mississippi) for over a
year.892 The struggle to keep these lands in the hands of freemen was the other pole of class
struggle in the South in the aftermath of the war.
In those southern states with majority black populations (South Carolina, Mississippi and
Louisiana), the problems of "labor control" were most acute precisely because, in these
states, the antebellum slave-based social order was most deeply rooted. Focusing on South
Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana throws the dimensions of the struggles between freemen
and planters into sharp relief.
The success of the struggle varied greatly, largely depending on the preceding historical forms
of slave labor practiced (which, in turn, depended in large extent on the type of crop grow),
and on the relation of Union forces as occupying armies to slavery toward the end of war.
Cotton was the primary crop in these states as throughout the South. In Mississippi, with the
exception of corn (which was not in any significant sense produced for the market), cotton was
an exclusive crop. In South Carolina and Louisiana, rice and sugar cane, respectively, were
important, even though secondary crops.893
[Coastal Lowlands]
In South Carolina (and Georgia), rice was grow in the costal lowlands. The form of labor
organization characterizing rice production, the task system, had been the basis for a partial
autonomy blacks had created as slaves. The area had been covered by Gen. William T.
Sherman's famous "Special Field Order No. 15" issued in January 1865. The order set aside
an area, from just south of Charleston (SC) to St. John's River in northern Florida thirty miles
891For blacks wish to control their own families and labor, Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 86-87; on enforced

idleness, Williamson, Ibid, 45; on the desire for land, Allen, Reconstruction, 43-72, Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 9,
especially, Du Bois, Ibid, 468, 529, 602-603, 611, McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 47, Wharton, Ibid, 63, and Williamson,
Ibid, 63. Allen (Ibid, 43-44) has a marvelous, albeit very brief, discussion of how freemen staked out and measured
their ex-masters lands for a fertile plot in anticipation of land redistribution. The testimony given to the Joint
Committee on Reconstruction in early 1866 is replete with considered judgments attesting to this willingness to work.
See the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, e.g., Part I (TN), 107, 109, 112; Part II, 5, 13 (VA), 175, 182
(NC).
On "good and faithful" labor, Davis, Ibid, 9-10. The desire for self-sufficient agricultural production is discussed with
reference to South Carolina by Williamson, Ibid, 44. According to numerous Union army officers, freemen were
characteristically ambitious, interested, as it were, in accumulation in the northern, free market-driven and subjectively
internalized sense. See Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, for example, Part I (TN), 108, Part II (NC),
176.
This view of the freemen was, it should be remembered, shaped by "free labor" assumptions ubiquitous among
northern Union officers. A more adequate characterization of the subjectivity of freemen would have these officers
confusing a desire to own land - and to "owe" it on a non-capitalist basis as self-sufficient peasant farmers - with the
social subjectivity driven by the desire to accumulate money-wealth, landed property or capital, itself grounded on the
internalization of exchange-based social relations.
892Wharton, Ibid, 40-41; Williamson, Ibid, 63, indicates that by late summer 1965 10% of South Carolina blacks had
land.
893Virginia was a state in which planters used slave labor to grow tobacco, one where cotton was not the largest
market crop. For the geographical distribution of these crops, see the maps in Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877,
126-127.

inland - an area that included the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina from Charleston
to the Savannah River, exclusively for the settlement of freemen and their families. The order
encouraged freemen to enlist in the Union army, providing a bounty for enlistment, and made
it particularly easy for enlistees to acquire land in the set-aside area. The order was
revolutionary in its implications because confiscated land was redistributed (and not sold to
freemen); because the region was off-limits to whites, viz., planters and their overseers;
because reasonably priced agricultural implements, fertilizer and seed, and start-up provisions
were made available to the freemen; and, because armed Union forces often with black troops
were present to enforce the order. Moreover, the order settled freepeople in agricultural
communities (and not, say, as isolated farmers) thereby strengthening their will, determination
and ability to hold onto their land. However, the order also only gave settlers a "possessory"
title to the land "subject to the approval of the President of the United States."894
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the ten percent of freemen who held their own
land in late summer 1865 held it in area covered by Sherman's "Special Field Order." That is,
their ownership was subject to Presidential whim. Through his pardons power as President,
Andrew Johnson had by 15 October 1865 restored legal title of all this land to ex-Confederate
planters with the exception of that around Port Royal. Restoration, however, was not the same
as repossession. On the ground, matters were different.895
Especially in the Sea Islands, organized freepeople made a stand. Planters could not return
without the accompaniment of armed, Union troops, and even then they could not successfully
claim "their" land. Freemen could not understand why they stood give up their land, and why
in particular they should give it up to rebels and traitors who they had as Union soldiers
months earlier fought a life and death struggle against. There are extant reports of armed
confrontations between Union companies and freepeople settlers in which the freemen stood
down the troops, forcing them to withdraw and compelling planters to return to the mainland.
Years of "scholarship" has systematically obscured and, then, buried this struggle. Moreover,
there are other reports of full-scale armed resistance by freemen in efforts to acquire or hold
land, for example, near Richmond, Virginia and again on plantations near Savannah, Georgia.
In both case, armed Union troops were dispatched to put down freemen's "insurrections." But
as Allen correctly points out, these efforts were episodic, largely sporadic, because "the mass
894For the task system, Foner, Ibid, 174, but, in particular, see John Scott Strickland, "Traditional Culture and Moral

Economy," 143-147, and his "'No More Mud Work': The Struggle for Control of Labor," 46-47.
According to Strickland, the task system was a form of labor organization characteristic of rice and regionally specific
long staple cotton production. This form grew up in the coastal lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia and was
largely peculiar to the swampy conditions of production in this area.
Gang labor, or closely supervised, slave labor was worked as a unit. Its pace, rhythms, and hours were determined by
the overseer. Opposed to this, the task system of labor was characterized by a strict separation of periods of fieldwork
from periods determined essentially as slaves' own time. Crops worked under this system of labor organization were
divided into standard, usually acre plots which formed a single task. The daily routine depended upon the
seasonally-specific, required work and a slave's strength. Slaved completed tasks at their own pace, quicker or
slower, helping other slaves with their tasks, etc., or, when finished and with the rest of the day belonging to the slave,
working additionally for cash or in-kind compensation, or, again, working her own customary garden plot, and perhaps
selling the surplus produce to whites.
Clearly, the task system, rooted in the conscious adaptation to the geographical and climatic peculiarities of the
coastal lowlands, was developed historically along lines largely controlled by slaves themselves. It grounded their
plantation-based communities and formed a central moment of, what Strickland (basing himself on the historiography
of popular cultures) correctly identified as, the "moral economy" of production of coastal lowlands, slave communities.
895The "Special Order" was issued 16 January 1865. It is reprinted from the War of the Rebellion records in Allen,
Ibid, 225-227 (citation appears on 227). For a discussion of the order, Sherman's motivations in issuing it, see
"Military Commanders and Black Labor" in chapter 8, above. Also see the following: Howard Westwood, Black
Soldiers, White Commanders, 107-120; William McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 18,47, 57; Williamson, Ibid, 59, 80.
The order was obviously contradictory, for, as we noted above in chapter 8, in its original formulation it also explicitly
acknowledged the Congress would determine the ultimate status of the so-called possessory titles.

of Negroes were freemen, just emancipated from chattel slavery, landless and propertyless,
as yet organizationally inarticulate, [and as such] in motion but ... [lacking] a clear class
leadership which would channelize the[ir] mass energy..."896
[The Sugar Coast]
The other pole of class struggle was over the "labor contracts," acquiescence to the terms of
which threatened to reduce freemen as wage laborers to "wage slaves," that is, to de jure free
laborers who were de facto re-enslaved. The success of struggles against this return to legally
unsanctioned, informal slavery varied, as indicated, regionally, by crop and according to
preceding historical form of slave-labor. In Louisiana, sugar cane was grown in the swampy
lowlands adjacent the Gulf and the lower Mississippi River in the south-central region of the
state. Sugar planting, a semi-industrial activity, was much more capital intensive than cotton
production. A sugarhouse was a far greater expense than a cotton gin; wood for fuel was
required which in turn required carts and work animals (oxen, horses, mules) to haul the carts
of wood. The soil in sugar-growing areas was generally heavier, and, accordingly, the work
animals had to be larger, that is, stronger. So too the slaves who worked this land were by and
large stronger and younger.
Sugar production fell dramatically after 1861; in fact, it did not recover pre-war levels until
1876. The great sugar plantations were, however, not only not broken up but land
concentration actually increased 300% by 1880. The concentration of plantation holdings
conjoined to a collapse in sugar production would, it might seem, have made for just the right
conditions for the imposition on freemen in the cane fields of the type of terms which explanters attempted to impose in the cotton fields. But they did not. In fact, outweighing the
concentration of holdings and falling production in the balance of class forces was an acute
labor shortage. Labor shortage resulted from the loss of black lives during the war - as Union
soldiers killed in combat. But lives were also lost to marauders who intimidated, abducted, and
murdered blacks in Union-held but poorly protected plantations in the South. Labor shortages
further resulted from the withdrawal of female (and child) labor from the fields as well as from
(state specific) out-migrations. Because sharecropping never gained a foothold on the sugar
planters, waged work became the norm; and, under the ubiquitous conditions of acute labor
shortages, freemen demanded and received not only wages much higher than in the cotton
fields but also cabins, rations and fuel, and often a garden plot and time to work it. This was
significantly different from the situation prevailing on cotton plantations where the wageearning, contract-bound laborers were often forced to take food and whatever else they
required as an advance to be deducted either from wages or shares.897
In the rice fields, the conditions of labor shortage were reproduced; in both rice and sugar
fields, plant, equipment and work animals were destroyed by retreating armies, opposing
armies in combat, and by invading armies. Moreover, in the sugar field massive flooding in
896For the stand made by freepeople, Allen, Ibid, 61-65, and Williamson, Ibid, 81-83; on their attitude toward planters,

Ibid, 82, 83, 84 and 89; and, Allen, Ibid, 63; an incident such as this (in which Union soldiers were forced to beat a
quick retreat) occurred on the Delta plantations in January 1867. It is reported by Ibid, 64; for the dispatch of troops to
quell "insurrections," Ibid, 66-67; see, also, Williamson, Ibid, 103-104 (though the discussion here refers to a later
period, namely, late summer 1876); citation appearing in Allen, Ibid, 68 (our emphasis).
897In 1861, there were 4,291 sugarhouses in Louisiana, yet by 1869 there were only 817. Taylor, Louisiana
Reconstructed, 365. For yearly figures on production of sugar, see Ibid, 370; on the persistence of the great sugar
plantations, Shugg, The Origin of Class Struggle in Louisiana, 235-241; and, Taylor, Ibid, 366; for labor shortages,
Ibid, 364.
For lack of Union protection, for example, in Mississippi, freemen working at Union army insistence in the Natchez
district (Adams Co.) faced the frequent threat of attack by marauders who hid in and operated out of the swamps
across the Mississippi River in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. See Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 60; and Taylor, Ibid,
37; on wage labor on the sugar plantation, Ibid, 367; for sugar plantation worker demands, Ibid, 368-369.

1866 and 1867 destroyed much of the cane in the fields before harvest. As, relatively
speaking, capital intensive, the recovery of sugar production was hurt that much more by the
generalized scarcity of capital in the post-war South. And while these conditions are largely
given as reasons for the failure of rice and sugar production to recover their pre-war levels,
such conditions only made that recovery difficult: Atop all this, it was the combativity of black
labor, its refusal to accept the essentially antebellum terms of work that post-war landlords
attempted to impose, that in the end accounts for these failed recoveries.898
[Cotton Belt]
Cotton production in the South was ubiquitous. Historically, the production of cotton entailed
low(er) levels of capital investment in tools and machinery (relative to, say, sugar). The cotton
fields were worked by large gangs of slaves who were carefully supervised by white
overseers, themselves employed by the planter. The fields were prepared for planting in the
spring and seed planted when the threat of freezing had disappeared. As the plants
developed, a good deal of cultivation with plough and hoe was demanded, but by July the
crop required little attention. This meant that slave labor was engaged by masters in other
"make work" tasks (e.g., ditch maintenance, etc.). By late August (or early September), it was
time to harvest the cotton from the plant bolls which were newly opening. Thereafter, the lint
was separated from the seed, the seed was "ginned," and then compacted into 500 pound
bales. Following completion of all associated harvesting tasks, six to nine weeks might lapse
before there was anymore work in the fields. Obviously, the timing and rhythms of cotton
production did not conform to the regularity of, say, waged, manufacturing production.899
In South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana as elsewhere, planters faced similar problems
with the post-war renewal of cotton production. The first overwhelming problem planters faced
was a scarcity of capital: Confederate currency had collapsed, the Confederate debt that
planters as a class had underwritten had been repudiated, southern banks had largely folded,
and planters had lost perhaps their single largest asset "their" chattel slaves. The only
sources of capital were Northerners who wished to invest in southern agriculture in the
aftermath of the war. In the first months following the formal end of the war, northern investors
were, in fact, greeted with open arms. But flooding in the Mississippi Valley (ruinously effecting
cotton fields in Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee) and the army worm blight (destroying
crops throughout the South) in 1866 and 1867, conjoined to the resistance of black labor to
Northerners with their rationalizing schemes for "free labor" cotton production, drove these
investors either away back North or out into southern politics. The second problem confronting
cotton planters was the resistance of the freemen. In the long term, this resistance was
decisive for it decided the form of social relations on the land in the South for several
generations.900
898According to accounts reported by Williamson (Ibid, 106), rice production in the coastal lowlands of South Carolina

never revived.
899For slave gangs in the cotton fields, Strickland, "'No More Mud Work'," 49.
It appears that the task system also characterized certain parts of the Black Belt cotton growing regions of the South.
With Alabama in mind, Fleming (Ibid, 710) wrote, Work was usually done by tasks, and industrious negroes were
able to complete their daily allotment and have three or four hours a day to work in their own gardens and 'patches.'
They often earned money at odd jobs For work in the cotton fields, we have relied on, largely reproducing, the
excellent summary of Taylor, Ibid, 372.
900For the reception accorded to northern investors, Foner, Ibid, 137; and Harold Woodman, King Cotton & His
Retainers, 247-249. For an opposing view, with regard specifically to Louisiana, see Taylor, Ibid, 68-69; on
rationalization of black labor, see Foner, Ibid, 138. Fleming (Ibid, 717-718) insightfully parodies the northern investor,
fully armed with a quasi-science of agriculture, as he prepared to exploit black labor; for the options facing northern
investors, see Foner, Ibid, 141.

Planters and Freemen (II)

Forms of Class Struggle in the Crucial Immediate Postwar Period
While socially and historically the forms of struggle freemen carried out (in response to
planters efforts to compel them to labor on their, planters, terms) cannot be separated from
the role of, first, the Union army and, then, that of the Freedmen's Bureau in imposing those
terms, analytically they can be and we shall reconstruct them separately.
[Labor Contracts]
In the spring and summer of 1865, planters (following upon the insistence of the army) offered
ex-slave freemen contractual agreements to cover wage laboring in their cotton fields. "Labor
contracts" constituted the first and most lasting effort by planters to impose their wills upon
freemen.
As a rule, the contracts extended for a period that ran until the end of the year (1865) and
were to be renewed yearly thereafter. They called for the continuation of closely supervised,
gang labor; for dawn to dusk work; for employer permission to leave the plantation, entertain
guests, and hold meetings. The contracts specified monthly, partial payment of wages, and a
standard withholding of one-half the wage compensation due at year-end (to insure laborers
would stay until the end of the year). The contract further authorized planters to make wage
deductions for "slacking" or for any time lost, for whatever reason. If provided by the planter,
medical care, too, constituted a charge against wages. Oftentimes contracts called for wage
forfeiture for the entire year and removal from the plantation should the "free" laborer "break"
the contract. That measure, taken together with the effort by many planters, perhaps most, to
ensure the "reliability" of freemen by regulating time after work as well as personal
comportment and appearance, makes it clear planters (with the assistance of the army and
the Bureau) sought to reproduce the same absolute obedience to the themselves and their
overseers that they had assumed their natural right to impose under slavery. Planters sought
written contracts to insure, in their own words, "good and faithful labor," which, in the context
of the foregoing, ideologically constituted an effort to secure for themselves subjective
certainty that they could, in fact, dominate all aspects of the lives of freemen.901
Regardless of how socially generalized, common sensical and taken for granted, this
perspective was rooted in a personally and culturally self-defensive, false understanding of
black labor. It was shaped by the prejudice that freemen as Negroes had to be compelled to
work. The prejudice was psychologically and emotionally characteristic of the planter (and,
generally, of the southern white) personality. It formed an ideal, intersubjective (or subjectively
shared) component of the antebellum social order as such. If, after all, black labor could work
without compulsion, recognition of such would turn the world upside down, i.e., really finish off
the war by shearing the planter of inward self-confidence in his own total mastery, a mastery,
that though no longer legally acknowledged, could be objectively recouped through the labor
contract. All those absurd and meaningless assertions Yankee abolitionists had made about
the slavish Negro might be true. The war, and southern planter culture it defended, might itself
have been wrong. Thus, freemen must be forced to work, and so compelled on the terms of
those who know them best. It was exactly this paternalism that was embodied in the Black
Codes.902
901On planter efforts to regulate freemen's behavior, Davis, Ibid, 71, 95-96; Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 135;

Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 332; Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 65; and, Williamson, After Slavery, 67.
902For the ideological understanding of black labor, Foner, Ibid, 132; Wharton, Ibid, 48-49, 97; and, Taylor, Ibid, 91,
324, 331; on the relation of paternalism to the Black Codes, Williamson, Ibid, 73.

Planters, however, did not rest secure in subjective satisfaction that guarantees in the labor
contract provided. In practice, they resorted to employer association, "combinations" or
employer self-organization, in order to fix wages and to blacklist "troublesome," i.e., militant,
workers. In other words, they very quickly assimilated the capitalist meaning of "free labor."
Such was demonstrably the case: Planters attempted to drive down wages below subsistence
levels and to reduce "overhead" by turning out and forcing off their lands older, helpless and
young people who had historically been part of slave labor forces. They refused to rent or sell
land to freemen. They made use of intimidation, such as discharge for the political reason of
casting a Republican ballot, and terror up to and including murder. All these measures were
oftentimes inadequate: By autumn 1865, in many states planters fell back on the Freedmen's
Bureau to enforce the terms of their contracts. Altogether lacking their own political
organization, a newly freepeople fiercely resisted every attempt to de facto reinstitute slavery.
Planters attempted to undercut their efforts: They leaned on Andrew Johnson to remove black
troops and to return confiscated lands. (As we shall see, in both cases the President was most
obliging.) Finally, in the decisive early, post-war period, planters' efforts to impose terms of
labor on freemen were themselves legally objectified in enactment of the Black Codes.903
[Black Codes]
The Black Codes were legislated enactments of the newly elected, allegedly reformed,
southern legislatures establishing legally sanctioned, repressive guidelines for compulsory
work by freemen.
The first states to pass Black Codes, in November 1865, were South Carolina and Mississippi.
(Alabama and Louisiana followed by the end of the year.) The codes were de jure
codifications of the planter moment of class struggle on the ground. These legal
formalizations, backed by the armed force of states, were projections of a past social order,
rationalized and lacking slavery as an institution, that planters, local and national politicians,
newspaper editors, men with economic power and influence everywhere, and military officers
were hurriedly trying to reconstruct.904 Particularly noteworthy in this context were the
vagrancy laws to which we shall return shortly.
The assumed necessity for formulation of Black Codes must be seen against the background
of a state of nature in the South at war's end, that is, against the double background of the
collapse of all State structures (the collapse of the Confederacy, and the federal disbandment
or simple disappearance of state and county rebel governments), and the collapse of the
antebellum southern social order in which a vast number of economically self-contained
plantations had once effectively functioned as seemingly autarkic "little societies" under the
aegis of formal, state rights political regimes. Whether one accepts the view of the pre-war
903For employer self-organization, Bentley, History of the Freedmen's Bureau, 80; Wharton, Ibid, 64; and, Williamson,

Ibid, 99; for attempted wage reductions, note, for example, the testimony given to the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction by Union army officer Lt. George O. Sanderson. Sanderson related how North Carolina planters told
him of their intentions to drive the price of free, black labor down below the costs of laborers held as chattel slaves!
Report of the Joint Committee, part II (NC), 175. Clearly planters internalized the logic of capital very early on and
with a vengeance; for planter refusals to rent or sell land to freepeople, Foner, Ibid, 134. Du Bois, Ibid., 173, cites a
Mississippi state law that strictly limited land purchases by freemen, and Wharton, Ibid, 60-61, 64, notes that in the
very first session of the restored legislation Mississippi representatives passed a laws prohibiting farm land sales and
renting to freemen. On this, also see William McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 70. McFeely (Ibid) notes the recently
enacted laws in Mississippi localities that placed exorbitant licensing taxes on freemen who sought to engage in
independent productive activity; for discharge from work for voting Republican, Williamson, Ibid, 98-99; for planter
terrorism, Foner, Ibid, 119-121; Taylor, Ibid, 63-64, 93-94; and, Williamson, Ibid, 97.
904This was a very early, informal but very real meaning of reconstruction.
On initial passages of Black Codes, Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi, 112f. For South Carolina, Williamson, Ibid,
74, and Novak, Wheel of Servitude, 5.

South as an essentially capitalist social order or, as we do, defends the perspective that the
same South was at once pre-bourgeois, seigniorial and integrated into world capitalist system
of social relations, with the exceptions of part-time legislative bodies and weak executives
and, in particular, a military-police function, though decentralized (slave patrols, sheriffs), that
characterize all State-forms, the antebellum southern state governments had precious few of
the institutions which distinguish modern capitalist states.905
In societies of capital, the regulation of labor and capital relations is simultaneously
undertaken by the State through legal codifications, and by owners' operatives on the ground,
for example, plant managers and supervisors. These relations are, of course, organized to
systematically reproduce capital or, stated differently, "labor control" must be secured to insure
the continuity, regularity and predictability of production and market transactions, that is, to
avoid disruption of production and social crises which might otherwise threaten these relations
and, generally speaking, the legitimacy of bourgeois society. It was precisely the nonbourgeois equivalent of this function that antebellum planters, their oversees, slave-catchers,
etc., had carried out themselves, and that, with the destruction of the institution of southern
slavery (and the presence of an occupying army to, among other things, guarantee it was not
re-established), that they were desperate to re-establish. Similarly, at the top; for here, Andrew
Johnson set out to restore State structures as the condition of the effective security of property
relations that had become bourgeois. This was the basis of Presidential reconstruction, that is,
the restoration of reactionary southern regimes. It was also, moreover, the lack of institutional
embodiment of and sanction for this function of labor control that Bourbons themselves, viz.,
planters, newspaper editors and politicians of the Southern Democracy, immediately
recognized and sought to rectify through legislative enactment of the Black Codes, pleas to
Johnson to remove black troops conjoined to efforts to recreate (white) state militias, etc.906
The obviously labor-repressive character of the Black Codes as attempts to enforce plantation
discipline (and, more specifically, the terms of labor contracts) was most strikingly evident in
their vagrancy laws; and these specific laws, like the codes generally, were not restricted to
the three states we have hitherto examined. For example, in Virginia vagrancy defined that
activity of "all persons who, not having the wherewith to support their families, live idly and
without employment, and refuse to work for the usual and common [local planter-imposed]
wages." In Florida, any "person of color" who did not perform all stipulated contractual tasks
by way of a "wilful disobedience of [employer] orders, failure or refusal to perform the work
assigned to him, idleness, or abandonment of the premises or the work" of the employer, was
liable, upon employer complaint, "to be arrested and tried before the criminal court of the
county," and upon conviction, was subject to all the penalties "ascribed for the punishment of
905For what we see as the illusorily self-contained character of the plantation, Fleming remarks, "Each plantation was

an industrial [sic] community almost independent of the outside world; the division of labor was minute All supplies
were raised on the plantation, - corn, bacon, beef and other food-stuffs; farm harnesses and implements were made
by the skilled negroes in the rainy weather when no outdoor work could be done; clothes were cut off in the 'big
house' by the negro women under the direction of the mistress." Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 710. Du
Bois (Ibid, 408) more properly contextualized the distinctive character of antebellum southern governments: "It is said
that the ante-bellum state (in South Carolina) was ruled by 180 great landlords. They had made the functions of the
state just as few as possible, and did by private law and on private plantations most of the things which in other states
were carried out by the local and state governments"; and, "before the war, the South was ruled by an oligarchy and
the function of the state carried on largely by individuals. This meant that the state had little to do and its expenses
were small. ... The government revenues are kept purposely small and the salaries low so that poor men cannot
afford to enter into government service" (Ibid, 616-617).
906On the role of armed force, we have written, "Regardless of its bewildering complexity ... [the] State essentially
concentrates armed force. No matter what transformations this State undergoes, the institutions of coercion (an army,
police, prisons, courts and ... a bureaucracy), and the monopoly of practical violence in society such institutions
necessarily entail, remain. This concentration of force is the essential, historical condition ensuring the continuity of
bourgeois rule ... as a condition of generalized social disorder invariably demonstrates." Whither America?, 97.

vagrancy." Those penalties? In Georgia, vagrants were to be "fined and imprisoned or

sentenced to work on the public works, for not longer than a year, or shall in the discretion of
the court ... be bound out to some person [i.e., a planter with need of labor] for not longer than
a year " Similarly for the other state legislatures that enacted Black Codes.907
Most southern state codes further included restrictions on the work blacks could seek outside
of waged plantation labor. (Such restrictions were enforced through licensing fees or outright
prohibition such as in North Carolina where freepeople were banned from the sale of farm
products.908) Other provisions included strictures on apprenticeships, limitations or
prohibitions on blacks bringing whites to court, prohibitions on the ownership, carrying and use
of firearms, and, of course, provisions detailing the rights of contractual employers and
regulating the contractual labor of freemen.
The intent of these all-white, restored legislatures may or may not have to immediately
reconstitute the social relations of slavery. If the question is moot (and in our view it really is
not), the assumptions of all legislation was, nonetheless, paternalistic. It presumed that white
planters (and legislators, oftentimes the same individuals) knew best what was good for a
freepeople, essentially children whose interests needed to protected (first and foremost from
themselves), and like children more in need of discipline than the lax environment advocated
by Northerners. Because it was paternalistic in the social sense originally constituted under
conditions of slavery, this legislation - regardless of the intent - objectively formed an effort to
reproduce those conditions. As a matter of fact, the character of the Black Codes is only
debatable when contrasting contemporary Reconstruction analysis with the older, Bourbonsympathetic tradition of Reconstruction historiography. For example, Fleming, remarked that
the codes would have "under different circumstances" been "well for the negro" had they been
enacted. In other words, while the Alabama codes were inherently good, their attempted
passage was merely politically inexpedient given the presence of occupying army.
Northern attitudes with regard to the codes were by and large contradictory. While Northerners
wished to insure black freedom from slavery, and Union army presence in the South made this
commitment real, few could see beyond the increasingly capitalist character of free labor
assumptions, assumptions that neatly dovetailed with southern paternalism. Williamson
states, "Anyone who sought to enlarge the freedom of the Negro was liable to criticism as an
enemy of the Negro, much as one who sought to place a child beyond the protection of its
parents. ... [As] everyone knew, laxity, not severity, was the common error of the fond parent
and more to guarded against."909
All state Black Codes were voided by occupational military authorities, vetoed by governors or
repealed by constitutional conventions held during the period of Congressional
Reconstruction. Yet the significance of the codes patently transcended their limited duration:
They established a framework of "race" relations for all subsequent legislation and social
practices in the post-Reconstruction era that followed the completion of Bourbon redemption
in 1877. An attempt to reduce freepeople to a slavery without legal standing or, better to
reduce them to peonage and vassalage,910 Black Codes, and in particular vagrancy laws,
907All citations are from Du Bois, Ibid, 174. A good summary discussion of the Black Codes can be found in Foner,

Ibid, 199-201, 208-209. Du Bois, intent here on exhibiting the institutionalized, legally sanctioned character of the
repression of black workers, pays a great deal of attention to the codes. He presents long extracts from the legislation
of various states, unlike other authors whose intent, falling far short, is also to recount Reconstruction as a whole. See
Du Bois, Ibid, 166-180. For South Carolina, see Williamson, Ibid, 72-79; for Mississippi, see Wharton, Ibid, 84-96;
and, for Louisiana, Taylor, Ibid, 99-103.
908Du Bois, Ibid, 170.
909Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 378; Williamson, After Slavery, 73.
910 terms were utilized to characterize the codes, or more accurately vagrancy laws, in the testimony given before the

Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Report of the Joint Committee, e.g., Part I (TN), 107-8; Part II, 35 (VA); and 177,

were the original model of the "Jim Crow" legislation, racial apartheid, that legitimized de facto
segregation and legally sanctioned the consignment of blacks to the status of a socially
inferior color-caste in the South, a status that was generalized across America and echoes of
which remain down to the present day. This side of the future, Black Codes were the
formalized attempt to put teeth into planter practices and demands emanating from the cotton
fields in the face of fierce freemen resistance and assertiveness.
Class Struggle on the Ground
In the immediate aftermath of the war, "conflict was endemic on plantations throughout the
South."911
On the cotton plantations, freemen waged a determined struggle against the straightjacket of
the Bureau-sanctioned labor contract planters attempted to impose. Their struggle was largely
against contract terms, since they were lived and experienced as, and objectively constituted
revivals of, slavery. In the face of a contractual arrangement partially imposed through army or
Bureau pressure, and without previous historical experience of wage-labor, freemen, as rural
wage-earners, everywhere immediately hit upon forms of struggle adopted by proletarians
when first confronted with employer attempts to ratchet up the rate of exploitation. They set
their own pace of work, established their own work rhythms, and attempted to set their own
hours of work. Very early on (before the end of 1865), freemen also began to challenge
planter assumptions of what work tasks actually consisted in. In those "down" times
characteristic of cotton production, planters had historically had their slaves engage in tasks
not immediately related to production, viz., ditch repair, digging of canals, levees and dikes,
etc. But under waged conditions, freemen began to demand extra compensation for these
tasks or altogether refuse to carry them out. These practices, of course, created ongoing
conflicts between freemen and plantation overseers (who had generally survived the warwrought destruction of slavery to serve planters), struggles in which workers were more or
less successful from plantation to plantation.912
As spring (1865) became summer and summer faded into autumn, struggles intensified.
Williamson reports in South Carolina, for example, instances of sit downs on the job and
spontaneous "wildcat" strikes (understood by planters, accustomed to slavish servility, as
"insurrectionary"). As the new year approached, freepeople throughout the South had good
reason to believe land distribution was, if not a "done deal," still a highly likely prospect.
Holding out for a plot of land (and, likely also, attempting to force concessions on planters as
planting season approached), they refused to conclude agreements for 1866. On plantations
where contracts were "signed," planters rigorously attempted to enforce labor discipline on the
old slave model that, among other practices, included closely supervised gang labor. In these
rather widespread cases, freemen were found refusing to work, yet standing together and
refusing to be driven off. Alternatively, freemen would often leave the plantation seeking better
terms of employment, and, under generalized conditions of labor shortages, competition
among planters for their services often made better terms available. Under these conditions,
freemen were sought to substitute family labor for the hated gang labor so reminiscent of
slavery. They also demanded and got garden plots to grow their own vegetables. Out of work
and without prospects, freemen would steal hogs, cattle and poultry, or even engage in barn182 (NC).
911Foner, Ibid, 136.
912For freemen's efforts to control the pace and content of labor, Ibid, 39; Williamson, Ibid, 111; for demands for

compensation for production related tasks, Foner, Ibid, 136, 139, and Williamson, Ibid, 101. Similarly, in the areas of
rice production, see John Strickland, "'No More Mud Work," 48.

burning, specifically targeting planters (as opposed to former non-slaveholding white

farmers).913
The central characteristic of all these struggles, however, was control over labor itself.
Freemen refused to accept laboring arrangements that smacked of slavery: They sought selfdetermination of the pace, rhythm, hours and even days of work, the laboring arrangements
that were to typically characterize work, the practical definition of just what constituted work
and, as we shall see later on, control over the surplus product of labor itself. Operating on the
(self-justificatory) assumption that Negro labor was incapable of self-direction, planters in the
persons of the post-slavery overseers, on that other hand, fought hard to maintain direct and
immediate, i.e., closely supervised, practical authority over freemen. Freemen struggled to
create for themselves and their families a practical sphere of self-definition, independence
and autonomy, planters fought to maintain all the old forms of domination and authority. This
conflict of irreconcilable class-based subjectivities, mediated by the institutional forces of the
U.S. State, its army and the Freedmen's Bureau, had its outcome in real movement. The
contours of this class struggle formed a settlement in the making, and its outcome would be a
form of labor-based social relations, sharecropping tenancy, that neither party had anticipated
and nor designed to create.914
Role of the Army and Freedmen's Bureau
[Union Armies in the South Prior to War's End]
Establishing bases and regional control, Union armies penetrated deeply into the South long
before the final outcome was clear. In South Carolina, with the successful November 1861
assault on Port Royal the Sea Islands fell under northern control. In the mid-South, Union
forces under Grant defeated Confederate troops in February 1862 at Fort Donelson and
established control in central Tennessee around Nashville. In the following year, Grant's Army
of the Tennessee took Memphis and, using the river, moved deeper into the South to prepare
an assault on Vicksburg. Five months of unsuccessful attempts to penetration the city's
northern defenses led Grant to attempt, successfully, a crossing of the Mississippi River south
of Vicksburg. An overland campaign in the interior of the country produced five victories before
settling into a siege of the city in its rear. Starving, the Confederate forces under Pemberton
capitulated, surrendering unconditionally on 4 July 4, 1863. In May 1862, an amphibious
Union force under Gen. Benjamin Butler captured New Orleans. By the end of 1863, the
occupation of Louisiana had been extended from New Orleans northward along the banks of
the Mississippi to Baton Rouge: With the exception of a small stretch of land below Natchez,
Union armies controlled the Mississippi River.915
Where Union armies had established regional control, slaves deserted plantations en masse.
Thousands of blacks, until 1 January 1863 considered "contrabands" and thereafter ex-slaves
and a freepeople, followed the Union armies and flooded their camps. Their presence created
913On planter consciousness of strikes as "insurrections," Williamson, Ibid, 103; on the late 1865 likelihood of land

distribution, Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 79, Foner, Ibid, 139, Taylor, Ibid, 327, Wharton, Ibid, 59, Williamson, Ibid,
89, and, Strickland, "Ibid," 51; on holding out for land, Williamson, Ibid, 102; for refusal to sign agreements, Foner,
Ibid and Taylor, Ibid, 327, 331; for planter efforts at contract enforcement, Davis, Ibid, 91; Foner, Ibid, 174; for seeking
better terms of employment, Foner, Ibid, and Williamson, Ibid, 102, 103; and, on competition among planters, Taylor,
Ibid, 326, 327-328, Wharton, Ibid, 65, and, especially Davis' excellent, concisely presented case study of two planters
in the Natchez District, Ibid, 90-94; for freemen's demands on conditions of labor shortages, Foner, Ibid, Taylor, Ibid,
329, 332, and Wharton, Ibid, 63, 65, 66; on freemen's responses to lack of work, Williamson, Ibid, 89, 104, 105; and,
Fleming, Civil and Reconstruction in Alabama, 271-272.
914For a broad characterization of freeman-planter struggle, Foner, Ibid, 136, and Davis, Ibid, 91.
915For the Vicksburg Campaign, see the discussion of the same in chapter 7, above; for the extent of the Union army

control of the Mississippi, Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 2-4.

enormous problems of feeding, clothing and sheltering a refugee population. These problems
were multiplied by tensions generated by presence of a black population among often racist
northern soldiers (and officers), and by the caravan of predatory northern scum, speculators
and profiteers, who, following in the wake of these armies, sought opportunities to profit from
war and human misery. In attempting at once to deprive Confederate armies of the use of
slave labor for, e.g., crop production to feed armies in the field and fortifications construction,
and to put the same labor to similar uses, first John Eaton and then Lorenzo Thomas both
under Grant in the Mississippi Valley and Rufus Saxton under Gen. T.W. Sherman in South
Carolina had developed the "labor contract" to ensure the now free black was acclimatized to
"free labor."916
[Union Armies and the Labor Contract]
Following upon the destruction of slavery as an institution and under conditions of conflict
between two antagonistic social classes, the attempt to reorganize production by supplanting
slave labor with waged labor had led, as we have seen, to a hybrid bastardization, the labor
contract.
In the Mississippi Valley, the labor contract was developed at once to "preparatorily" discipline
black labor, and with a view to military exigencies. The latter was primary and was, most
importantly, designed to free regular army units from securing abandoned lands and to relieve
the army of caring for refugees, thereby freeing soldiers for fighting. More than incidentally, the
attempt to get cotton production on abandoned lands going again would bring in badly needed
revenue to the U.S. Treasury through rents and a per bale tax. In the Sea Islands, the labor
contract was the immediate outcome of a frustrated attempt to secure land exclusively for
freemen. There, speculators and planters had, with the cooperation of the Treasury
Department tax commissioners for South Carolina, successfully thwarted efforts to redistribute
plantations as farms reserved throughout the whole of the Islands for freemen and their
families. Here, the labor contract was intended as an intermediary form, designed to protect
the freeman, and prepare him for life as a waged laborer. In both cases, the labor contract,
while not preceded by, say, a theoretical analysis of the projected conditions of blacks at war's
end, nonetheless was thoroughly theoretically mediated by army officers' cultural-ideal
commitment to "free labor" even if the labor contract grew out of the immediate situation on
the ground.917
This commitment was, of course, in the nature of a taken-for-granted assumption about the
proper form of social organization, that is, it was the practical correlate of an immediate
intuition of social reality - one resting on the social class character of mid-19th century
America. "Free labor" was the common sense perspective of the economically independent,
self-employed, especially farmers and those tenants that aspired to such status, but also
craftsmen, enterprising manufacturers, small businessmen, etc., the "productive" classes,"
viz., of all those who, mediated by the market, profited from their own labor as opposed to
slaveholders and financial interests such as bankers and speculators. Because the free labor
mlange itself was, at least in the West (and recall Westerners held the key offices of the
916For black migration to army camps, see the entirety of chapter 8, above.
917For an albeit brief, but descriptive sketch of the profiteers activities, Davis, Good and Faithful Labor, 63, 66-68; to

relieve Union army forces of the task of securing abandoned lands, these lands were leased to loyal (Unionist) white
planters who were willing to work them with fixed-waged, black labor. The idea was to turn the tasks of overseeing
refugees over to the aforementioned leasors who, in principle or so it might have seemed, would in paying wages
allow freepeople-refugees to care for themselves. Significantly, a black soldiered-white officered home guard was also
formed to protect the plantations against rebel marauders. Ibid, 64-66; for the Treasury tax on cotton, Ibid, 66; for
defense of the South Sea Islands, Williamson, Ibid, 55-58; on the role and function of the labor contract in the Islands,
Ibid, 68.

State in the North), fluid and still relatively softly stratified at mid-century, and because it was
the starting point for not just the farmer or small businessmen but underpinned the entire
western economy, articulated by lawyers and politicians, free labor assumptions had become
a dominant socio-political perspective within northern society, and hegemonic in the West. As
Foner suggests, the perspective of free labor rested on social assumptions of "universal
economic rationality and the conviction that all classes in a free labor society shared the same
interests," a conviction that, we believe, was reinforced especially in the West by a democratic
culture a central moment of which was universal white male suffrage. These assumptions,
however, were relative to a social formation in the process of becoming industrially capitalist,
and had little relevancy to the South, a society whose central social and productive institution
had been slavery. Yet with the sole, limited exception of Rufus Saxton, no army officer, as
either military commander or Bureau agent, was capable of breaking with these assumptions:
Neatly dovetailing with military necessity and the northern capitalist desire to resume
production, thus an ideological conviction, it was taken as a matter of course that fate of
freepeople was to do plantation labor as free wager-earners. These assumptions would
continue to inform commanders' actions, without regard to the rights or wishes of freepeople
themselves, for the entire period the army and Bureau were actively engaged in overseeing,
regulating or adjudicating production in the South.918
In all cases, the role of army and the Freedmen's Bureau in organizing social production on
the basis of a (long-term) contract was contradictory. On the one side, the wartime
experiments at Fortress Monroe (VA), Port Royal (SC) and Davis Bend (MS), as well as
practical consequences of Sherman's Special Order No. 15, all found the army engaged in de
facto land redistribution. On the other side, the army enforced labor contracts and regularly
enforced their worst terms, for example, vagrancy laws, vagrancy patrols, and urban pass
laws. Which side received more emphasis largely depended on the field commander in charge
of operations in a given district - as the difference between Saxton and Thomas clearly
suggests. The situation in the South basically remained this way down until very late winter
1864-1865 when the first of two events transformed army practice. The first event, occurring 3
March 1865, was the Congressional legislation that created the Freedmen's Bureau, and the
second, occurring in September, was the acceleration of the Presidential pardons granting
process on the basis of which Andrew Johnson ordered the return of all confiscated,
abandoned lands to former owners.
Taken together with the struggle of freepeople against a de facto re-enslavement, the
contradictory efforts of the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau in the end produced in the labor
contract a short-lived, transitory form of labor organization in the South.
[Origins, Mission, Structure, and Personnel of the Freedmen's Bureau]
It is sometimes argued that the importance of the Freedmen's Bureau was largely overrated,
especially during its "radical" phase (spring - summer 1865). With 900 agents in the field, and
with millions of acres of plantation land worked by ex-slaves to cover, how could the Bureau
have been effective? In this light, to argue otherwise would appear foolish. But consider the
question from a perspective other than the practical efficacy of agents on the ground.
Consider it from the standpoint of the planters who employed freemen to cultivate cotton, rice,
sugar cane, or tobacco. From this perspective, the army occupying the South came into play.
Having lost the war and with their lands occupied by the victor's armies, all planters
recognized that the army could be called on to enforce Congressionally-mandated Bureau
agents' decisions against any recalcitrant planter. Moreover, disgruntled freemen, even those
in the interior, had the right (no matter how practically difficult) to appeal contract violations,
918Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 153-157, 156 (citation), 167.

cheating on wages, arbitrariness, abuse, etc., by planters to the Bureau, which, in turn, was
backed up in the last resort ... by the army. It was for this reason that the Bureau was, in fact,
quite effective. It was also why, because it was immediately present in the person of an agent
(as opposed to an army company that might have been garrisoned fifty miles away), it was so
hated - even though most planters found it relatively easy to work with Bureau agents. That it
was, ultimately, the army, armed repressive force of the national, northern-controlled
bourgeois State, which gave the Bureau its effective edge cannot be doubted: Recall that long
after the Freedmen's Bureau ceased to exist, it was the army that southern Bourbons had to
get rid of before "redemption" could be completed.919
The Freedmen's Bureau had its origins in a March 1863 Congressional commission, the
American Freemen's Inquiry Commission, created to inquire into and remedy the conditions of
freemen. The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen and Abandoned Lands was the result of
legislation passed by both Houses of Congress, and signed by Lincoln, all on the same day, 3
March 1865. The Bureau was created to last for a mere one year from the end of the war. It
was to have a commissioner - to carry out its mandate, organize its activities and oversee its
operations - and ten assistant commissioners to act as regional directors. The commissioner
was to be appointed by, and the assistant commissioners were to be selected subject to
approval by, the President with Senate consent. As McFeely suggests, this gave President
Johnson a central role in deciding and, in the event, diverting the direction of Bureau
operations. The mandate of the Bureau called for, among other things, preparations for the
postwar resettlement of ex-slaves, and the wherewithal to accomplish this task: The Bureau
was put exclusively in charge of all abandoned or confiscated southern lands, and was
specifically charged with the task of setting aside land in small plots (forty acres) for freemen.
Thus, the Bureau took over the wartime role of the Treasury Department. No funds were
appropriated for its operation, and, accordingly, all revenues would have to be generated
through rents on those abandoned lands. The Bureau was placed under the Department of
War. Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, chose a military officer, Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, to
head the Bureau as its commissioner. Howard, in turn, staffed his agency with military officers,
individuals who, having served under him, he was personally acquainted with. (In choosing
military officers, Howard was able to lock out abolitionists and political radicals, who by wars
end were by and large civilian.) As assistant commissioners, these men were assigned to
operate the Bureau regionally in territorially-based districts, such as the assistant commission
for South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, that corresponded to the military departments of the
South. These men, in turn, appointed sub-assistant commissioners, and hired field agents,
inspectors and superintendents. The officers, some of whom were definitely not sympathetic
to freepeople, were ambitious, mostly young career-oriented men chosen not for their
sympathy or politics but, rather, first and foremost for their loyalty to Howard, and then for their
battlefield-proven competency and their Christian commitment to a moral reawakening of the
nation (which Howard assumed the Bureau would be the instrument of): These ex-military
officers serving as assistant commissioners were all good Christian gentlemen. Predominantly
protestant (the mid-nineteenth century evangelical type that included Baptists,
Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterians), they were sons of New England and the
West. They were one and all firmly committed to "free labor," and in this specific, narrow
sense opposed to slavery.920
919For criticism of an "overrated" Bureau, Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 330; Fleming, Civil and Reconstruction in

Alabama, 444-445, provides a good example, thinly veiled, of hatred of the Bureau; for the relation of army withdrawal
to "redemption," C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, 195-196.
920On the Bureau's origin, McFeely, Ibid, 22; and Bentley, Ibid, 25-26.

[Bureau Practice]
Some Bureau agents were fair to the freemen, others were not; but committed to "free labor,"
agents in the field continued the contractual enforcement practices of the army. Nonetheless,
from the very beginning and particularly in the crucial period of late spring-early summer 1865,
a consistent "pro-Negro" policy on the part of the Bureau was - given the agency
Congressional mandate - possible. But it would have only been possible had the Freedmen's
Bureau had a leadership unequivocally committed to that mandate, a leadership that was
morally courageous and that shaped agency practices, including the appointment of assistant
commissioners and all their subsequent hirings, in light of that mandate.921
From the beginning, Howard was unclear as to the specific mission of the Bureau, and this
lack of clarity was compounded by the contradictory perspectives he articulated. On the one
hand, he believed the work of the Bureau was "missionary," and though involved feeding,
sheltering and educating tasks, its aim was moral uplift. In this endeavor, he sought out and
worked with major private relief agencies, such as the American Union Commission and the
American Freemen's Aid Commission, who in turn were controlled by conservative religious
forces that were exclusively interested in spiritual converts, forces such as those of Lyman
Abbott (head of the American Union Commission). On the other hand, Howard at some level
recognized that the freemen needed land in order to realize any prospects for real integration
into the national community. This objective was, however, unrealizable without a
thoroughgoing willingness to confront both the limited objectives of the Christian relief
agencies, and the obstacles and personages whose own agendas conflicted with, or who
ignored or opposed the Congressional mandate. Incapable of critically confronting authority of
any sort (as his wartime performance, e.g., at Chancellorsville and the Atlanta Campaign,
demonstrated), Howard was not the man to shoulder this task.922
We have relied heavily upon McFeely, and not because of his sympathetic treatment of freemen or his critical analysis
of the Bureau. Writing in the end of era of the modern Civil Rights movement, McFeely, who obviously took the
achievements of this movement seriously, was able to base himself on and elaborate its insights into the dynamics
and history of "race" relations in America. His examination of the Freedmen's Bureau, though occasionally chatty, is
superior precisely because he grasps the decisive, contextually shaped and mission-aborting, practical and
ideological limitations of the Bureau and its agents as well as the sharp social class conflicts into which it was
inserted.
In the wartime context, the United States Department of the Treasury was de jure responsible for administering
abandoned southern properties, including "contraband" (i.e., ex-slaves) seized by the Union army. Its agents were
detailed to confiscate, or more infrequently seize, property abandoned as northern armies approached to offset
unpaid taxes.
For the Bureau's structure, McFeely, Ibid, 23; and Bentley, Ibid, 49; for the Presidential role, Ibid. In fact, Secretary of
War Edwin Stanton actually made the selections of commissioners (see below); on the Bureau's primary land-related
mandate, McFeely, Ibid.; and Bentley, Ibid. The other mandated objectives included distribution of food, clothing and
fuel to white refugees as well as freemen; for Howard's staffing practice, Bentley, Ibid, 63; on locking out abolitionists,
McFeely, Ibid, 65-66; for the hierarchy of Bureau officials, McFeely, Ibid, 65. An excellent account of the daily Bureau
tasks of an ex-military officer appointed sub-assistant commissioner can be found in John De Forest, A Union Officer
in the Reconstruction; for ex-military men's, now commissioners' "Christian nationalism," McFeely, Ibid, 65-66, 72, 76.
921On contractual enforcement in the field, compare Capt. Charles Soule, writing to Bureau Commissioner Howard in
early Summer 1865: "Affairs were found to be in a very unsettled state. ... [Freepeople were] excited by the prospect
of freedom [and there was] every prospect that the crops would be neglected. ... Besides receiving their food, clothes,
their free rent of houses and gardens, and the privilege of keeping their hogs and poultry, they are to take for
themselves all day Saturday and Sunday and to receive half the crop." He told Howard that as he toured the
plantations, he told blacks that "some people must be rich to pay the others, and they have the right to do no work
except to look after their property. ... Everyone must stick to [their places.] ... Working time belongs to the man who
hires you." Cited by John Strickland, "'No More Mud Work'," 44-45. Clearly, Soule's sense of upright, industrious "free
labor" were offended by the "extravagant" demands of the lowly freemen.
922For Howard's missionary zeal, McFeely Ibid, 86, 88; on private relief agencies, Ibid, 88-90; on Howard's
recognition of the substantial and objective needs of the freemen, there is the example of his hiring of Rufus Saxton
and his Circular #13 (see the discussion immediately below).

Against even the most dogged pursuit of the Bureaus Congressionallly-mandated mission
stood a de facto, overarching commitment to order. This commitment, organizing the Bureau's
practices, was a product of an institution permeated by the military mindsets of its leading
personnel. The commitment was embodied both sides (top and bottom) of the Commissioner
and his assistants, in the personages of the Secretary of War and in that of the sub-assistants
hired in the field. It was this eminently military goal, that of an orderly transition (a disciplined
and hierarchically organized, step-by-step development) from slavery to a South structured on
some form of waged labor, which could not be sacrificed no matter what the status of the
freemen in the end of the day might be.923
The task, specifically that assigned by Congress, of establishing the freemen on the land was
complicated, frustrated and eventually undermined by the President. Johnson, of course, was
clearly opposed to land redistribution: His Amnesty Proclamation of 29 May 1865 made this
clear. The decree "sounded a note of sternness toward the disloyal, but it was, in fact, a
handsome system for the dispensing of political patronage throughout the South." In it, blacks
were studiously avoided: There was no mention of lands, nor any mention of their prospects
for effective participation in the life of the nation (i.e., enfranchisement). The purpose of the
Proclamation was to quickly restore the "natural leading element" of the old order - and this
much was clear on the ground. For example, McFeely cites the situation in Union Springs,
Alabama where planters started a rumor that Johnson's decree "revoked" Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation.924
As was the case with the struggle on the ground, the late spring-early summer 1865 was the
decisive period for the Bureau, that is, for its chances for effectively carrying out its
Congressionally-mandated mission. However, the intent of Johnson's decree was clear, at
least to military officers of the army and ex-officers of the Bureau: Pardoned planter rebels
were to be fully restored (minus, of course, ex-slaves) even at the expense of freemen who
occupied, worked and had "possessory" title to abandoned lands confiscated during the
war.925
In early June, immediately after issuance of Johnson's decree, one of those officers, Gen.
Quincy Adams Gillmore - commander of the Department of South for South Carolina, Georgia
and Florida, sought to enforce it by removing 40,000 freemen from 485,000 acres occupied
after Sherman had issued his Field Order No. 15. Gillmore correctly read Johnson's decree as
an obligatory authorization to rescind Sherman's Order. Gillmore informed War Secretary
Stanton of his intention, and Stanton, wishing to avoid being caught in the middle of the
developing confrontation, turned the problem over to Howard as Bureau Commissioner.
On 8 June, Howard countermanded Gillmore's restoration order by re-instituting Sherman
Field Order No. 15, but not without transforming it in a decisive manner. He informed Saxton,
as Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau district corresponding to Gilmore's military district,
923For the commitment to a smooth transition and social order, McFeely, Ibid, 65; and for the same in coastal South

Carolina, Strickland, "Ibid," 52.

For Howards leadership capacity, see Appendix II, "Chancellorsville (XIV). Command Failures," the section
specifically referencing Howard. An ominous indication of the new appointees moral courage, Howards performance
during the Atlanta campaign once again exhibited his inability to take any initiative even at the expense of a good
deal of soldiery life. Refusing to accept the observation-based report of his own subordinates (since Sherman's orders
presupposed no resistance in his, Howard's, front, and he feared Sherman's wrath much more than the loss of the
lives of a few of soldiers), at Adairsville (17 May 1864), Howard insisted one of his brigades assaults well-entrenched
defenses with the resultant, completely unnecessary, heavy causalities. See Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 194.
924McFeely, Ibid, 93 (citation); on planter rumors concerning Lincoln's decree, Ibid, 95.
925The sense of Johnson's decree of 29 May 1865 is nicely developed by McFeely, Ibid, chapters 5 and 6. This

sense was also clear to observers not directly involved in ongoing events. McFeely cites James M. Russell in London
who wrote Johnson, stating, "'that you hate the negroes [is clear] ... and in order to secure reelection, you will pardon
those who by an unjust settlement, may continue to hold the colored race as serfs, though no longer slaves." Ibid, 95.

that "he [Saxton] must allow white men to live on these lands." This action, which effectively
changed the intent of Congress, constituted an early indication of the way in which Howard
would handle any difficult situation: In his better moments, he would seek compromise.
To cover himself, Howard, then, proceeded to seek an official opinion on the entire matter by
writing U.S. Attorney General James Speed and requesting clarification of the Act of Congress
creating the Bureau. On 22 June, Speed responded through proper channels with a written
opinion addressed to Secretary of War Stanton. He unequivocally indicated that the Bureau
had undisputed "control of all subjects relating to refugees and freemen" with control of lands
solely qualified by use of those lands for the welfare of freemen. He further stated, the
Commissioner "has the authority, under the direction of the President, to set apart for the use
of loyal refugees and freemen the lands in question." The Commissioner was "required" by the
Act to provide every male freemen forty acres of land. While Speed's opinion ducked the
Constitutionally difficult question of the "validity of the title to the lands once they were granted
to the freemen," he did state that, "it seems to me plain that Congress looked primarily ... to
the personal and social interests of loyal refugees and freemen," and surely not to
treacherous, planter rebels. Speed's opinion also failed to clarify the case, not envisioned by
Congress, of a President who refused to abide by the plain intent of the law.926
Saxton was in Washington in the last week of July in order to discuss with Howard the
situation in South Carolina, and to, it appears, attempt to persuade the Commissioner to issue
directives to immediately begin implementation of land distribution to the freemen. He
emerged from these meetings, according to his diary, "disappointed." So, on 16 July upon his
return, Saxton issued instructions, his Circular #1, to the agents in his district. Here Saxton,
alone among leading Bureau personnel, exercised the kind of leadership that would have
been necessary at the national level to open up the possibility of a successful challenge to
Johnson. The instructions directed his agents to inform the freemen land distribution would be
undertaken, viz., that the forty acre farms would be created on, abandoned and confiscated
lands. Howard, inspired, as it were, by Saxton, completed a draft the very next day of his
Circular #13. Basing himself directly on the authority of Congress (and citing the Act of 3
March 1865 that created the Bureau) but acting without Presidential approval, Howard
instructed his staff to "set aside" land for distribution in forty acre plots. This circular was not,
however, promulgated until Friday, 28 July. The same weekend Howard went on vacation to
Maine.927
In Howard's absence, Col. James Scott Fullerton, his Adjutant General, assumed charge of
the Bureau (over Howard's chief deputy, John Eaton, Jr., Assistant Commissioner for
Washington, DC, who, McFeely reports, had no abiding interest in the Bureau). Fullerton,
though, was still in South Carolina reviewing district Bureau operations at Howard's
instructions, and would not return to Washington until 10 August. Thus, dissemination of the
Circular was undertaken by Major William Fowler, Assistant Adjutant General and head of the
land desk. Undoubtedly worried about the chain of command and intent on covering himself,
926For Gilmore' reading of the decree, Stanton's ducking of the issue and Howard's countermand, Ibid, 97; citation of

Howard to Saxton and his request to Speed for clarification, Ibid, 98; for Speed's reading, Ibid, 99-100 (citations,
emphases in original), and also Bentley, History of the Freedmen's Bureau, 92.
The majority of members of both Houses would have been most unlikely to anticipate the event of a President who
refused to abide by the intent of the law: Lincoln, as a still living President (whether or no in the event he would have
acted any differently than Johnson), had given no indication of opposition to the legislation that created the
Freedmen's Bureau. Recall that, in fact, Lincoln signed the Act into law the very same day it passed both Houses.
927Diary entry cited in Ibid, 102; for Circular #1, Ibid, 103. It seems that Howard really screwed up his courage, for
according to McFeely who accepts Bentley's view in this matter (Ibid, 93), he wanted to present President Johnson
with a fait accompli "which, done, the President would not undo" (Ibid, 108-109). Such motivation was entirely
uncharacteristic of Howard. We doubt this reading of events. For the "set aside," Ibid, 104; Bentley, Ibid, 93.

Fowler distributed the circular with a gloss. His cover letter stated that the circular had,
according to McFeely, "not yet received the approval of the President," and that the agents
were to be guided by it inasmuch as it expressed Howard's views, in Fowler's words,
"'pending submission to the President.'" The effective outcome was obvious: Only the boldest
assistant commissioners, those additionally with an explicit commitment to freemen, moved
ahead with implementation of the instructions contained in the circular.928
The confrontation began to come to a head over the case of a Nashville, Tennessee planter,
B.B. Leake. Leake had been pardoned by Johnson on 21 July and immediately thereafter (27
July) sought restoration of confiscated Nashville lands. He was denied his request by Gen.
Clinton B. Fisk, Assistant Commissioner for Tennessee. In a machinating practice common to
southern planters, Leake sent a woman, his aunt, C. Clara Cole, to Washington to plead his
case with the President. She saw and spoken with Johnson, and left a letter presenting in
writing Leake's case. Johnson forwarded the letter to the Bureau on 15 August, and
demanded an immediate report on the case. With nothing forthcoming, Johnson sent the letter
over to the Bureau again the next day, this time with a notation. The appended note stated
that Leake had been Presidentially pardoned, and thereby he was entitled "to all his rights of
property, except as to slaves." He ordered Fisk, or rather Howard to order Fisk, to relinquish
all property to Leake, adding "the same action will be had in all similar cases." In a stroke,
Johnson had undermined Congressional intent, superceded all Congressional authority, and
appropriated the latter for himself.929
Still no word of these events was mentioned to Howard. Fowler wrote him indicating there had
been some "'misunderstanding'" of the circular, and he included a draft of changes proposed
by Fullerton. These changes, in fact, were consciously designed to undercut and dismantle
Circular #13. Fullerton, intimately trusted by Howard, had been working hard to undermine the
effects of a policy oriented on freemen for some time. Fullerton was a de facto fifth column
inside the Bureau attempting to build the agency as a power center for himself inside the
national government, while carrying out the orders and designs of his commander in chief.
Fullerton engaged in real, if not-so-subtle subterfuge, duplicity and character assassination:
He did everything in his power to remove those morally courageous assistant commissioners
(by identifying them to Johnson), while seeing they were replaced by men who would follow
the Presidential line.930
On 17 August, in the absence of Howard, Johnson called John Eaton over to the White House
and reprimanded him for alleged anti-planter and pro-freemen actions of agents in Georgia,
Louisiana and Tennessee. He further indicated that he did not want any agents operating in
his home, East Tennessee. The following day, Fullerton, acting on his own authority, instructed
Clinton Fisk not to set up a Bureau agent in East Tennessee, and he indicated that Circular
#13 was being rewritten. Fisk was compelled to comply. Meanwhile, Fullerton had written
Howard to apprise him of the Leake affair in central Tennessee, and to warn him of the
President's angry insistence on his restoration cum pardons program. There is, according to
McFeely, no record of opposition at this point coming from Howard. Howard returned to the
928For Eaton's relation to the Bureau, Ibid, 111; Howard, Autobiography, 2:216; for Fowler, Ibid, and for his gloss and

the predictable response of the assistant commissioners, McFeely, Ibid, 112.

929On Leake, Fisk and the rest of the affair, Ibid, 113-114; Fullerton had by now returned to Washington. Though in
contact with Howard, he kept silent, failing to report these events to the Commissioner. Johnson notations cited in
Ibid, 114, and Bentley, Ibid, 95.
930For Fowler's correspondence with Howard concerning "modifications," McFeely, Ibid, 115; on Fullerton as a fifth
column (our term), Ibid, 110. Fullerton viewed the efforts to assist freemen as tantamount to dismantling the Bureau,
since turning over lands to them at low 1861 rents dissipated both its rent-generated revenues and its landed basis.
Ibid; for his activities on behalf of Johnson, Ibid, 68-71, 108, 115-116, esp. 119-120.

Washington before month's end, and all the while Fullerton wrote assistant commissioners to
direct them to actively aid in advancing the President's restoration program.931
Before the month was out, the events that transpired in the Leake case were repeated on
confiscated lands occupied by freemen and formerly owned by the Donelsons of central
Tennessee. Assistant Commissioner Fisk was, of course, once again involved, and in his
defense of the freemen (who were shortly removed) Howard did nothing to come to his aid. By
mid-September, Circular #13 had been officially rescinded, and Johnson had Howard touring
the Southeast to assure planters that the Bureau was fully supportive of the Presidential
restoration program. Johnson's victory over the half-hearted Howard, and, more importantly,
his burial of the Bureau's Congressionally-mandated mission, was completed as Howard
spoke to freemen farmers on Edisto Island (in the South Carolina Sea Islands) in the latter half
of October attempting to explain to them that they must vacate their lands.932
July and August 1865 were decisive months for formation of the Freedmen's Bureau. At this
time, its institutional role in the post-war settlement was established. Yet, it was during this
period that the Bureau original mission was transformed. The condition of the subversion of
the Freedmen's Bureau legislatively-mandated mission was the absence of an assembled
Congress in session, and, given this condition, the actual fact of subversion was decided by
the presence of weak leadership morally uncommitted to the land-based autonomy of a
freepeople. Under these conditions the Bureau was destined to be reduced to a welfare
agency (i.e., refugee care, support of hospitals and orphanages, etc.) and, more importantly,
without an alternative to the "free labor" form of labor organization - say, on the model of
independent yeomanry formed around freemen-owned small farms, it was fated to be an
instrument of planter reaction on the ground. Thus, at the agency's summit, the objective
outcome was to rejoin effective agency practice in the field - which was merely a continuation
of the army practice of enforcing labor contracts.
Without Congress and with weak leadership, even the best intentioned assistant
commissioners in the field - such as Rufus Saxton, Clinton Fisk, Thomas Conway or Edgar
Gregory - would enforce the odious labor-contract as the case of Saxton in South Carolina
clearly demonstrated. With Congress assembled, even Howard might have found the
backbone to consistently oppose Johnson. Congress, or at least a large minority in Congress
(and that radical minority was there and potent, as the events of the following year where to
show), could have acted as an alternative pole of attraction, insisting on its Constitutionally
determined role; and, having legislated and having that legislation signed into law (by Lincoln),
Congressional radicals could have countermanded Presidential instructions and thus upheld
that law against the Johnson's arbitrary action. Congress in session would have provided
even a weak Commissioner, such as was Howard, with room to maneuver, depriving the
President of his easy victory, and perhaps by way of stalling even neutralized him and, thus,
prepared for a major confrontation with Congress over the Bureau's mission. The actions of
the Bureau's fifth column, James Fullerton, would have had to have been much more subtle,
and likely much less effective. But in the end, these events are merely counterfactual.933
931 Johnson reprimand of Eaton, Ibid, 115; on the rewrite of circular #13, Ibid, 115-116; for Fullerton and Howard's

correspondence as well as Fullerton instructions to assistant commissioners in the field, Ibid, 115-117.
932On Howard's failure to defend Fisk, Ibid, 118-120; on his capitulation at Edisto Island, Ibid, 134, 140-145. Johnson
did not merely return planter lands by throttling the Freedmen's Bureau. The Second Confiscation Act (1862) also
authorized expropriation of rebel property. During the period June-December 1865, James Speed, Johnson's Attorney
General, restricted and then abrogated confiscations undertaken by authority of the Act in the districts of the South
through federal attorney generals assigned to these districts. See Michael Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of
Andrew Johnson, 40-43.
933Howard did, in fact, later oppose Johnson. In late November 1865, as Congress prepared to assemble - the
opening session occurred 3 December 1865 - Howard, prodded by Stanton, began to go into opposition to the

On 16 July 1866, the one year life of the Bureau was extended for an additional two years
over the veto of President Johnson. Most of the Bureau's work ended 31 December 1868,
with minimal operations continuing until 30 June 1872. But once the Thirty-Ninth Congress
assembled in early December 1865, the Bureau became swept up in the broader opposition to
Presidential restoration.934

President. Ibid, 192f. In regards to rendering Fullerton less effective, it might be noted that beginning in late
November 1865, Howard did also stall, and from that point on Fullerton was not consulted and, to be sure, was no
longer central to daily operations at Bureau headquarters. When Fullerton went into open opposition to Howard and
the Bureau in February 1866, he was fired. Ibid.
934On the extension of the Bureau's life over Presidential veto, Howard, Ibid, 2:282, and Barnes, History of the ThirtyNinth Congress, 306.

Part II
The Party of Freedom
Radical Republicans. Revolutionary Democrats or Jacobins in Capitalist Garb?
[Meaning of Radicalism]
Radicalism had different meanings at different times in antebellum history and, in particular, in
the history of the early (i.e., pre-1872) Republican party.
Prior to the emergence of the Republican party, radicals distinguished themselves from both
old line Democracy and old line Whiggery by their overriding anti-slavery commitments. In this
respect, radicals originally emerged from the abolitionist milieu and grew up with abolitionists.
They differentiated themselves from abolitionists (from whom, for Democrats and Whigs, they
were indistinguishable) by their commitment to politically ending slavery, and, moreover, by
their practical commitment to legal methods within the framework of the Constitution.
Abolitionists, on the other hand, often disregarded legal methods in favor of direct action
aimed at inflammatory excitement of opposition to slavery. They disregarded the Constitution
as well or at least its prevailing interpretations. Thus, among the two leading abolitionist
tendencies, those grouped around Gerrit Smith demanded expropriation of slaveholders
without compensation and those around William Lloyd Garrison advocated disunion with the
slave states. Radicals considered the direct methods practically reduced from these views
(incendiary speeches, ceremonious Constitution-copy burnings, freeing imprisoned fugitive
slaves) counterproductive, or, in the political vocabulary of the times, obstructionist. The
earliest radicals had, however, also been opposed to other tendencies at work in the
abolitionist milieu: When differences between the two larger groups came to head and they
split in 1839, it was the broad, expansive demands implicit in the hitherto unified movement,
especially women's demands for equality, that frightened men who had always made and held
patriarchal assumptions.935
With their entry into the Republican party in the process of formation, the content of radicalism
began to undergo change, change that would become a constant feature of radicalism in the
coming years. Between 1856 and 1860, radicalism meant building the Republican party on the
anti-slavery foundations as opposed merely to the old Whig program though, to be sure, the
party platform did not go beyond non-extension (i.e., opposition to slavery in the territories).
During the secession crisis of winter 1860-1861, extreme radicals opposed all factions that
vacillated, compromised or were conciliatory toward rebels: Radicals actually wanted war,
since they saw victory in war as an opportunity to abolish slavery.936 Still with the outset of the
war, the old Constitutional basis of the radical position was undermined. The war or, better,
cumulative Union army losses during the first year of actual fighting compelled a choice: Either
unyielding support for the Union territorial integrity and northern military victory, or fidelity to
the Constitution (no matter how stretched the interpretation) and the real possibility of
dismemberment of the Union. As anti-slavery nationalists, consistent, extreme radicals such
as Stevens and Wade meant to insure Union victory at whatever the cost, regardless of the
Constitution. (This was not, though, solely a radical position, as witness Lincoln himself). By
and large, radicals looked the other way in the face of extralegal actions by Lincoln's
government.
The content of radicalism underwent still more and frequent change during the course of the
war. From the bombing of Fort Sumter until autumn 1862, radicals defined themselves by
935Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, 407.
936As the announcement was made on Friday, 12 April 1861, that South Carolina militia had fired on Fort Sumner,

from the gallery of the Ohio Senate Abby Kelly Foster, an abolitionist, rejoiced and shouted out "Glory to God" at the
news. "She believed in a solution by the sword: Through blood would the slave be freed." Frederic Trautmann,
"Introduction" to C. Grebner, We Were the Ninth, xi-xii.

asserting the necessity of vigorously prosecuting the war. From latter half of 1862 until the
following summer, radicals demanded the use of black troops and insisted that the war not be
terminated short of northern victory. From Gettysburg (early July 1863) through the failure to
destroy Lee's army and capture Richmond in the spring of the following year, radicals at once
were compelled to again insist on, in the face of dismay bordering on demoralization,
complete Union victory.
At this moment, radicals were further distinguished by forging ahead and legislating the
abolition of slavery nationally (Thirteenth Amendment). From the second half of 1864 until the
end of the war, radicalism mean opposition to a quick, unlegislated and Constitutionally
unsecured (i.e., Presidential) restoration of the South. In the aftermath of the war until 1868,
radicals set themselves apart, in light of Andrew Johnson's Presidential restoration policy, by
their commitment to realizing black suffrage and socio-economic transformation of the South.
In this phase, the extreme radical program entailed a commitment to full political rights for
freemen secured by land redistribution achieved through the uncompensated expropriation of
all southern planter property. Radicals did not win all these fights, and when they did when (as
they did in most phases of their development) it was a slowly forthcoming, often compromised
victory.
Radicalism is largely known through the great personalities that constituted its leadership.
Equally important, however, were the class forces that pushed these men forward, and the
opponents they engaged in the struggles that defined radicalism. We shall review each in turn.
[Radical Leadership (I). Men, Commitments, Class Origins, and Personal Formation]
Recall that radicals were committed to legal methods of pursuing change. That meant
commitment to work on the terrain of the bourgeois State, particularly state houses, state
legislatures and Congress. Their commitments never transcended this framework. And why
should it have? Prior to 1860, radicals often had considerable power inside state legislatures.
After 1860, radicals exercised real power inside the national State, and for a period between
1866 and 1868, they were a dominant power at nearly every level of the State. Given this
frame of political reference, radicals were quite successful. But who were the radicals?
Instead of referring strictly to those half dozen figures who made up the radical leadership, let
us instead follow an at once more narrow and more inclusive strategy, by basing ourselves on
examination of a group of Congressional radicals identified in terms of actual political positions
as decided by legislative voting. (In so doing, we at once exclude two of the greatest radical
abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, and, at the same time, we allow
ourselves consideration of a range of positions among radicals.) If we examine those men
who served in at least four sessions and two congresses between 1861-1870, we can compile
the following list: James Ashley (OH), George Boutwell (MA), Henry Bromwell (IL), John
Broomall (PA), Sidney Clarke (KS), Amasa Cobb (WI), Henry Winter Davis (MD), Thomas
Elliot (MA), James Garfield (OH), Josiah Grinnell (IA), George Julian (IN), William Kelley (PA),
Joseph McClurg (MO), Robert Schenck (OH), Thaddeus Stevens (PA) and Rowland
Trowbridge (MI) in the House, and Zachariah Chandler (MI), Jacob Howard (MI), Charles
Sumner (MA), Benjamin Wade (OH) and Henry Wilson (MA) in the Senate. Based on a very
brief review of biographies of these more or less extreme radicals, we note, first, that the
overwhelming majority of them represented states that made up the either the old
Massachusetts abolitionist heartland or the Yankee corridor. With the exceptions of Davis,
McClurg and Clarke every radical represented one of these states or districts in these states.
(And, if we extend the evolution of the New England migration into the late 1850s and early
1860s, Kansas, hence Clarke, would also fall into this group of states.)

As we described earlier, this free labor Yankee corridor constituted the belt of land that
stretched from western New England, across western upstate New York, northern
Pennsylvania, the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, southern Michigan,
southeastern Wisconsin, and southern and eastern Iowa. Free labor class forces included not
only farmers, tenants and agricultural waged laborers, but also working class artisans, small
manufacturers and self-employed merchant-traders. These were the productive classes, and,
it should be noted, in a basically and still largely agrarian society, the social model of
productivity was the farmer who simultaneously produced his own sufficiency and generated
surpluses for sale on the market. The corridor was, in fact, largely settled, populated and
developed by families from out of a very small layer of prosperous capitalist farmers
developed. These farmers were men who, on the basis of their prosperity and that of like men
and families in similar positions, could merely look around and self-evidently conclude that
free labor created a garden (in the nineteenth century sense) in the West. Committed to a
geographically expanding Republic as the context of economic growth and individual
prosperity and well-being, they, accordingly, were opposed to slavery extension into the
territories, to slavery as a form of degradation of and threat to free labor. Since more than a
few of these men had Puritan consciences the best of them abhorred slavery for the
humiliation, brutalization, and dehumanization of the slave. (These commitments, often less
that of the humanitarian abhorrence of slavery, extended to small property owning farmers
and tenants who viewed them as social models.) As elected political representatives of a
massive free labor mlange, especially capitalist farming middle strata, radicalism in the first
place, then, had everything to do with free soil.937
Irreducible to class origins, class or intellectual formation, radicalism was, second, constituted
as a practical commitment to the abolition of slavery. Ashley, Boutwell, Bromwell, Clarke,
Cobb, Kelley, Julian, Wade and Wilson all lacked any formal education, and Wilson was
bound into indentured servitude for five years of his adolescent life. Kelley and Wilson were
artisans in their youths. For Boutwell, Julian, Wade and Wilson, assimilation of a fundamental
hostility to slavery, learning to read, and religious training were sides of the self-same activity
which took place as a mother read from the bible to her pre-teenaged children. Each had
varying degrees of a typically long and difficult daily, farming youth, planting, tending food
animals, wood chopping, fence repair, etc. Chandler and Broomall received common school
educations. Elliot, Garfield, Grinnell, Howard, McClurg, Schenck, Stevens, Sumner and
Trowbridge, on the other hand, were either college or university educated. Ashley's father (and
grandfather) were itinerant ministers: He developed his hatred for, as a direct witness to the
brutality of, slavery while riding a Virginia and Kentucky preaching circuit with his father.
Wade, possessing like Ashley a Puritan heritage, was not a member of a formal church
denomination. Grinnell was a Congregationalist clergyman and a highly successful farmer.
Garfield administered a theological seminary before entering politics. Ashley, Chandler and
McClurg were at one time merchants, the former lower to middling and the latter two wealthy.
Boutwell, Bromwell and Clarke were newspaper editors before entering politics. Ashley,
Boutwell, Bromwell, Broomall, Cobb, Elliot, Howard, Julian, Kelley, McClurg, Schenck,
Stevens, Sumner, Trowbridge, Wade and Wilson were all lawyers. Law hardly had the socially
937The criteria for radicalism in the House from 1864 through 1868 can be easily enumerated: During the 1st, 1864

session of the 38th Congress radical meant opposition to white's only suffrage; and, during the 2nd, 1865 session of
the 38th Congress, radical entailed support for the Wade-Davis bill. During the 1st, 1866 session of the 39th
Congress, radicalism meant support for black suffrage; and in the 2nd, 1867 session of the 39th Congress, radicalism
signified opposition to Senate amendments to the Reconstruction bill. In the 1st, 1868 session of the 40th Congress,
radicalism was indicated in support for reporting impeachment from committee to the full House. See Michael
Benedict, A Compromise of Principle, "Lists: Radicalism in the House and Senate," 341-362, from whose account of
Congressional developments this characterization is drawn.

parasitic and politically backward connotations it does today. Primarily it was a respected
profession from which most of the politically advanced and politically engaged men of the day
emerged, one that, moreover, opened up opportunity. In fact, each man was vastly upwardly
mobile in his lifetime with only Chandler, Stevens and Sumner coming from really well-to-do,
established families.938
If the vast majority of radicals (including those unnamed above) had their origins in the free
labor mlange, it is not strictly accurate to designate this softly stratified aggregation
composed of the "productive classes" of society, as, employing our earlier characterization, a
"middle stratum." Occurring rapidly, American capitalist development was (and remains)
typically uneven: Because the mid-nineteenth century American North was undergoing
transformation, it was both largely agrarian and urbanized in significant areas. The regional
economy of the Northeast, centered on its commercial and banking metropolitan poles of New
York, Boston and Philadelphia, was dotted by a plethora of smaller industrial towns. Very
small farming towns similarly dotted the old West with emerging industrial metropoles along
the Great Lakes (Cleveland, Chicago and Milwaukee) and the Mississippi and Ohio River
valleys (St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh). Because of this dual character, the
central farming component of the various strata of the free labor mlange was, to the extent
the past was embedded in the living historical present, a basic productive class and, to the
extent the future already haunted the same present, a middle stratum. The significance of this
dynamic characterization of the class origins of as well as the classes politically represented
by radicals will becomes evident in our later discussion of the ossification of the Republican
party.
[Radical Leadership (II): Conscience]
If radicals' place of origins by birth or descent were almost exclusively New England, this fact
has meaning because New England geographically embodied the American homeland of what
hitherto we have called the Puritan conscience. Taking advantage of the inherent ambiguity in
the decontextualized appropriation of this French word, we suggest, typically, radical
awareness embodied an inseparable unity of moral conscience and politically advanced,
theoretically sophisticated consciousness. It, accordingly, behooves us to consider however
summarily the social-visionary and politico-theoretical commitments of radicals.
The first feature to note is their rigorous moral-religious formation. Radicals were
predominately Calvinist (Presbyterian or Congregationalist). The denominations that English
Calvinists, or Puritans - whose greatest period of migration to the "New World" historically
dated from the persecutory period of Charles I's Personal Rule,939 attached themselves to all
dated from the sects that proliferated during the English Civil War. The central feature that
characterized the vanguard element of that war, the militants among Cromwell's New Model
Army, was the manner in which rigorously logical, morally scrupulous conscience dictated
action; and, the feature that most characterized the revolutionary center of the vanguard, the
Levellers, was the increasingly secular, universalistic and rationalistic nature of their thought.
Mediated and informed by universalistic, anticipatorily Enlightenment concerns, these features
were quietly transmitted from generation to generation among the more pious New
Englanders. They began to publicly re-emerge among abolitionists, and reached their
938Biographical information has been culled from the "Bibliographical Index" in Barnes, History of the Thirty-Ninth

Congress of the United States and the Dictionary of American Biography. The following biographies have also been
consulted: Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade. Radical Republican from Ohio, Ernst McKay, Henry Wilson:
Practical Radical, Thomas Brown, George Sewall Boutwell: Human Rights Advocate, Patrick Riddleberger, George
Washington Julian. Radical Republican.
939Charles' Personal Rule (i.e., kingly rule without recourse to the calling of a Parliament) was chronologically defined
by the period from 1630 until the outbreak of English Civil War in 1638.

American high water mark among the political abolitionists known as radicals. Radicals
notably were passionately committed to social justice (and its practical presuppositions such
as the right to seek redress of grievances), and their practical commitments to it took priority
over any positive, and even "fundamental" or "organic," law. They upheld the primacy of
reason, and evinced rigorously logical thought founded on unshakable, moral-religious
principles, first and foremost of which was the essential equality of all human beings. Radicals
exhibited an often practically realized unwillingness to abandon principle in the face of
momentary advantage or political (especially, patronage) pressure. Lastly, radical practice
consistently involved the public articulation, defense and promotion of principles, both in front
of constituencies who rarely came up to the level of radicals and in the state legislatures and
in Congress where they confronted decided pro-slavery opposition, opposition that engaged in
practices ranging from censure to threats of intimidation and outright violence. (Recall, in 1856
Charles Sumner was beaten nearly unconscious on the floor of the Senate by a Southerner,
Preston Brooks. In typically southern "gentlemanly" fashion reserved for slaves, this South
Carolina "colleague" "caned" Sumner for condemning, on the basis of his "outrageously"
offensive Yankee principles, pro-slavery border ruffians in Kansas.)940
[Radical Leadership (III). Internal Differences]
Among the radicals, there were typical differences. Not a function of class origins, these were
partially a matter of temperament, partially (though not in all cases) a matter of intellectual
disposition and rigidity. Among even the extreme radicals, there were those (best exemplified
by Stevens, Wade and Wilson) who were "practical" in the vulgar sense: These men,
possessing equally expansion visions of social justice and the possible and morally every bit
as sensitive, were willing when nothing else more could be had to take (say, legislatively) what
was available. There were those (Sumner is the outstanding example), however, who were
intransigent, men whose commitments largely could not be mediated by and assimilate
prosaic developments. This is not to say either group was willing to compromise principle.
They were not, and that unwillingness perhaps characterized them as a group as much as
anything else.
In any historical period when there is the wherewithal to move forward, and the contradictory
structure of society is not only highlighted but gives all appearance of impending conflict,
scrupled men immovably committed to principle not only invariably rise, they push back the
limits of the possible and wring more historical progress from their era than contemporaries
ever conceived feasible. Such was the case with the extreme radicals, not the least the
intransigents. But in a period in which a shift in the balance and relations of class forces favors
without any fundamental change at least a temporary resolution of the contradictions that
propel social conflict, "practical" and intransigent men will go their separate ways. This was
clearly the case with radicals inside the Republican party between 1870 and 1872.941
940For the East Anglia-based, Puritan settlement of New England, David Hackett Fisher, Albion's Seed, 13-206; for a

discussion of the English Civil War with reference to the practical morality and politics of the New Model and the
Levellers, see chapter 4 of our Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War.
George Julian was a Quaker. However, even Quakers, whom Puritans (before their sectarian splintering) long predated, were an offshoot of the English Civil War.
With regard to violence, Thad Stevens recalls in the late 1850s representatives armed themselves with pistols and
knives on the floors of the Congress amidst a rancor and invective so great that they were prepared to do deadly
battle.
941There is an apocryphal story told about the early, great political radical Joshua Giddings of Ohio. It was said that
Giddings had once rejected the pleas of an ex-slave to purchase his wife (in order, presumably, to free her) because
"he did not deal in flesh and blood." (Cited by Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade, 329, n. 37.) This, in an
abusive and in very exaggerated form, suggests what we intend in the designation "intransigent."

[Radical Leadership (IV). Republican Party Opposition]

Radicals were shaped by their struggles, particularly those with the intra-party opposition,
conservative Republicans. (At the outset of and early on in the war, the northern peace
Democracy as a mass movement did not objectively exist. Conservative Republicans, bulwark
of the informal party of property especially in Congress, functioned as the major obstacle to
the historical progress sought by radicals.)
From its actual start until the end of the war, the center of conservatism in the Republican
party revolved first and foremost around Lincoln (contrary to all mythologies of the "great man"
who mediated both party extremes to develop the most humane and viable course). A second
center could be found around his Cabinet that included Stewart, Gideon Welles, Montgomery
Blair and Caleb Smith. A tertiary center was situated in the Congress.
Outside the cabinet, prominent men such as House "radical" Charles Francis Adams engaged
in conciliatory gestures very early on. Similarly, during the secession crisis, in the House and
Senate separate committees were set up to mollify southern fire-eaters. The conciliators put
up proposal after proposal demonstrating that, after thirty years of southern planter domination
of the State at the national level and ten years of threats, abuse and indignities consciously
aimed by Southerner members at extracting concessions on the geographical extent of
slavery, northern Congressmen remained smug in their conservatism and foolishly blind to the
meaning and significance of slavery for southern life and the centrality of slavery to the social
dynamics impelling confrontation. On 18 December 1860, a bloc of northern and border state
Democratic and northern Republican conciliators in the Senate put forth the Crittenden
proposal (offered by John Crittenden, D-KY). The central resolution of this proposal, the most
serious put forth, offered a geographically-based compromise, one that extended the 36' 30
line west (from the southern boundary of Missouri) to the Pacific, fixing slavery south of the
line and freezing this arrangement with a Constitutional amendment. During the crisis period,
radicals were able to block it and the Crittenden Compromise could not get adequate votes in
the Senate for passage. Until the bombing of Fort Sumter (which ended the secession crisis
by finalizing southern separation, a crisis that had opened with the November 1860 election of
a Republican President), conservatives were led by Sen. William Seward, shortly to become
Lincoln's new Secretary of State.942
As first South Carolina (20 December 1860), then six other soon-to-be-followed-by-four-more
southern states, seceded, Lincoln working with and through Seward, remained firm on the key
issue to which the party platform committed Republicans, namely, repudiation of slavery
extension - the issue commitment to which could only mean war. However, he was already
giving signs of the soft approach to rebels that would characterize his policies throughout the
war: Not only was he was willing to request northern states modify their personal liberty laws
(to accommodate slave catchers) and to assure non-interference in established states where
slavery already existed, he had (through party manager Thurlow Weed) requested Seward
present a resolution in the Senate (late December 1860) for a Constitutional amendment to
prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery as it existed. (In a little recorded fact, this
amendment passed in the House and Senate, and only the outbreak of war prevented
development of the ratification process.) In a Senate speech on 12 January, Seward offered a
popular sovereignty-styled, modified restatement of the Crittenden Compromise, now in effect
committing the new Administration to it. None of this satisfied the secessionists (nor, for that
matter, the radicals).943
942For the period of radical-conservative struggle prior to Lincoln's official ascendancy (1856-1860), Hans Trefousse,

The Radical Republicans, 103-136.

943For the Lincoln inspired Seward Senate resolution, Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade, 137, 141-143 and Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, 240-241, 243; for Seward's 12 January 1861 speech, Van Deusen, Ibid., 244-245

After the bombing of Fort Sumter (12 April 1861) Lincoln began to retreat behind the moderate
Whiggery that had won him the Republican nomination. This was brought home by his
thoroughgoing commitment to a border states policy (viz., efforts toward appeasement of
slaveholders in those states, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, that had remained
in the Union) - most clearly exhibited in his rescission of Gen. John Frmont's late August
1861 action abolishing slavery in Missouri, and by the tenacious manner in which he clung to
McClellan, his staff a hotbed of conciliatory southern sympathizers, for months after the
latter's generalship had been discredited. Lincoln's error in regard to Frmont (and later
Hunter) was enormous. Of course, it was not just Lincoln's own predilections and fears, his
Cabinet's inertia, conservatives Republicans and Democrats in Congress, banking and
mercantile interests in the East nor a generalized popular wariness about war - all pressures
mediated to him through his party and the Cabinet - that made for his conservatism. Beyond
these pressures, the District of Columbia itself was populated by slaveholders and southern
sympathizers, while the historically small Washington-resident, national bureaucracy was
permeated by traitorous elements.
Lincoln's conservatively informed misjudgment, however, went beyond this. As Julian
suggested, the pro-slavery, Copperhead reaction that raised its ugly head in the North can be
dated from Lincoln's annulment of Frmont's order. At every step of the war Lincoln was
fought, sometimes gently and at other times hostilely by radicals - led by Wade, Chandler and
Julian on the Joint Committee on Conduct of the War, Stevens in the House and Sumner in
the Senate, backed by Stanton in the Cabinet and by radical newspaper editors, especially
Wendell Phillips. Each policy advance was marked by a struggle between Lincoln, and the
conservative forces the worked through him on the one side, and the radicals on the other.
Lincoln resisted each advance making them at best slowly and hesitantly, at worst kicking and
screaming. Without radical pressure to interpretatively mediate to him the force and
compulsion of events, his personal tendency was to backslide. Ideationally speaking, this
backsliding followed in rigorous fashion from Lincoln's profoundly conservative, and practically
refuted perspective on the perpetuity of the Union and the indestructibility of the states, a
perspective incarnating his aversion to "meddling" with the affairs, laws and institutions of the
states, one expressed in his willingness to tolerate the "local customs" of slaveholders against
his own objectively meaningless because deeply subjective drama (personal opposition to
slavery). And his backsliding continued down to the end of the war. On 6 April 1865, Lincoln
directed General Godfrey Weitzel, military commander in charge of captive Richmond, to post
an order throughout the city inviting high-ranking rebel officers and members of the
Confederate legislature to meet in Richmond on 25 April in order to discuss the restoration of
peace and allied issues. Fully uniformed, Confederate officers, strolling around the city as if
they owned it, took this to mean just what was intended, namely, an offer to restore the South
on a status quo antebellum basis minus, of course, slavery. That such a sense was intended
is explicit in the Lincoln's 11 April announcement that he would hold to the restoration plan he
had proclaimed back in December 1863, namely, restoration would be carried out by those
Southerners enfranchised under the laws and constitutions of the states prior to the rebellion.
The terms of surrender offered to Confederate General Joseph Johnston by the Union's
William T. Sherman on 16 April, though likely transcending the limits of even Lincoln's
embryonic restoration policy, were inspired by a property-minded magnanimity in the spirit of
Lincoln and demonstrated how easily that policy could be construed along pro-Confederate
lines. Yet these terms clearly constituted a betrayal of most of what had been achieved in

and Trefousse, Ibid., 139.

northern victory. (Fortunately, Andrew Johnson immediately rescinded these terms.) Under
Lincoln's wings, the conservative forces inside and outside the Republican party flourished.944
Lincoln was not the master of events, a great "Emancipator," nor a genius at the head of his
party. Rather, he was compelled by the force of circumstances and events (that is, by a war in
which misled northern armies whose generalship in the East could not decisively win a battle
where such an outcome was possible, by the northern popular classes who war-weary and
morally unmotivated clearly understood these failings, by British and French governing strata
that might at any moment recognize the Confederacy, and by the self-liberatory actions of
blacks on the ground) to inaugurate a revolutionary transformation (expropriating southern
planters) that would provide both the morale and men to successfully prosecute the war to a
victorious conclusion. Now an endorsement of the radicals is not an imputation of military
genius. Indeed, men like Ben Butler (though an excellent military administrator among rebels)
did, and men like Ben Wade would have, made very poor field commanders. In fact, the
unique position of the radicals rested in their minority opposition; had, for example, Frmont
been elected to the Presidency in either 1856 or 1860, there would surely have been war, and
a war with a radical northern leadership that (because of the stunning lack of northern military
preparation and consequent, deadly blunders on the battlefield) would have irreparably
damaged the cause of human freedom. But without the radicals, to shove, pull and drag a
hesitant, wary Lincoln momentarily into the vanguard, it is doubtful that the North could have
ever gained the moral high ground nor that Union armies would have had the stamina to wear
down and grind up rebel forces and eventually emerge victorious. It is, moreover, even more
unlikely, without the radicals and, in particular, without the aforementioned force of
circumstances and course of events that radicals by and large skillfully rode, that
emancipation would have even been possible for decades to come. To this day, bourgeois
democracy in America has a largely unacknowledged debt to both a newly freepeople and the
revolutionary democrats among the radical Republicans.945
Conscious of an Enlightenment mediated religiously-morally grounded commitment to
universal human rights going beyond mere legally codified and institutionally-sanctioned
formulation of these rights, practically consistent with that commitment, the extreme
revolutionary democrats, heavily represented among radical Republicans, were outstanding
exemplars of humanity's vanguard as the curtain fell on the era of the bourgeois revolution.
They were revolutionary democrats in an era in which working class radicalism was just
beginning to make its impact felt. Committed to the American democratic State structure, they
were not, as they were so often "accused" by their detractors, "Jacobins." They were not
Jacobins, not just in the specific sense of radicals whose organization embodied the
theoretical summation of the experience of the extreme party of French Revolution, but
because, more broadly, they did not seek to canalize the energies and rise to power on a
wave of spontaneous mass revolt against an established, oppressive regime (since, whatever
944The point concerning Copperhead elements in Washington is well made by George Julian, Political Recollections,

195-196, and also by Trefousse, Ibid, 73 (where, in passing, the author draws us a description of a remarkably
southern city). The opening chapters Gore Vidal's Civil War novel, Lincoln, paints a masterly portrait of the "secesh"
and southern character of Washington during the war; for the emergence of the northern peace Democracy, Julian,
Ibid, 199-200; for Lincoln's order to Weitzel and the 11 April announcement, Ibid, 254, 256, respectively; the terms of
General Sherman's offer included immediate restoration of full civil rights to all Confederates and recognition of the
rebel state legislations, Supreme Court settlement of claims among rival state governments and restoration of
property, see Benedict, A Compromise of Principle, 101.
945It should be noted, however, that early in the war, in April and again in September 1861, Ben Butler played a
crucial military role: His aggressive, determined action in Baltimore saved Maryland from seceding. An enjoyable,
historically faithful account, written from the perspective of Lincoln's government, can be found in Gore Vidal's
Lincoln, 133-134, 142-143, 147, 152-154, 165. For Butler, see Appendix I, below.

their misgivings, they did not consider the American State oppressive, and they did not seek to
overthrow it and dismantle it, merely to capture its machinery).946
Even if their practice took for granted the State structure articulated by the Constitution, the
fundamental commitment of the extreme revolutionary democrats among the radicals was to
preservation and extension of a nation transcending the Constitution (though, in their views,
there was no basic irreconcilability of nation and Constitution), one allegedly incarnating,
because founded on, (formal) human equality and universal rationality, beyond local custom,
social mores and the varying cultures of daily life. In the capitalist West, the legally codified
foundations of bourgeois democracy were largely the products of the struggles of Levellers,
Jacobins and extreme radical Republicans against the dominant bourgeois social group of
each era. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, taken together with the Civil
Rights and Habeas Corpus Acts, products of struggle of and confrontation by extreme radicals
conducted and won strictly on the political terrain of the bourgeois State, embody worthwhile
achievements, and justify beyond themselves the only other redeemable, codified or
"Constitutional" elements (First through Eight and Nineteenth Amendments), of bourgeois
democracy in America.
The Fourteenth Amendment
The second section of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was a measure of compromise ... It
sanctioned the barbarism of the Rebel States Government in denying the right of
representation to their freemen ... It was a scheme of cold-blooded treachery and
ingratitude to a people who had contributed nearly two hundred thousand soldiers to the
armies of the Union, and among whom no traitor had even been found ... Of course, no
man could afford to vote against the proposition to cut down rebel representation to the
basis of suffrage; but to recognize the authority of these States and to make political
outlaws of their colored citizens and incorporate this principle into the Constitution of the
United States, was a wanton betrayal of justice and humanity.947

Meeting in the "Committee of Fifteen," the Fourteenth Amendment was put together as a
conservative-favoring compromise of Congressionally-based, radical and conservative
Republicans. It legalized and, given Union victory, thereby permantized the changes brought
about by the war, in particular, the Statist centralization the course of the war had effected.948
Consider the first section.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,
are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make
or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.
946For an examination of Jacobinism of this order, see our Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), 125.
947George Julian, Political Recollections, 272-273.

For the perspective of revolutionary democratic "realism" in contradistinction to Julian, see "Thaddeus Stevens and
Radical Reconstruction," esp. at fn. 58 and the text to which it is appended, in chapter 3, above.
948For the centralization as a product of the war, see the Conclusion, below.
The Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction was a Congressional committee that consisted of nine House and
six Senate members - twelve of whom were Republicans. It was instituted to formulate a Congressional plan for
Reconstruction in opposition to and more thoroughgoing than that Andrew Johnson's. Established 12-13 December
1865 in the House and Senate, meeting first on 6 January 1865 and last on 9 February 1867, the Committee
hammered out the legislation that has come down to us as the Fourteenth Amendment. See William Barnes, History
of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States, 34-36, 47-49; and Benjamin Kendrick, The Journal of the Joint
Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction, 37-38.

The first feature to note concerns citizenship. Its basis is rigorously set forth ("all person born
or naturalized in the United States"), and it is defined with reference to privileges and
immunities, specifically "equal protection" and "due process" under the law which include "life,
liberty, and property." The second feature to note is that citizenship is defined with reference to
the national State, not to the various states, and is neither revocable nor amendable by the
latter. In other words, the document projects and Constitutionally-legally founds the recreation
of the peoples of the various states as a nationalized people, and it does so by at once
"forever" ending the legal subordination of one man to another and by making citizen rights
flow directly from the national government, i.e., by legally undermining the states'
independence vis-a-vis their citizen bodies. The whole basis and reality of "state rights,"
asserted must forcefully in the succession crisis of winter 1860-1861 and overcome in the
South by Union military victory and in the North by creation and then enforcement of the terms
of a national draft, is cast aside here. The third feature to note is that, against the background
of the Constitution which proclaims a republican form of government and guarantees it to each
of the states, i.e., against the ground of a founding document that announces political power is
socially constituted and flows from the people to the government, political power now flows to
a highly centralized, national State built up out of military, bureaucratic and financial
apparatuses (supported by direct taxation and when necessary conscription). In this respect,
too, the Fourteenth Amendment codifies the changes engendered by the war.
The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads (in part) as follows:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their
respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding
Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote ... is denied to any male inhabitant of such
State ... or in any way abridged ... the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in
the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of
male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

States still retain the right to determine who has specifically political rights as opposed to
unalterable, merely citizen rights. States, accordingly, still determined who voted.
Disenfranchisement was not precluded by law. Rather, the state (or states) that refused full
political rights to the ex-slave freeman would suffer loss of representation nationally.
The distinction between civil and political rights is consistent with mid-nineteenth century
American thought about the rights of "man." Natural rights, bourgeois rights in their lowest
form tended to be absorbed into citizen rights (though, not, in the southern United States and
on questions of slavery outside the abolitionist and Republican communities). They included
the right to life, to self-preservation in a state of nature (in the Lockean sense). Citizen rights
centered on liberty and property, both of which tended to be narrowly construed one in terms
of the other so that, for example, liberty was understood in terms of the rights to buy, sell and
enter into contracts without hindrance. Political rights designated primarily the right to vote,
and, according, the associated privileges such as running for and holding office.949
Because emancipated blacks are only being legally incorporated into the human community
as citizens but without political rights, this section constituted the compromise that was forged
between radical and conservative Republicans. Without doubt, it was a betrayal of the
949Social rights entailed the "privileges" of association without discrimination, for example, the right to enter an eatery

and fully expect to be served alongside other clientele regardless of color or place of origin. Similarly, Eric Foner, Ibid,
232-233. Social rights for blacks are a product of the modern Civil Rights movement, though every white person in the
United States who opposed the Fourteenth Amendment at the time of its enactment, assimilated, in thought, social to
civil rights.

freemen, and threw into doubt the sacrifice the war entailed. It, this section, moreover,
transformed the objective historical meaning and significance of the war. The radicals cringed.
But this section did more than merely insure the de facto disenfranchisement of southern
freemen: Indians were explicitly excluded not merely from political but also from citizen rights;
women were also explicitly excluded from political rights (for another fifty-two years) inasmuch
as they were not male; and immigrants too, in accordance with the perspective of the New
England membership of the Committee of Fifteen, were also excluded. In the first case, in line
with the entire previous history of British colonists and Americans, Indians were simply
assumed without reflection to be apart from all considerations of the human (here, the
European descended citizen-political) community. Their conquest and expropriation, after all,
was the material-geographical presupposition of the formation of colonies and the State as
such, viz., the federal system of state and national government. Women and immigrants were
consciously excluded. In the objective historical sense the Fourteenth Amendment
retrospectively marks a turning point in the formation of oppositional currents in American
history: Before its drafting and ratification, women had been in the vanguard of abolitionist
agitation; thereafter middle class feminism emerged as a distinct current with its own
autonomous, and overtly racist agenda. At any rate, these elements of the Fourteenth
Amendment were not components of a compromise but the product of Committee
membership unanimity. The compromise concerned specifically the freemen.950
Conservatives, in fact, opposed the whole of the maximum program of the radicals: They
recoiled at land confiscation and redistribution to the freeman for fear the violation of southern
property rights would set a precedence for the rest of the country. They opposed mandated
public education and enfranchisement because they intuited a sudden, massive increase in
the number of voting wage-laborers might lead to a political polarization along class lines. This
opposition was based on the politically astute recognition of the lack of commitment to black
voting rights among the middling social bases of the Republican party outside New England,
that is, in the North and the West, where very recent attempts in Wisconsin and Minnesota to
amend state constitutions to enfranchise freemen failed.951
The third and fourth sections of the Fourteenth Amendment also constituted a compromise of
sorts, namely, one on retribution: These sections excluded from state and national "civil or
military" office all former members of Congress, U.S. military officers, state legislators, and
judicial and executive officers at the state level who "have engaged in rebellion or insurrection
against the [United States] ... or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." The
conservatives would not permit, however, as the more extreme radicals among the
Republican party such as George Julian would have, trial and imprisonment, exile or
execution of those found guilty of high crimes of treason. Here they walked a tightrope:
Knowing full well that the vast majority of Southerners in every state and of all social classes
(with the exception, of course, of freepeople) were bitter and defeatist (in relation to a possible
Union engagement with a foreign power), and even, in some cases, revanchist, conservatives
insisted on lax treatment: They shared the pragmatic attitude of their business constituents
who were anxious to reintegrate the South and looked forward to the markets this region could
provide. Instead, by disenfranchising the political leadership of the Old South and by refusing
950Radicals' dismay at the compromise is nicely captured in remarks by George Julian found in the citation heading

this section; on the negative significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for women, Foner, Reconstruction, 18631877, 255-256.
On the exclusion of women and immigrants, see Kendrick, The Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 41; and
especially, Du Bois, Ibid, 287-288.
951Du Bois, Ibid, 293. In 1865, in Connecticut, the only state in New England not to have a long history of black
enfranchisement, a state constitutional amendment to enfranchise freemen was voted down.

to honor the claims against the Confederate debt and claims for compensation for lost slaves,
the radical-conservative coalition sought to reconstruct the political leadership of the South.952
Thus, the compromise held out the promise of a State operating nationally that would secure
the legal and organizational principles of capitalism, as well as the promise of political as well
as citizen rights for the freeman. But, as a matter of fact, the compromise first and foremost
embodied factional Republican unity against the planter aristocracy of the Old South.
Factional unity was possible because it started from the decisive role of a nationally
reconstituted State. It was necessary because radicals needed to wield the State as the
engine of destruction of slavery and class power of the planters and because conservatives
could not afford to do otherwise.
In this light (that of necessity) recall the enormous debt generated by the war: It was the large
banks in the urban centers of the East that held the loan notes and bonds with which the war
had been largely financed. As testimony given before the Joint Committee demonstrated,
there was not a formerly Confederate soul in the South who would not, given the chance,
repudiate the northern sectionally-incurred, national debt. If the South was to be returned to
the Union with the Democracy still largely intact - without, in other words, purging its old
leadership, the planter class could arise again, say, on the basis of a form of formally freematerially unfree labor (enforced by newly legislated Black Codes), a modified slavery or a
"serfdom" in a language then popular. But there would have been this difference: The
freeman, no longer formally a slave, would form the basis of increased southern
representation in Congress. The old three-fifths formula based on slavery was no longer
meaningful. According to the calculations by Stevens (repeated by Kendrick), if simply
readmitted on the terms laid down by Andrew Johnson the South would acquire thirteen new
representatives in the House. Republicans feared that additional number when conjoined with
Copperhead representatives would allow the South to reassert control over the national
government. The great danger from the conservative standpoint was, having resumed control,
southern planter politicians would repudiate the national (i.e., Eastern banking capital
financed) debt, further undermine the entire economic edifice which had been erected during
the war and, finally, return the State in practice to the old, Democratic vision of limited
government that did not interfere in the affairs of the states. These actions would mean the
ruin of the large, northern financial capitalists and an end to any hope of expansive, Stateprotected and State-encouraged economic growth. Clearly if the "state rights" advocates had
been returned to Congress with increased representation, the federal government would not
have been in a position to protect railroads, in particular, as well as other emerging national
industries from popularly-imposed state intervention, regulation and control. Conservatives, as
representatives of these interests, had no choice but to push for a compromise that at the
same time would constitute a revision of the "fundamental law."953
952For extreme radical prescriptions see, e.g., Julian's remarks on the floor of the House (15 January 1866), Barnes,

History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, 76, 78. The testimony before the Joint Committee is replete with examples that
demonstrated the ubiquitousness of bitter, hostile southern attitudes. See the Report of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, passim. On the reconstruction of southern leadership, see Montgomery, Ibid, 69, 70.
953Andrew Johnson's terms for readmission to the Union included acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment
(codifying emancipation) and an oath to uphold the Constitution.
Du Bois, brilliantly insightful and employing well-developed, analytically superior class categories, grasps the driving
motives of northern capital in terms of "industrialization." While perhaps reading a fully developed, corporate-based or
trustified, manufacturing capital of the post-1900 era back into the era of its infancy, he was essentially correct in
asserting the "industrial leaders of the North ... feared ... return of the South would mean an attack on the tariff, the
national bank, the debt, and the whole new post-war economic structure" (Du Bois, Ibid, 295). He identifies the
problem in quoting The Nation (Ibid, 293), referring to the grave fears of "the leading commercial men" and "the
bankers of the great cities" that Johnson and the Copperhead Democrats might actually win the struggle with
Republicans as it began to take shape in late December 1865 - early January 1866. Similarly, see Alexander Saxton,

The Fourteenth Amendment, then, in a sense created and then solidified unity between
Republican radicals and conservatives. It made possible all the later legislation - especially
the various Enforcement Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment - that was enacted against the
South. More than any person, event, social relation, or any other legislation, its passage and
ratification in the state legislatures effectively symbolized the zenith of Republican power in
the era of Reconstruction.
Liberal Republicanism
[Economic Differentiation to the End of the Civil War]
In the West and outside the major cities (New York, Boston, Philadelphia) in the East, the
class structure of the mid-nineteenth century northern United States had not yet become
rigidly stratified. Almost exclusively white settler and Creole populations lived overwhelmingly
in rural areas and small towns. Though tenancy and waged labor had made significant inroads
into these rural areas and small towns, the relatively large presence of economically
independent strata - farmers, artisans and small businessmen (those who we have described
as it the core of what we have called the free labor mlange), taken together with fluidity and
mobility of these populations, gave rise to a culturally hegemonic form of awareness that
mediated the practices of most classes, strata and groups in the society of the North. This
vision, that of the real community of free labor-free men, was most fully articulated954 after the
free labor mlange had already disappeared. The vision itself had become fixed, unrelated to
actual social movement (that is, to the life practices of social groups and classes), and hence
ideological. The Civil War vastly accelerated those developments that destroyed the free labor
mlange.
First, the enormous demand for beef, clothing (uniforms and blankets) and shoes, as well as
troop movement itself, did not merely highlight the centrality of railroads for distribution. It
created a elaborate complex of middle men, including agricultural processors and corporate
grain-elevator operators, who mediated the deepening network of mutual dependencies
between agricultural producers in the West and dependent urban populations in the East. The
costs of storage, transportation and distribution (e.g., rail freight) these groups imposed on
western farmers drove the latter as a group to the ground.955 The rural class structure of the
West was simplified as the independence of small property owning capitalist farmers was
destroyed, and their life chances were reduced to a level of tenants and agricultural laborers
who, as a consequences of this destruction, grew enormously as strata in the post Civil War
era.956
Second, polarization in the rural areas and small towns drove young men and women into the
cities to look for work. Together with the massive immigration after 1840, rapidly growing large
and medium-sizes cities (e.g., Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and
Cincinnati) sprung up across the northern landscape. These populations formed the basis of a
class of wage earners that fed the demand for labor, by 1854, in a small yet well developed
metalworking sector (producing, for example, farm implements, such as hoes, scythes, axes
and plows). Metalworking, while dependent upon an enormous expansion in fuel production
fed by anthracite coal, provisioned the western farm economy. The urban wage-earning
populations themselves drew in their wake production for consumption, in sectors such as
beer and other drinking alcohols, sugar and chemicals, glass, earthenware and plated
The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 247-251.
954As in Grant's Personal Memoirs. See chapter 7, above.
955Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era, 195f.
956Paul Wallace Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier, passim.

ware.957 Production here exercised a further attraction on redundant rural and small town
populations. By concentrating production in larger and larger units to met the demand of,
productively speaking, an entirely non-productive and dependent, huge military population
(well over a million men by war's end), the Civil War also accelerated development of an
industrial sector.
Most important, the war had three objective outcome. First, it permantized the already
unfolding development of factory production in these sectors, thereby destroying craft
production and with its artisan strata and creating and crystallizing in this sector and others a
hereditary proletariat. Second, because of the volume of sales and the profits drawn from
those sales to the War Department, it freed an emergent class of manufacturers from their
financial dependence on the large banking interests in the East, 958 and, mediately, the
financial market of London. Third, the emergence of these two, fully industrial classes, taken
together with emergent mass production they engaged in, in turn, free American economic
activity as a whole from its dependence on British industry.
Within a couple years of the end of the Civil War, the softly stratified middling strata had
disappeared, and new, polarized social classes had appeared. Consciousness of this
transformation was rapidly achieved. It would only take the onset of the Great Depression
beginning in 1873 to allow leadership of working class organizations to recognize the
Jacksonian producer was irretrievably a part of the past, that wage labor has become a
permanent reality.959 At the same time, moreover, the social basis of the free labor vision of
man and community had also obviously disappeared.
[The Split among Radical Republicans]
Underlying Republican radicalism had been the commitment to the vision of the real
community of free labor-free men. But this vision had never been uniformly shared. Nuanced
differences had existed from the time leading proponents of the free labor mlange had first
emerged and become conscious of themselves as such. Thus, once forced by ongoing social
transformations (and in particular realization of most of its early objectives such as abolition of
slavery and civil rights for freepeople) to elaborate its sense, the ambiguities inherent in the
free labor vision were developed in two distinct directions.
On the one side, the revolutionary democrats among radical Republicans insisted on
enfranchisement of freemen and the socio-economic transformation of the South. The latter,
seen as the only means to secure black suffrage and its guarantor (an ascendant Republican
party in the South), entailed land redistribution achieved through the uncompensated
expropriation of all southern planter property. The men holding this position had never been
very numerous. With enactment of the Reconstruction Acts and their supplements during the
course of 1867, and while a Constitution amending process had already incorporated the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments into the organic law of the nation, the death of
Thaddeus Stevens in August 1868 dealt radical Republicanism a blow it would never recover
from. Increasingly, the remnant revolutionary democrats, both within and without of Congress,
were compelled to support the conservative Grant Administration, itself increasingly the center
of the party of big capital, because only the "old general" demonstrated an albeit unforgivably
hesitant and half-hearted willingness to enforce the Reconstruction Acts. Revolutionary
democrats were unable to maintain a center of their own because, numerically small and
957Alfred Chandler, the Visible Hand, 75-78.
958Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 20.
959Ibid, 514-515.

under intensifying assault from what once was their own, they no longer had the legislative,
political and social weight to realize even partially their own program.
Thus, on the other side, emergent liberal republicans differentiated themselves from the
revolutionary democratic counterparts by their emphasis on reform of the State (not its
legislative procedural dimension but its bureaucratic and patronage component), their laissez
faire attitude toward State activism and their stress on formal equality before the law (i.e., on
abstract, bourgeois right), and, concomitantly, their doctrinaire commitment to the abstraction
of the "nation" and hence their obfuscatory opposition to "class" legislation (both in the sense
of "special interests" and social classes).960 What was occluded by their speech and discourse
was ongoing capitalist development and, with it, formation of new class strata, in particular, a
liberal middle stratum intelligentsia with ideal and practical interests in "reform." While the war
had greatly enlarged the bureaucratic apparatuses of the national State, thereby enormously
increasing "the patronage" and with the latter exacerbating and magnifying abuses of power
(and hence resulting in the calls for what we would today call "civil service" reform), in the
senses indicated above the war also accelerated capitalist development. The revolutionizing
of production and distribution, and their integration as mass production and mass distribution,
as well as the nascent development of vertically integrated firm characterizing the era of
trustification at its outset,961 all identified by Chandler as aspects of "the managerial revolution
in American business,"962 not only created a qualitatively novel, economically dependent
middle stratum of supervisors, managers and administrators whose position in production was
fixed according to capitalist needs and whose status as such was quite distinct from the older,
now defunct free labor mlange, but also gave rise to a new organic intelligentsia, with its
institutional structure of training schools, colleges and universities, that articulated the
interests and aspirations of this new middle stratum. That articulation lacked the solidity,
independence and self-sufficiency of free labor as embedded in the vision of the real
community of free labor - free men; rather, it gave expression to the dependent status of the
new middle stratum as appendages to industrial capital.
If at the outset of specifically capitalist development, the free labor mlange had, on the basis
of its productive independence, been able to articulate its own world vision, it was the last
middling group in American society and history that will ever be able to do so. Liberal
Republicans, on the other hand, formed an early, transitory moment in the existence of the
newly forming mittelstndische liberal intelligentsia. They would be driven by their formal
commitments to forsake southern blacks and abandon their defense of the newly established
freedom of a freepeople; and, propelled by their laissez faire vision of settled social life, they
would embrace arms with Democratic party politicians. After the ignoble defeat of Horace
Greeley's 1872 Presidential bid, these developments would become unavoidable. In their full
960Ibid, 308, 310, 449, 456, 498-499.
961"[The] intelligentsia which differentiated itself out of the middle stratum in the United States can best be described

as technical. It was (and largely remains) fully integrated, socially and ideologically, into the prevailing mode of
capitalist production. It was materially integrated specifically into newly forming capitalist monopolies as, for example,
in the strata of managers and engineers, business "theorists" of scientific management and labor psychology. On the
basis of its political enfranchisement, its influence, and the lack of a historical alternative to bourgeois democracy, it
was (and remains) committed to "democratic" capitalism. With a view to social change, it was at best engaged in "fine
tuning" the existing social order (e.g., the so-called "progressives"), but hardly in a comprehensive program of change
of the established capitalist society. Thus, the American technical intelligentsia has, its obsequious ideological
pronouncements notwithstanding, an entirely negative relation to the intellectual patrimony of the bourgeois West: It
accepted (and accepts) culture, and defined (and defines) it in its social practice, as wholly pragmatic and utilitarian,
permeated with the business ethos of capitalist activity, and understood (and understands) science only in its relation
to technological mastery." W. Barnes, "Notes on American Labor and Proletarian Revolution in the Early of
Trustification, 1872-1894," 37-38.
962The Invisible Hand. The term set off in quote marks forms the subtitle of Chandler's seminal work.

flowering, they would come to play abjectly reactionary roles on the transformed, new
industrial terrain of American social life.963

963Their roles varied, but each was e.g., directly engaged in one manner or another in repression of the great strike

of 1877. These men included radicals such as Francis Charles Adams, Jr., member and de facto head of the
Massachusetts State board of Railroad Commissioners; Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior during the Presidency
of Rutherford Hayes (once leading free soil radical and Westerner); and James Garfield, Civil War military officer, free
soil radical; military men such as James Harrison Wilson, Westerner and Free Soiler, and during the war member of
Grant's inner circle and latter cavalry commander, in the middle eighties a railroad president (like Henry Slocum, who,
though as a Civil War commander, was no radical); or, for example, Granville Dodge and Jefferson C. Davis, generals
under Grant in the western armies, Westerners and Free Soilers. See Robert Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, passim.
Extreme reaction can be glimpse from the remark of Grant: The strike "should have been put down with a strong hand
and so summarily as to prevent a like occurrence for a generation" (Ibid, 311).
Contrast this to men like Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass who supported workers' struggle for the same
reason they supported black emancipation, because workers' struggles were those of the oppressed striving for a
general liberation.

An Extended Note on the Relation of Radicals to Organized Labor

[Skilled Worker Stratum]
From mid-century to the end of the Civil War, the working classes in America can be defined
with reference to social groups who taken together formed a "class structure." The social
groups, or class strata, we can identify in the "structural" sense (and not in terms of a category
of consciousness) were twofold, first factory operatives and, second, laborers. But at the heart
of the working classes was a "stratum" that was definable in terms of consciousness.
Delineated in these, the latter terms, this proletariat presupposed itself, i.e., it was qualitatively
objectified and materialized subjectivity, organization, that characterized this "stratum": Of
course, organization can be historically reconstructed with a view to those confrontations and
struggles in and through which it was formed; nonetheless, organization is itself a substantial
expression of consciousness, and once constituted, it is the medium for the further
development of class awareness. This much said, it should immediately be added that this
"stratum" of workers also had an objectively-based position in production that grounded its
organized awareness: Class awareness developed among an identifiable, skilled-based
industrial wage-earning core that had begun to come into being.
The stratum was the skilled layer of urban, industrial workers. "Skill" is an historically relative
category, and the industrial workers in question here were to form the skilled stratum of the
latter half of nineteenth century America, an era when "skill" still had the meaning of the
knowledge and practical ability to master the machines, tools and equipment that made up
those means of production with which workers have a living relation. This era formed a
"twilight zone," somewhere between what Marx called the period of the "formal domination of
labor by capital" (i.e., the era defined by the long historical struggle in which employers came
into being as employers by stripping artisans of their ownership and control over the means of
production) and the period of the "real subsumption of labor by capital" (i.e., the contemporary
era with its roots in the early twentieth century whose origins were defined by the failed
struggle of workers against employer-introduced, technologically driven mass production,
dilution and "deskilling" and which is characterized by the employer-introduced and controlled
constant transformation of the means of production).
Among this proletariat were those situated outside the cities, in mining and in the railway
roundhouses. In the large urban centers (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati and St. Louis), these workers were engaged for the
most part in small shops, in cigar making, leather working and coach making, in printing, as
telegraphers, etc. But the most important skilled workers were situated in metal trades. The
latter consisted in two major groups of workers, the "aristocrats" made up of draughtsmen,
pattern makers and machinists on the one side, and the iron workers made of iron molders,
blacksmiths and boilermakers (and tinsmiths, brass finishers, etc.) on the other side. The
former group was depoliticized - with a narrow craft-based notion of organization, preferred
cooperation with its bosses and was self-consciously on the edge of innovative and
technology-based, practical (not "scientific") experimentation. The latter were engaged in the
more physical, heavy and arduous task of metalwork, and, more significantly, were at once
politicized - possessing an expanded notion of political possibilities, and oriented toward
political action independent of the established ruling class parties. 964 It is the latter group that,
in what follows, we, largely though not exclusively, identify as a "class core."
These workers were not factory operatives. This core class stratum of the skilled industrial
wage-earners, moreover, made itself in the fuller sense a "class" because, first, in the two
964Marx, see "Results of the Immediate Process of Production," in Capital, I, 1019-1025. On the strata of skilled

industrial workers, see Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 107-113, and for the consciousness of each, Ibid,
108-109, 110, 113-114.

decades prior to the 1860s, while undergoing differentiation and losing its status as a
journeyman artisanate, it had struggled over and again to create lasting forms of organization,
trade unions. Second, this stratum made itself as a class, because, largely in the eras of Civil
War and Reconstruction, its more advanced elements established citywide (New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco, etc.) trade councils that cut
across industries and acted on behalf of the entire organized proletariat. These same
elements further strove to form specific issue-oriented bodies (eight-hour leagues), to
reestablish national (and international) trade union organizations, and to create national alltrades, union bodies. Thirdly, this core stratum made itself as a class because, once again in
the same era through these new organizations forms, it set forth demands and engaged in
practices that make it an identifiable social agent: War-engendered inflation (rising rents and
food prices), conscription and emancipation ("competition" from black labor) were the pregiven conditions that engaged this stratum, and the reform movement of the immediate postwar period, built by these organizations around a set of demands summarized singularly in
that for the eight hour day, was the conscious worker response, an "act" of self-making, to
these historical conditions.965
[Inflation and Wages in the War and its Aftermath]
Industrial workers, like immigrant laborers, by and large opposed the spread of slavery and
dreaded contact with blacks (fearing competition against slave labor would lower their value,
wages and living standards, that interaction with black labor would corrupt," i.e., unman and
humiliate, hence degrade," white labor, and operating with practice-orienting depthpsychological fantasies concerning black sexuality and affectivity), opposed the war, and
favored sectional compromise. However, after the sectional crisis of winter 1860-1861 and the
onset of war, a patriotic outburst by workers saw a wave of urban-centered enlistments,
resulting oftentimes in the collapse of existing unions. The Conscription Act of 1863, however,
threatened those workers who had not signed up. After 1863, the enlistment of tens of
thousands of freemen and, then, the formation of Negro regiments in Union armies took a
great deal of pressure off northern industrial workers.
With the formal end of the war, conscription, and with it its galling class-based exemption
provision, was abandoned. For those workers who had not enlisted and were not drafted, the
overwhelming issue (because lived and daily experienced) had been the skyrocketing cost of
living. Expressed in terms of a ratio, the percentage rise in the rate of inflation (food cost and
rent rises) to the percentage of per annum wage increases, the cost of living can be denoted
thusly: 1862, 8.7:1; 1863; 15.2:10, and 1864, 20.9: 6.1. The fall in real wages was hardly
severe by contemporary standards. However, it must be borne in mind that these were
dramatic and unprecedented increases for those workers of the Civil War era because, having
lived their entire lives with price stability, they had never had the historical experience of
inflation. Wage increases had, in fact, been restricted by the rapacious appetites of employers
for war-time profits, and by military suppression of strikes in war related industries. After April
1865, an explosion of strikes and their successes, in the context of first a slack in (that would
later become a collapse of) government demand, resulted in the rise of wages relative to
inflation. This rise can be seen in the following figures, for which the terms of the ratio are this
time inverted (that is, expressed as a ratio of the percentage of per annum wage increases to
the percentage rise in the rate of inflation): 1865, 15.4:7.7; 1866, 7.3:1.2; and 1867, 4.3:1.2. It
was during this approximately two year period of successful strikes, and often on the very

965Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 91, 103 (on worker organizations), 175-176, 175f (on the issues animating them).

basis of successful strike action, that industrial workers created, re-formed and rapidly
expanded union organizations.966
[Expanded Union Organization]
The most important worker organization was the National Labor Union (NLU), whose effective
life ran from 1866 to 1870 (though it did not formally cease to exist until 1872). Called into
being by leaders of both unions and the trades councils (assemblies), the NLU was neither;
rather, it was an explicit, conscious, national response of organized workers aimed at
combating employer combinations to thwart "the aspirations of labor." Though short-lived, and
never having really got off the ground, the NLU brought together the personages and
embodied the ideas of the most advanced, conscious elements of labor in this era. The issues
that animated the NLU at its first two national conventions, issues that shaped its entire
existence, were land reform, political action and the eight-hour movement, and currency
reform. Little was said about the issues that confronted a newly freepeople. Political action
was reformist, largely if not exclusively electoral and legislatively oriented activity. It dominated
the first convention, and it encompassed legislation to secure an eight-hour day at the national
and state levels, election of men committed to labor's interests, and formation of a labor
party.967
According to National Labor Union organizers, labor's interests lay in legislation of an eighthour day, in promotion of consumers' and producers' cooperatives, in the inclusive
organization of workers into trade unions and, of course, in the enactment of laws that would
facilitate, not hinder, such organization (such as repeal of conspiracy laws, mine and factory
safety legislation, abolition of convict labor, etc.). Trade union organization was to be inclusive
and included specifically black workers as well as the means to such organization (namely,
establishment of a thorough apprenticeship program and resort to strikes only as a last
resort). The notice taken of black workers did not, of course, preclude separate unions. Such
a question simply was not broached.968
At the second convention (1867) of the National Labor Union, political action was overtaken
by currency reform as the means to achieve labor interests. What had happened between the
first and second conventions? In 1866, the large London firm, Overend, Gurney, failed. Its
collapse set off a panic that brought on an economic downturn which beginning on one side of
the Atlantic was felt on the other. Although precipitated by the panic, a downturn in the U.S.
would have been hard to avoid given the contraction of government spending following on the
end of the war. At any rate, manufacturers immediately began to slash wages. Workers
responded with strikes, and they were everywhere smashed. Union locals dissolved. In this
context, that of massive defeats, organized labor leaders desperately sought after a practically
reducible, theoretical perspective that would illuminate the desperate situation of labor.
966All figures calculated on the basis of a chart in Robert P. Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, 181; for instances of

military action against striking workers, Ibid, 178-179.

967On the National Labor Union, see Montgomery, Beyond Equality; and, Sharkey, Ibid, 183f; on "labor's aspirations,"
Sharkey, Ibid, 184. According to Montgomery (Ibid, 185), in guaranteeing the autonomy of the trade unions, the NLU
drastically limited its scope for effective action, and in effect rendered itself irrelevant to the actual practices of those
unions; on the decisive nature of the first two NLU conventions, Montgomery, Ibid, 176. Land "reform" meant
preservation of public lands for white homesteaders in opposition to the land concentration implicit in the federal land
grants to the railroads. See Ibid, 178.
968Ibid, 177-180, 191.
The attitude toward strikes was largely determined by ongoing slump-related defeats of strike actions. The existing
apprenticeship system had been under attack from employers at least from the beginning of the war. (Employers
attempted to bring more apprentices into shops than the numbers agreed on with unions, thereby throwing
journeymen out of work. See Sharkey, Ibid, 179.) There was certainly an element of skills dilution based on the
introduction of simplified machinery involved in this question also.

"Greenbackism" provided that explanation and prescriptions to remedy this situation. 969 The
vulgarly political-economic perspective of greenbackism explained the concentration of wealth
under conditions of rapid and early capitalist industrialization, as well as the necessary,
corresponding impoverishment of labor, in terms of socially parasitical, monopolistic activity of
the non-productive classes. In so doing, it connected up with the an older "labor" tradition, that
of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank politics of Jacksonian era mechanics.
[Radical Republicans and Trade Unionists]
In the immediate aftermath of the war, radical Republicans had greeted the growth of the
union movement with open arms. Labor reformers, like radicals, were nationalistic and
utilitarian, and both, according to Montgomery, engaged in "ideological ... [advocacy] of free
agency, self-improvement, temperance and the open society." Initially radicals exhibited
sympathy for eight-hour day legislation; whereas, Whiggish politicians, largely concentrated in
the Republican party, opposed a shortening of the working day to eight hours on the ground
that such an enactment would constitute government interference with "individual liberty," i.e.,
with the sanctity of private property and the rights of employers (and, ostensibly, employees)
to freely contract. But even radicals had problems with legislating an eight-hour day, and,
more generally, with union organization. The latter were, after all, "coercive" organizations
(interfering with the affairs of workers who were not members), promoted the special interests
of their members (over and against the interests of the "community"), and challenged the
prerogatives of private capitalists, their right to dispose of their property as they saw fit. In
1865 and early 1866, these apprehensions were merely latent. Non-Whiggish politicians of all
hues supported union sponsored legislation for an eight-hour day. Organized workers, on the
other hand, supported radical Republican measures including the Fourteenth Amendment
enthusiastically. The support of politicians for the eight-hour day was, however, shallow since
it was not based on principle but on political expediency, that is, support was designed to win
votes only.
By 1867, the eight-hour day campaign along with labor's commitment to currency reform,
made Republican fears explicit. The contradictory consciousness of radicals vis-a-vis labor
reform made them choose and, with few exceptions, radical Republicans abandoned their
ambivalence and opposed labor reform: Radicals, as nationalists first and foremost, were
incapable of questioning the dogma of an undivided national community. Radicalism, then,
was politically and theoretically incapable of providing workers with a defense of the eighthour day. Among organized workers, on the other hand, there was a significant tendency to
put class interests above and pit them against the abstraction of the "community at large." In
fact, the opposition was tendentially exacerbated by a compelling logic that would have, if
consistently elaborated, propelled labor, against itself, into a critique of private property. The
demand for an eight-hour day gave rise to recognition that, even if unrealized, a worker's time
was de facto his employer's time, that, accordingly, in the easily accessible (because by now
common sensical), classically republican categories of the era, he was a wage slave and
private property was tyranny. The issue, however, which drove a wedge between radicals and
the reformer vanguard among organized workers was currency reform.970
969On political action, Sharkey, Ibid, 185-187, and Montgomery, Ibid; for the desperation that generated the need for

a new theoretical perspective, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era, 102-103, 104.
Unger cites remarks (Ibid, 106-107) from major contemporary labor leaders that suggested the currency reform
perspective, associated with American political economic analysts Henry Carey and, in particular, Alexander
Campbell, was much more of a "revelation" than theoretically mediated insight, and commitment to greenbackism had
more of the character of religious conversion than reasoned conviction about it.
970Montgomery, Ibid, 230, 238-239, 240-241, 245-246, 247, 248-249. The 1868 election of the dispositionally
conservative Grant should, from the standpoint of small farmers and organized workers, be seen as a referendum of

By 1868, a newly formed, highly centralized State - predicated on a standing army, a

bureaucracy, taxation and a national banking system - had transformed the conditions under
which wage-earners lived and worked. Bondholders, those ruling class financiers who had
raised money and loaned it to the Republican government to support the Union war effort,
those financial capitalists concentrated in the largest banking establishments of Boston and
New York City, would be the major beneficiaries of a contraction of existing paper currency
and a resumption of specie payment. (Under such conditions of contraction and resumption,
loans originally made in devalued paper money would be repaid in specie, i.e., gold.)
Implementation of such policy would provide the efficacy and power of financial capitalists,
their ability to set the national agenda. As nationalists, the radicals largely supported
resumption of specie payment. On the other hand, organized labor feared such a resumption
would eat up the price of labor entailing a redistribution of wealth away from labor toward
speculative or promotional, i.e., parasitic, financial interests. Accordingly, organized labor
would be unable to pursue its own agenda, the eight-hour day, etc.971
While not all organized labor was committed to greenbackism, key elements, including the
National Labor Union leadership, were after 1867. This commitment objectively brought
organized labor into a inter-class alliance with other social strata who favored expanded use
of paper money, and in opposition to those classes and strata that did not. The coalition of
those classes and strata committed to currency reform consisted of an primarily doctrinaire
component of old northern Democratic party regulars - a stratum of intellectuals in the
Jeffersonian-agrarian tradition and Copperhead revanchists, and the Democracy's opportunist
element as well; an entrepreneurial element made up largely of the newly emerging
manufacturing class; and, of course, the labor-reformist moment of the skilled industrial core
of the working classes. Each of the social groups came to currency reform by way of different
motives; yet while their interests diverged, in their opposition to, broadly speaking, a large
array of groups composing the financial and "old elite" business communities (including Whig
Republicans and most, if not all, radical Republicans), they dovetailed and intertwined.972
the Fourteenth Amendment; well-known radical Republicans who supported labor reformers included George Julian
and Benjamin Wade; with regard to the "community at large," organized labor, "challenged the Radical tenet that the
triumph of the nation eradicated class." Ibid, 231.
971Currency reform would, so it was argued, entail a more equitable redistribution of the product of labor among the
contending classes of society. A mechanism, the "interconvertible" bond, was designed to insure this redistribution
would be achieved. From this bond, housed by some form of national financial institution, legal tender ("greenbacks,"
i.e., paper currency) would, on the one hand, be issued at an exceedingly low interest rate (1-3%) just high enough to
cover the costs of banking operations. On the other hand, the same institution could issue bonds at a slightly higher
interest rate. Interest charges, so it was judged, would remain low fluctuating between these two rates: Inflated rates
could not be charged as long as all property owners could borrow legal tenders (against their real estate mortgages)
at the fixed low rate; and the money supply would not balloon (i.e., interest rates would not collapse) as long legal
tender holders could invest in bonds bearing the slightly higher rate. As a result, bankers and "capitalists," i.e., the
speculative, promotional and nonproductive elements in society, would not be able to charge excessive interest rates
which, in turn, functioned as a tax-collection by consuming "price of labor," redistributing labor's products to the
"money lenders, bankers and bondholders" (Sylvis).
For currency reform entailing more equitable distribution; Sharkey, Ibid., 90-91; Montgomery, Ibid., 229; On
interconvertible bond, Montgomery, Ibid., 190; Unger, Ibid., 99-100. William Sylvis, iron molder, union organizer and a
founder of the National Labor Union was one of labor's heroes, cited above by Unger, Ibid, 107.
972Unger, Ibid, 112; 41-119.
This "old elite," i.e., ruling class social group, consisted in the great financiers of New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
It was at the center of much larger merchant and financial community that objectively and subjectively constituted an
alliance of social groups whose vast wealth and economic power, control over circulation (viz., access to those
money, bonds and securities markets from which the funds were raised to finance federal spending), similarity in lifepractices and cultures, and uniformity of outlook made them a ruling class. These ruling class social groups consisted
specifically in big eastern bankers, international import-export merchants, the great textile manufacturers, leading
Calvinist, i.e., Congregationalist and Episcopalian, clergy and prominent "conservative" politicians. Among these
groups, there was, socially speaking, enormous, mutual penetration. Families had intermarried and fortunes had

[Unions and Black Labor]

The actual bearers of continuity that united greenbackism to the historically transcended
Jacksonian anti-monopolism were, of course, Free Soilers. There is, thus, continuity here at
an altogether deeper level: Self-conscious, organized labor, in its central commitments in each
of its two national conventions (land and currency reforms) essentially ignored the issue of the
fate of a freepeople (which in relation to union activity would be understood in terms of black
labor in that activity). It is not that this issue was peripheral or tangential to national debate.
After all, it was during the this period, 1867-1868, that Andrew Johnson was impeached and
tried essentially for his efforts to roll back black gains as a result of Union victory in the war.
Yet, like the Free Soilers for whom the central issues was slavery extension into the territories
and the domination of a handful of slavers over national life, and not, say, the barbarity of the
institution of slavery itself, organized workers affirmed their relationship to black labor by and
large negatively: While giving lip service to the need for black workers to organize, the NLU
deemed it necessary that these workers maintain separate, segregated locals, i.e., they
prohibited blacks from joining their own, white organizations. The commitments by organized,
white workers to black workers were not made on the basis of solidarity of interests as
workers, but out of the same fear that had motivated the Jacksonian mechanic: The old fears,
anxieties and fantasies about blacks (the code word for which remained amalgamation), still
considered slavish," i.e., uncivilized," indolent and lazy," was just as characteristic of this
core class stratum as of other whites." Like Jacksonians, and Free Soilers, for organized,
conscious labor black existence still stood outside the human community: 973 Emotionally
underpinning this archaic judgment was the acceptance and assimilation of capitalist work
discipline, and the projection of the forbidden dimensions of yearnings, affectivity and
sexuality, suppressed and repressed and split off, onto a not fully humanized black other."
In the period of Andrew Johnson's Presidency, unions, especially the NLU, pursued an
independent labor politics or supported the racist Democracy and sympathized with Johnson.
In both cases, worker bigotry was clothed in reasoning that considered support of the goals of
freemen amounted to tacit support for the Republican party and dismissed it out of hand.974

mingled - all within the charmed circle of the same social groups. See David Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 59, and
Unger, The Greenback Era, 125.
973That labor leader William Sylvis, speaking at the 1868 NLU convention, told fellow workers that "antagonism"
between black and white workers would surely "kill off the Trade Unions," changed nothing. Cited by Jim Montgomery,
Beyond Equality, 228.
974Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 479-480.

Part III
Losing the War and Winning the Peace
The Reconstitution of White Mastery
[Party Re-alignment]
Between the adjournment of the Thirty-Eight Congress in late February 1865 and the first
session of the Thirty-Ninth (having been elected in November 1864) on 3 December 1865,
hostilities between the Union and Confederate armies were officially terminated (9 April 1865),
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated (14 April 1865) and Andrew Johnson was sworn in and
assumed the Presidency (15 April 1865). Thus, this lapse of over nine months between the
adjournment of an old and the actual seating of a new Congress, a peculiarity of the American
political system characteristic of nineteenth century American politics, was the historically
formed precondition which made the very reality of Presidentially enacted restoration
possible.975
It is generally agreed that Lincoln, had he lived, would have been amendable (though not
without a fight against radicals) to Congressional participation in formulating a reconstruction
plan. This was not, however, the perspective of Andrew Johnson. Lincoln's death and this
political feature of Congressional sessions made Johnson fortunate indeed: He was singularly
intent on carrying out a strictly Presidential restoration of the southern states - without
consultation of and in full consciousness of the prospects for his objective opposition to
Congress should it be locked out of the formulation of reconstruction policy.976
In spring 1864, party managers held flagging doubts whether the war could be won outright.
With, accordingly, the party's 1864 national electoral chances greatly diminished, to the
chagrin of radicals the Seward-Weed led conservative Republican party wing placed Johnson
on the ticket alongside Lincoln and took the name of the "Union" party. This strategy, in fact,
did broaden party support not only among war Democratic politicians but especially among
the non-Republican Unionist mass of poor farmers and workers as the fall 1864 election
outcome in Congress and that at the top of ticket testified to. As the war Democratic titular
head of the essentially Republican, Union party, and now President, Johnson's ascendancy in
mid-April 1865 sparked a fury of rampant press speculation and correspondence among those
most involved in seeking a party re-alignment. That party would be an organization of
conservatives, one predicated on the exclusion of both peace Democratic Copperheads and
radical Republicans. Based on the revulsion of northern ruling class social groups at the
expropriation of planters for the sake of freeing blacks, the attempt at party re-alignment in the
immediate aftermath of the war was objectively the organized expression of a determined
effort to prevent future radical Republican "excesses."977
It was possible this reorganization might have been able to bring together conservative
Republicans, war Democrats in the North and in border states (such as the those Tennessee
Unionists who supported Johnson), independent Free Soilers and, once established, the antisecessionist (and much smaller loyalist, pro-Union) element of the old southern Whiggery.
Such a coalition rested, however, on slippery ground from the beginning, first, because a new
and politically weighty class force would have had to emerge in order to objectively and
975Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 228, notes this little-known characteristic of nineteenth American politics.
976For discussion concerning Lincoln's unrealized relation to Congress on reconstruction, Ibid, 61, 73, 192, and

especially, Eric McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 105, 180.

977For 1864 Republican electoral strategy, LeWanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 32, and
Saxton, This Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 254; for Weed's role in the nomination of Johnson and radical
disappointment over the 1864 vice-Presidential selection of Johnson, Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, 308-309 and
Julian, Political Recollections, 243, respectively; for examples of press speculation, Cox and Cox, Ibid, 33, 41, 46, 47,
53, and Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, 319-328.

historically stabilize such a re-alignment. Such a class force could only be found in one of two
forms. One form would have been the enfranchisement of freemen as an independent rural
peasantry in conjunction with the truly effective enfranchisement of southern (white)
yeomanry. In the event, radical Republicans would have had to have been the center from
which all considerations of party reorganization radiated, and their maximum program
including black enfranchisement and, in particular, land reform based on destruction of the
great planter estates would have had to carry the day. That was not the case in spring 1865
or, for that matter, anytime during Reconstruction.978
Constituted through an electoral upsurge, the other, second, form of emergent class force
would have been much more restricted, to wit, a politically viable southern and border states
white yeomanry. A politicized yeomanry would have had to at once displace planters from
southern state houses while maintaining the political disenfranchisement of blacks. This would
have constituted a mostly political revolution aimed at the personnel occupying southern state
governments but not the alteration of these governments, a transformation which would have
presupposed a very limited degree of planter expropriation (along the lines of Johnson's 29
May 1865 decree). Narrowly based and caught between the unsatisfied demands of a
freepeople and the suppression of the great planters, the upsurge of a politicized yeomanry
would have been a highly unstable foundation on which to undertake a party re-alignment.
Nonetheless, such an upsurge was not only the anticipated outcome of Andrew Johnson's
original "reconstruction" policy, it was that on which he initially rested his political fortunes. It
was never destined to materialize.
A second reason for the weak foundations of a conservative Republican-war Democrat, party
re-alignment lay in its leading organized components. From the one side, boss Dean
Richmond's Albany Regency coupled with New York City's Tammany Hall were the two
summits of war Democratic power, respectively the "country" and "court." From the other side,
the Albany-New York City based Seward-Weed faction, formed the center of power within
conservative Republicanism. These two sides, central components of a projected realignment, were antagonistic in a way that is only found in old inter-party hatreds. But
precisely this factionalization of a potential party re-alignment strengthened the hand of
Andrew Johnson, who, of course, sought to place himself at the head of any such realignment. In the first nine months of his Presidency, Johnson consciously dissembled about
his real intentions allowing at different times all significant political tendencies to woe him. He
led each, including radical Republicans, to believe he as President would pursue policy
substantially similar to that of each faction who at the moment thought that it held his ear.979
[Johnson's Commitment to an Unrealizable Yeomanry-Based Re-Alignment]
Considered abstractly and narrowly as a national structure, the remoteness of the American
State from the underlying classes on which it rests is doubled at it summit, where the
Presidency institutionally insulates the officeholder from the immediate pressures that surge
upward out of the daily life of society-constituting social classes. Thus, the office provides its
978For the organizational elements of an immediate post-war party re-alignment, Cox and Cox, Ibid, 47; chapters 2

and 3 of Coxes' work are devoted to, respectively, the conservative Republican and war Democratic tendencies
straining toward party re-alignment in the war's immediate aftermath, while chapter 4 discusses sources for SewardWeed and Richmond-Blair antagonism. Van Deusen demonstrates Richmond's and Weed's groups might have
achieved unity around a Johnson-Union party, but the real antagonism was between the Weed faction and Tammany
Hall (Ibid, 322-323).
979Our understanding of Johnson's dissimulation is grounded in readings of various historians each of whom takes
Johnson's transient commitment to party factions straightforwardly yet fail to account for why he led so many to the
conviction they had his support and why in the end no faction outside the "old natural ruling element" of the South
could claim his program was their own.

holder with the appearance of being "above classes" (while never detaching him from his
class-based formation, prejudices and stand) and the wherewithal to maneuver among the
factions fighting for his attention. Accordingly, Presidential subjectivity, as an objective moment
in the course of historical events, demands our attention.980
Andrew Jackson Johnson was a war Democrat and east Tennesseean, champion of a
romanticized upcountry southern yeomanry, savagely anti-planter and anti-black, staunchly
pro-Unionist. Psychological and ideational rigidity provided backbone to a man who was a
fierce political fighter, by formation and conscious practice a consummate "outsider" yet as
U.S. Vice-President the ultimate "insider" at the moment of Lincoln's death. As President,
Johnson, the last politically important Jacksonian, initially sought not merely to revive the
Hero's old class coalition but to recreate it around its ideally projected and historically
unrealized center, the southern yeomanry.981
Thus, in assuming office a history of remarks on the theme referring to the criminal treachery
of the planter aristocracy preceded him and was regularly repeated. Moreover, in the very first
month of his Presidency he had let it be known that he would not oppose black
enfranchisement - a view he would shortly discard. Needless to say, such remarks initially
endeared him to radicals and frightened ex-Confederates of all stripes and their supporters,
North and South. Johnson's most famous expression regarding southern sedition, "treason
must be made odious, and traitors must be punished and impoverished," suggested the kind
of reconstruction policy he was about to undertake would include criminal prosecution of
rebels beyond their thin leadership stratum, and imprisonment and property confiscation for
those found guilty as well.
Such pronouncements could be seen as a signal to southern yeomen indicating they had
nothing to fear from the South's old master class, and should, accordingly, seize the
opportunity to politically assert themselves. These signals were codified in his 29 May 1865
proclamation that effectively barred the old, specifically secessionist leadership from
participating in elections to the constitutional conventions that were decreed as the first step in
re-entry of southern states to the Union. Here was the opportunity for southern yeomen,
especially its Unionist component, to catapult themselves into their respective state
leaderships. This outcome did not come to pass. The different strata among southern nonplanter whites faced the devastation of the Civil War with less to fall back on than any other
social class in the region: War-wrought destruction entailed loss of yeoman crops, and the
wasting of farmlands, buildings and homes. The scarred battlefields that were once their lands
left them without agricultural produce and without the means to hunt (i.e., ammunition was all
but non-existent): Famine was abroad in the South and starvation was not infrequent. Starting
from severely restricted market integration and, thus, similarly restricted social intercourse, delinked completely by war, rural, isolated and individualistic, yeoman communities were often
broken up. By the end of the war, the southern yeomanry had undergone an accelerated
marginalization that converted the different strata among non-planter yeoman populations into
a leveled, disarticulated "poor white" mass.982
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the northern victory-sanctioned fact of expropriation of
the planters' chattel slaves was not accompanied by (re)formation of a politicized yeomanry:
Instead, individual farming families, often lacking a male household head or his older sons
(who had been killed in fighting), were left to forage for food or to seek it from the Freedmen's
980See "A Preliminary Note on Political Parties," above.
981The brief, sweeping sketch of Johnson is based on McKitrick, Ibid, 85-92.
982For the post-war situation of the southern yeomanry, see "Between 'Nigger-Lord and Slave," below; for Johnson's

commitment to a post-war ascendant yeomanry and the fact of its failure to emerge, Foner, Ibid, 181,193,197, and
Saxton, Ibid, 255.

Bureau. The morale of these yeomanry or its remnants was sapped, its life in the most
elementary sense appeared nearly exhausted. It is no wonder voter turnouts for the
conventions were light, while elections resulted in delegate selections of essentially the same
categories of personnel, planters and professional politicians that had dominated prewar
southern legislatures. Retrospectively, a yeoman-like phoenix could not have been expected
to rise from its war-generated ashes. This outcome compelled a decisive change in Johnson's
policy, one he was never quite able to feel his way to, and largely accounts for the wily
maneuvering he engaged in between summer 1865 and spring 1866.983
[Johnson's Reconstruction Policy Shift. Motives and Clarification]
Johnson's early restoration actions in the first months in office provide a glimpse into his
efforts to retain the support and loyalty of radicals, conservative Republicans and war
Democrats. To clarify these actions, it is necessary to turn to the clock back one year.
Lincoln had easily defeated a radical Republican challenge from Salmon Chase for the party's
Presidential nomination and, with Andrew Johnson on the ticket, did extremely well in his
reelection bid. Moreover Lincoln, the first President to be elected to consecutive terms in
thirty-two years (the last being Andrew Jackson), would again control the national patronage
at a time when the terms of office of numerous appointed, leading state and national officials
expired. Thus, having defeated a challenge from the left and thereby proved his popularity in
his own party, having received a popular mandate for his conduct of the war, and having
control of the patronage at a moment which such control carried qualitatively more weight than
its already enormous clout, Lincoln's stand on the issues of enfranchisement and
reconstruction were decisive.
Congressional support for black enfranchisement had been waning since it reached a wartime
highpoint in the debates over bills for Montana statehood (April-May 1864) and the WadeDavis Reconstruction bill (June-July 1864) in the first session of the Thirty-Eight Congress. As
the many votes each bill underwent suggest, roughly half of both Houses would have
supported (or at least were not firmly opposed to) black enfranchisement. After the fall 1864, a
decided shift in Congressional opinion away from support for black enfranchisement was
noticeable. Lincoln views were likely the difference. Lincoln, in fact, did not so much oppose
black suffrage (actually, by January 1865, he stood for a limited version which included black
war veterans and, in some states, "qualified," viz., literate or propertied, blacks with future
graded enfranchisement for the vast Negro majority) as he designed to link reconstruction to
his war aims by using reconstruction as a means of "rallying" those Southerners willing to
cease fighting or providing other forms of support to those rebels willing to renew their
commitment to the Union. Thus, Lincoln's notion of reconstruction emphasized amnesty in
return for loyalty and downplayed black enfranchisement.984
Since pursuit of a northern victory, and demands for black emancipation and (after 1862)
suffrage had been the hallmarks of radicalism during the war, acknowledgment of Lincoln's
party leadership had led to a thinning of radical ranks as the Thirty-Eight Congress assembled
for its second session at the end of 1864. (The remaining radicals, with its purged
membership, strong leadership and clear consciousness of the tasks ahead, now constituted
a minority, nonetheless a large and very powerful bloc in Congress, especially in the House.)
The greatest piece of legislation of the war Congresses was achieved 31 January 1865 with
983Note also Grant's remarks (Personal Memoirs, 642, 648) concerning Johnson's volte face:

"Mr. Johnson ... [underwent] a complete revolution of sentiment ... [he] at first wished to revenge himself upon
Southern men of better social standing than himself, but ... still sought their recognition, and in a short time conceived
the idea and advanced the proposition to become their Moses to lead them triumphantly out of all their difficulties."
984On the Montana statehood and Wade-Davis bills, Michael Benedict, A Compromise of Principle, 73-80.

passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery. But

enfranchisement was not on the Congressional agenda.985
With the Thirty-Eight Congress already long adjourned, on 10 May newly sworn-in Andrew
Johnson recognized as states the wartime governments of Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee
and Virginia created by Lincoln's Administration. None of these governments had made any
efforts to enfranchise blacks, yet only a few, exclusively radical Republican eyebrows were
raised. On 17 May, Johnson removed General Nathaniel Banks, commander of the southern
military district that included Louisiana, after Banks challenged the appointment powers of
James Madison Wells, an unconditional Unionist with unimpeachable credentials. From his
installation as commander to his removal, Banks had been a strong supporter of Lincoln's
state government restoration policies. Wells, as the new governor of Louisiana replacing
Banks' appointee Michael Hahn, systematically removed officials of the Hahn political machine
- loyal Banks' appointees. Assessing the state political climate and deciding his social base
had to be broadened, Wells replaced Banks' appointees with "conservative" Unionists
opposed to black enfranchisement and Confederate veterans committed to overturning the
state's antislavery constitution of 1864.986
Nationally, this action agonized radicals, yet very few developed suspicions of Johnson since
he not only continued to voice his outspoken opposition to treasonous Southerners, but in the
South he also continued the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the use of provost
marshals to arrest traitors and military tribunals to try them. (Johnson did not, in our view, see
these measures as "radical," merely as functions of constitutionally-sanctioned war powers he
assumed as President. He was largely motivated by his view that restoration centered on
individual punishment for southern recalcitrants.) The latter group of actions had, on the other
hand, provoked cries of indignation from the political leadership of the northern war
Democracy, who otherwise had been assiduously courting Johnson favor.987
Following his swearing in, Johnson received a flood of letters from gushing northern war
Democrats assuring him of their loyalty to him, even willingness to abandon the old party to
support a Unionist one led by in him 1868. Organized by the Blair family, especially
Montgomery, and New York state Democrats led by Dean Richmond, his Albany-based
political machine and Samuel L.M. Barlow - co-owner of the influential Democratic New York
World, this support was, however, conditional. Democrats wanted basically two commitments
from Johnson; first, an end to "unconstitutional" measures in the South that Johnson as
President enforced under the war powers provision and, second, de facto institutionalization of
white supremacy within the framework of acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment.988
After 29 May, when Johnson laid out his restoration plan in two proclamations, his position
though ambiguous began to clarify. The first decree concerned amnesty and pardons. All
those who, having sided with the Confederacy, took an oath of loyalty to the Union and
committed to support for emancipation would be fully restored and have all property (less
slaves) returned. A provision of this proclamation declared fourteen classes of rebels,
especially Confederate supporters and property holders with estates valued at more than
$20,000, would have to seek individual Presidential pardons and would be banned from
political activity unless pardoned. The second decree appointed William Holden provisional
governor of North Carolina, directing him to call a convention in order to amend the state's
antebellum constitution, that is, to create a "republican form of government" (a concept that
985For the shift of Republican opinion away from black suffrage, Ibid, 84-85.
986For Banks in Louisiana, Ibid, 85-87, Foner, Ibid, 182-183.
987For martial law measures in the South, Cox and Cox, Ibid, 57, 64.
988For northern war Democratic reaction to Johnson's emergency measures and conditional efforts to woo him, Ibid,

50-67, and Foner, Ibid, 216-219.

was conditioned on ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, repudiation of the Confederate

debt and nullification of the secession ordinances) which, once done, would fully restore North
Carolina to statehood. This proclamation excluded those fourteen classes of individuals
enumerated in the first proclamation from voting for convention delegates. Identical decrees
for the other ex-Confederate states shortly followed.
On the one side, radicals could support the exclusion of the specified categories of rebels on
the assumption, one taken for granted at the time, that the pardons policy would be
meticulously pursued, not cutting any slack for offenders. But that was small comfort: The
decrees made no mention of black suffrage - thereby proposing to restore the status quo
antebellum minus its most egregious elements, and tendentially arrogating the entirety of
reconstruction policy as a Presidential prerogative. On the other side, war Democrats were
upset by the apparent sweep of the exclusions, yet they were pleased by both the utter lack of
reference to Negro suffrage and to the rapid tempo at which restoration was proceeding.
By the end of July 1865, delegate selection to the constitutional conventions in those southern
states undergoing Presidential restoration already suggested that the anticipated yeoman
upsurge would not come to pass. Johnson began to tack between the yeomanry and "old
natural ruling element" of the South. Particularly among old southern Whigs untainted by
explicit secessionist commitments at the outset of the war, meetings with a Presidential envoy
touring the South as well as the actual development of the Johnson's pardons policy made it
increasingly clear to southern leadership elements that the President was giving them firm
grounds for hope of a quick, penalties-unencumbered restoration of their properties and their
citizenships, and for reestablishment of a "white man's government." Further, Johnson's
appointments of provisional governors, among them James Johnson in Georgia, Lewis
Parsons in Alabama, William Sharkey in Mississippi and Benjamin Perry in South Carolina,
largely suggested a concern for broader southern support, hardly criminal prosecution of
sedition. These men included those who had opposed secession at the outset of the war. But
men (Parsons and Perry) who had served in wartime state legislatures could also be found
among them. None of them had been unconditional Unionists, that is, loyalist in the northern
sense.989
Also beginning in June, and really getting underway in July, numerous substantial Southerners
(or their representatives) personally came to Washington to call on the President. But it was
not his assurances that there would be a de facto full restoration of the status quo antebellum
but the coupling of these promises to the accelerating pace and indiscriminate character of his
pardons that reassured Southerners that Andy Johnson was truly "one of us." (By September,
it seems clear Johnson accepted the failure of a politicized yeomanry to emerge in the
elections to southern states' constitutional conventions. Thus, he had been careful not to
alienate potential southern, ex-slaveholding planter support for an attempted party realignment he planned to head. Instead, what he was engaged in, so it appears, was an effort
to extract loyalty in return for pardons.) By late July, elements among the northern war
Democratic leadership also began to support Johnson without qualifications. Barlow, for one,
had been convinced by a southern spokesman sent north, one Richard Taylor, son of exPresident Zachary Taylor and a major general in the Confederate army, who, he wrote
Montgomery Blair, had indicated that, "Johnson must be supported ... earnest[ly] and
active[ly]." Whether or not Taylor spoke for "the Southern people" as Barlow related is open to
question, but Taylor, a Whig, did speak for those "leading men," soft Confederates, who had
either opposed the secessionists and supported the rebellion only after the onset of the war or
those who had merely "retired" at that onset refusing to take an active role in support of the
989The envoy was Tennesseean and Union Democrat Harvey Watterson. He toured the South from June through

September. Cox and Cox, Ibid, 102; for southern provisional governors, Foner, Ibid, 187-188.

Confederacy. In either case, these men were by southern standards "loyal" and knew they
need not fear anything from Johnson's (now almost non-existent) threats of retribution.990
By the end of August, most of the ambiguity surrounding Johnson's position on
"reconstruction" had been dispelled. In mid-August, Johnson, in a practice that by midSeptember would be institutionalized as Bureau policy, ordered the return of abandoned and
confiscated lands to B.B. Leake, a Nashville planter-rebel. The beneficiaries of this policy, of
course, were exclusively the great planters. Small property-owners had to pursue their claims
in the courts. At any rate, in establishing this policy Johnson overruled and rewrote the policy
guidelines established by Commissioner of Freedman's Bureau, O.O. Howard. Also by midAugust, North Carolina governor William Holden was completing patronage-based
appointment (often after having consulted the President) of some 4,000 plus officeholders,
allowing ex-Confederate officerholders to continue to man their posts, or selecting mainly
antebellum and ex-Confederate political leaders as opposed to Union loyalists. In this activity,
Holden was following the example of Wells in Louisiana - a precedent that Governors
Sharkey, Lewis and Perry would soon also follow. Again, in August, Johnson supported
Mississippi Governor Sharkey in formation of a state militia against Union Major General
Henry Slocum. Slocum had prohibited the militia's formation since he feared that it would be
composed of ex-Confederate soldiers known for abuse of freemen and Unionists. Johnson
countermanded Slocum's order, and the general's fears were confirmed. Finally, in August, the
President announced that all black troops would be removed from the South. Johnson had a
sympathetic ear for those southern whites who complained of "painful humiliation" and the
breakdown of plantation discipline. Thus, August was clearly a turning point for the still
undecided. Northern war Democrats and Southerners of all convictions lined up behind
Johnson; radical Republicans, on the other hand, now understood that Johnson was
undermining all chances for a thoroughgoing reconstruction.991
[Party and Class Bases of Conservative Support for Re-Alignment]
Conservative Republicans, the largest single faction in the Thirty-Ninth Congress, were
unperturbed by Johnson's policy shift on black suffrage. They were not disturbed by war
Democratic efforts to have him publicly pronounce his preference for this party, and,
significantly, by Johnson's assumption of Congressional responsibilities under the war powers
provision of the Constitution. These conservatives felt much more comfortable with Johnson's
position on black enfranchisement (the entire question could be said under the rubric of "voter
qualifications" to belong to the states), and had nothing in common with radical proposals for
land reform and for territorialization of southern states under conditions of militarily-supported
civil occupation for an indefinite period. With emancipation, the "free" (i.e., waged) labor
conditions for a new South were already present and, coupled to the imagined activity of
landing-owning, cotton-producing capitalists - including Yankee entrepreneurs heading south,
the South was ready to rejoin the Union. Thus, first and foremost the policy of conservative
Republicans was, broadly speaking, aimed at protection of northern interests (including those
in the South) and freemen's citizen rights as waged laborers. For these men, Reconstruction
was a narrow, immediately practical problem. It was never oriented toward social and
economic transformation. Among conservative Republicans it is not surprising, then, that its
dominant national tendency, the New York state-based Seward-Weed faction, also, like war
990Barlow's letter to Blair is cited in Cox and Cox, Ibid, 60-61.
991For elaboration on the incident with Leake, see the section headed "The Role of the Army and Freedmen's

Bureau" and the sources cited therein, above; for court claims aimed at recovering confiscated property, Randell,
Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 338; on Holden and the other governors, Foner, Ibid, 188-189; for Slocum and
Sharkey as well as the status of black soldiers in the South, Ibid., 190.

Democrats around Blair, Richmond and Tammany Hall, actively sought to bring a political realignment into being, and made overtures to President Johnson for this purpose.
Governor of New York from 1839 to 1842, two-term U.S. Senator from New York throughout
the fifties, front-runner for the Republican party Presidential nomination in 1860 and Secretary
of State under Lincoln and Johnson (1861-1868), William H. Seward came to the Republican
party by way of Whiggery. A radical in the forties and fifties, he opposed both eastern
Whiggery's habitual nativism and slavery. The latter opposition was articulated in the
sophisticated political sense (and not morally in abolitionist terms) on the grounds that
southern backwardness retarded national economic development. Seward, a true continental
nationalist, possessed an expansive vision of American power and potential role in the world
very early on. Politically and theoretically accomplished, perhaps New York's most popular
politician, Seward became the de facto Republican party leader between 1856 and 1860.
Thurlow Weed was Seward's political mentor. A consummate insider's insider, long-time Whig,
with Seward Weed left the disintegrating Whig party for the newly forming Republican
organization late, long after Kansas-Nebraska exploded into a nation-wrenching sectional
conflict. In the most populous and economically most prosperous state in the Union, Weed
had carefully built up a Whig-nationalist state party machine based in Albany over years of
meticulous, arduous work. Decades before Lincoln came to power, he was the New York state
Republican party boss, a behind the scenes manipulator and operator, Seward's
organizational alter ego who secured the latter's electoral triumphs. Both Seward and Weed,
politically ambitious, had abandoned Whig radicalism in the late fifties. Significantly, both had,
on their own accounts for different reasons, been compromiser-conciliators inside the party
during the secession crisis of winter 1860-1861. In fact, together with Lincoln himself, and the
bulk of the Cabinet (less Stanton, Chase and Speed, Secretaries of War and Treasury, and
Attorney General respectively), Seward and Weed constituted the conservative center of
Republicanism from the firing on Fort Sumter until the end of the war.992
Since January 1861, Weed's control of the New York Republican party machine, challenged
and restricted by a bloc of radicals and anti-Weed Republican party machine politicians
around Horace Greeley, David Dudley Fields, George Opdyke and Reuben Fenton, had
begun to wane. After June 1862, against the background of this radical challenge and during
one of the many low points in the North's military fortunes, Weed first floated the idea of
disbanding the Republican party in order to unite the war Democratic and older WhigRepublican elements in a "Union" party around Lincoln. Radical strength in the Republican
party was on the rise because the radical program, revolutionizing the war (through
emancipation) and on that basis pursuing an unrelenting fight to the end to insure Northern
victory, was emerging as the only strategy to preserve the Union. Weed's idea of a Union
party was clearly to put an end to radical ascendancy even if partial adoption of the radical
program became necessary. Weed's years of intimate connection as state party boss-party
fundraiser extraordinaire, and his informal diplomatic trips to London and Paris on behalf of
the Lincoln's government, had allowed him to cultivate a finely tuned sensitivity to the needs
and fears of the New York City-based leading commercial and business figures in the country.
Weed was the personal bearer of the pressures generated by eastern bondholders (who
wanted an end to, because they feared inflation generated by, massive military spending),
European bondholders and financial capitalists who had made loans to the North (and feared
992For Seward and Weed, see the biographies of each by Glyndon Van Deusen (William Henry Seward and Thurlow

Weed), and Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 41-42, 80-81, 104-106, 142, 170, 221-223, 234-236, 282, 316; a glimpse of
Seward's advanced and extraordinarily prescient vision of American wealth and power articulated as early as 1837
can be found in Van Deusen, Seward, 47; on Lincoln-Seward and Cabinet conservativism (leading to both the
uncritical embrace of McClellan as general of the army and the abjectly conciliatory early conduct of the war known as
the border states policy), Julian, Ibid, 184-190, 195-196.

for their investments in the face of northern inability to mount a decisive military drive to finish
off the Confederacy), and the governing centers of ruling class power in Britain and France
(both who thought that the war had gone on too long, that further conflict meant more
disruption of capitalist trade threatening European stability, and that restoration of pre-war
levels of trade must be secured immediately). Electoral struggle in the New York City
stronghold of the peace Democracy also found him mediating to the centers of Republican
power the pressures emanating from the Copperhead social base, namely, the stratum of
banking and large merchant capital tied to cotton export (the latter of which had been
grievously hurt by the northern blockade), and New York City (and by extension, all big city)
artisan-workers and, in particular, (Irish) laborers who longed for a return to normalcy (viz., an
end to rising food and rent prices).993
Weed had, both through Seward and through frequent personal visits with Lincoln, made the
fears of radicalism apparent to the highest councils of the Republican party. Andrew Johnson,
too, was led to understand that the Seward-Weed faction of conservative Republicanism was
amendable to party re-alignment. This President knew full well that any new party he sought
to head would require assistance from this political tendency embedded as it was in the
organization that carried the greatest weight of any political faction in Congress. Yet, by
autumn, Johnson lent explicit support to neither the Congressionally weak war Democrats nor
conservative Republicans, as the September-November 1865 contest in New York state's offyear elections demonstrated. The President was busy in this respect laying the groundwork
for a broad-based "Andy Johnson party," as his press mouthpiece the New York Herald called
it. An independent or third party formation, Johnson's party was to be built organizationally on
control of the vast system of national patronage and politically on his "reconstruction" policy, a
policy that his many Democratic and Republican sycophants assured him was vastly
popular.994
[Actual Course and Objectives of Presidential Restoration]
President Johnson' reconstruction policy and its consequences came more and more into
conflict with radical imperatives as the year wound to a close and the Thirty-Ninth Congress
prepared to open.
Beginning with Mississippi in mid-August, southern states held conventions under terms of
Johnson's restoration policy in late summer and throughout the fall. Delegates, southern
Democrats and old Whigs most of whom were ex-Confederates, debated old, petty and
embittering issues that clearly indicated an unwillingness to abandon antebellum prejudices
and beliefs. (In North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, the conventions refused to
repudiate the Confederate debt.) In the fall, those southern states that had fulfilled Johnson's
terms for readmission, elected legislators and officerholders at all levels of state government.
While anti-secessionist, nonetheless ex-Confederate officeholding Whigs won in the
overwhelming majority of elections and garnered the bulk of major appointments, southern
Union loyalist were regularly subject to intimidation, threats and, occasionally, bodily harm
extending to murder. Johnson did nothing to secure the safety of these former Union men,
993For the struggles of Weed faction against radicals in New York, Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed; for the 1862 Union

party trial balloon, Van Deusen, Ibid, 320, and Julian, Ibid, 223.
994For the New York elections, Cox and Cox, Ibid, 68-87, and, in particular, war Democratic disappointment over
Johnson's lack of explicit support, Ibid, 85-86.
"Mouthpiece" may (and it may not) be a somewhat unfair characterization: The Herald's editor James Gordon Bennett
was personally in touch with Johnson, between them there appears to have been mutual respect and consultation,
and Bennett established a formal liaison with Johnson through which their professional relation was maintained. See
Ibid, 88-106.

Southerners, who had risked their lives and fortunes during the war in opposing the
Confederacy (to say nothing of freepersons subject to the same terror).
In September, Johnson pressured O.O. Howard, in the first of many such instances that would
follow that autumn, to remove one of the Freedmen's Bureau assistant commissioners whom
his fifth column inside the Bureau, J.S. Fullerton, identified as hostile to his efforts to restore
planters' abandoned and confiscated lands.995
In November and December, state legislatures meeting in South Carolina, Mississippi,
Louisiana and Alabama enacted the first "Black Codes." (The rest of the southern states were
to follow the same course in early 1866.) The codes were aimed at the newly won freedom of
freepeople. They restricted property rights, and attempted to eliminate social-geographical
mobility through fines for vagrancy and imprisonment. By enforcing contract labor and denying
free (waged) labor status to blacks, they prohibited jury duty and disallowed submission of
testimony against whites. The codes further prohibited carrying firearms, and even in some
cases laid down conditions for subjugation to the slave trade. In other words, denying all civil
and legal rights to blacks as a freepeople, these laws were an attempt to regulate black labor
according to the antebellum perspective of the planter, and to legally constitute and then
sanction a degraded caste-color based status of a total societal character for blacks. Andrew
Johnson made no disparaging comment, much less did he attempt to circumvent, these newly
enacted state laws. In fact, his actions suggest he appeared to approve of the course of
southern development: By September, the pardons of individual members of the fourteen
classes of Confederates disenfranchised under his 29 May 1865 decree had become massive
and indiscriminate as hundreds per day were issued. By the end of 1865, some 7,000 out of a
total 15,000 Southerners excluded from officeholding under the $20,000 clause had received
Presidential pardons.996
By the end of the year, Johnson, responding to planters' pleas, requests and demands for
removal of Union troops from their lands, had almost entirely demobilized Union armies: A
million man plus army on 1 May 1865 had been reduced to 152,000 officers and troops by 31
December 1865.997 The South now had no significant force to protect freepeople against the
intimidation and terror that the President's restoration policy had set loose. In particular,
virtually all black regiments had been disbanded and none effectively operated in the South.
With his Presidential restoration cum reconstruction of the southern states "completed" by the
time of the opening of the first session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, Andrew Johnson sought
to realize three inseparably distinct objectives. First, he wished to present not merely his
opponents in Congress but all those (in and out of Congress) who felt anything resembling
even a vague uneasiness over the course of events with a fait accompli. Second, in so doing,
he desired to foreclose on all other options, leaving Congress no alternative but to ratify his
restoration success (success presumably grudgingly acknowledged by Congress and lauded
by the nations leading newspapers). Thereby, he hoped to provide further evidence of his
centrality to the nation's future. Third, on the back of this triumph he would begin seriously to
construct that Unionist "Andy Johnson party" from which he would launch his bid (sure to
succeed) for the Presidency in 1868.
995On Johnson and the Bureau, see "The Role of the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau" and the sources cited

therein, above.
996For Black Codes, see "Black Codes," above.
Two of the earliest state constitutional conventions, elections, and legislative sessions that enacted "Black Codes"
are dealt with in Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed and Vernon Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi; for the
tempo of Presidential pardons, Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 191.
997Foner, Ibid, 148.

[Responses to Presidential Restoration. Faction and Unity Among Congressional

Republicans]
As the Thirty-Ninth Congress assembled for its opening session in early December 1865,
Johnson's opponents, the radicals, and those who felt uneasy over a course of events that did
not quite correspond to obfuscatory notions of a nation healing and a section getting back up
on its feet witnessed something different: Restored state governments dominated by exConfederate officeholders, legislatures seeking to effectively re-institutionalize antebellum
master-slave social relations, and the abuse of southern Union loyalists were the central
southern developments that confronted the new Congress. Hidden underneath, and only
occasionally visible beneath, this dense tangle of events with a specifically political meaning
was the hard class struggle between freemen, engaged in attempting to carve out a sphere of
autonomy based upon their newly won freedom, and planters, desperate to compel freemen
to work on their plantations in order to get cotton production moving again, salvage their
fortunes and re-establish hegemony over southern society. It was this struggle, the fact that a
freepeople refused to simply submit, that generated the overall context in which these events
were inserted, that compelled the "old natural leading element" in the South to pursue those
actions that taken together constituted this course of events, and that provided radicals with
the foundations and points of reference for their critique of Presidential policy and southern
reality.
Radical Republicans had had only the most minimal shared context to view, discuss and plan
their strategy for the new Congress once it convened. Leading men such as Ben Wade, Zach
Chandler and George Julian among others had held Congressionally authorized meetings
during the first months of recess in the radical-dominated, House-Senate Joint Committee on
the Conduct of the War. That committee had issued its final report on 22 May 1865, and, by
June, almost all radicals had returned to their home districts or states. Beyond this, they
corresponded heavily by way of letters. Between August and November, radicals expressed
anxiety about, division over and some hope for (a reversal of) the direction of Johnson's
policy. It appears the bulk of them shared the overriding conservative Republican fear that a
confrontation would irrevocably drive the President into the Democratic camp. Throughout
summer 1865 and into the fall, this perspective, it appears, structured their sentiments and
their practical orientation toward Johnson.998
By the time the Thirty-Ninth Congress opened in early December opposition to Johnson had
become irrevocable, but representative radical positions in each chamber could be put forth
only on the very limited basis of the pre-opening caucus. In the Senate, the first occasion for
(albeit limited) opposition was consideration of a House resolution for convening a joint
committee to handle all matters relating to Reconstruction. Charles Sumner spoke a length in
detailing the mounting evidence of savage southern behavior toward freemen and attempts to
legislatively re-enact a de facto form of slavery. He presented the radical position that
southern states were outside the Union and, accordingly, should be bound by laws emanating
from Congress, in particular, a bill put forth by Massachusetts radical Henry Wilson to void
"Black Codes" wherever in the South they might be legislated. Conservative Republicans
marshaled their strength and referred the bill to the Judiciary Committee where it later died.
Another Senate radical, Jacob Howard of Michigan articulated essentially the same position in
998The unwillingness to break with Johnson for fear of losing him to the Democrats is suggested by Trefousse, Ibid,

320, and also by George Julian, Political Recollections, 263 (though Julian had already encountered this attitude in
his early June return to Indiana).
Established in both the Thirty-Seven (1862-1863) and Thirty-Eight (1864-1865) Congresses, the Joint Committee on
the Conduct of the War receives treatment in two volumes by Hans Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 182-190,
246-249, 304-305, 312-515, and especially, Benjamin Franklin Wade (Ben Wade was chairman of the committee in
both Congresses), also Benedict, Ibid, 100-101.

defense of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction resolution. He indicated that the southern
states remained conquered communities subjugated in war and still subject to military power
because even in the present their actions revealed complete disregard for United States
authority. He noted it was military power alone that elicited their obedience. He concluded that
neither the states should be recognized as part of the Union nor should their representatives
be seated in Congress.999
The House-sponsored resolution that Howard supported in his speech was of considerable
importance, first, because, for the obvious retrospective reason, the body it created gave us
the Fourteenth Amendment. Second, the resolution arose as a measure explicitly aimed at
denying seats to southern state-designated representatives from Louisiana, Virginia, and
particularly Tennessee whose governments the President recognized as "restored" and whose
representatives he wanted seated. Its acceptance in both chambers demonstrated that, if the
fault line separating radical and conservative Republicans at the outset of the Thirty-Ninth
Congress was black suffrage, this difference did not preclude agreement on other
Reconstruction-related issues. As a matter of fact, a spectrum of Republican positions existed
ranging from the extreme conservative to that of the party's revolutionary democrats. Except
at the extremes, positions were not fixed, and were, moreover, quite fluid on certain
Reconstruction issues. Nonetheless, these two tendencies remained the great poles of
attraction to which Republicans were drawn; and, when all was said and done, all those
Republicans not on the immediate periphery of the radical tendency were repelled by and
recoiled from the extreme radical vision and its programmatic consequences.
President Johnson had assumed seating the southern delegations from Tennessee, Louisiana
and Virginia would not be problematic. The assumption was clearly operative, for example, in
the Senate speech of a Johnson Democrat from Wisconsin, James Doolittle. Johnson,
advised by Cabinet members such as Gideon Welles who could (and would) not distinguish
factions within the Congressional Republican caucus, had assumed the question of black
enfranchisement was a rigid line of demarcation. He further reckoned that radicals had been
isolated, that, as it were, the popular rejection of proposed amendments to the state
constitution enfranchising blacks in Connecticut in September and, again, in Wisconsin and
Minnesota in November had proved the efficacy of his restoration policies and the futility of
pursuing radical policy prescriptions. Leaning heavily on his southern sources of support, the
President's assessment was myopic: If conservatives Republicans were to straightforwardly
support Johnson in allowing restored southern states to decide questions of enfranchisement,
if they acceded to the President and allowed restored southern states to be seated without a
fundamental reconsideration of the entire question of national representation, with a
freepeople counting in the apportionment of representatives and at the same time politically
disenfranchised in the South, what would prevent the South from dominating the Congress, or
at least the House? The direction of Presidential policy forced conservative Republicans to
bloc with radicals: They had to put questions of representation beyond the reach of any
specific President or Congress and whatever legislation might be forthcoming from the latter.
Johnsons actions compelled them to go beyond all positive law and to embody a new
formulation for deciding representation in a Constitutional amendment, precisely a formulation
whose development would be left to a joint committee. In the abstract, conservative
Republicans were generally willing to commit to a party re-alignment that would destroy both
peace Democrats and radical Republicans as viable political tendencies. But they were
unwilling to see Southerners returned to power in the national legislature. A bloody, costly war
had been waged not, from their standpoint, in the least to preclude that possibility. The Joint
999For Sumner's speech, Ibid, 142-143; for Howard's, Williams H. Barnes, History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the

United States, 36-37.

Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction would be charged with eliminating that occurrence.

With the establishment of the Joint Committee, both Houses turned to other business.1000
During the Thirty-Ninth Congress' first session both houses proposed, debated and passed or
killed other legislation. In the House, financial legislation included consideration of a
bankruptcy, funding and currency bills; aid to the Niagara Ship Canal; and, a railroad
regulatory bill. In the Senate, transportation assistance included its version of the Niagara
Ship Canal bill and a Denver Pacific Railroad land grant; and, regulatory legislation included a
proposed rate amendment to the International Ocean Telegraph bill and a rate regulation
amendment to the Niagara Ship Canal bill. These bills suggest that, even at a historical
moment when sectional issues and the prospects for re-alignment among ruling class social
groups seemed to overwhelm that national State-centered debating society in which unity
among those groups was in the nineteenth century largely constituted, the Republican party
conservatives and radicals inclusive, found time, because it dominated the Congress, to
pursue its continental-scale industrialization commitments. Still reconstruction issues did
dominate the Congress.
[Congressional Legislation in Objective Opposition to the Intent of Presidential Restoration]
Four major pieces of legislation were put forth. First was the District of Columbia suffrage bill.
Recall that since Congress governed the District, state rights-styled arguments against
interfering with states' alleged voter qualification prerogatives were irrelevant and
meaningless. Note also the bill was about black suffrage because the District had a huge
unenfranchised Negro population. In the House, a bloc of radicals, Democrats and extreme
conservative Republicans killed a limited suffrage vote, the former because it was limited and
the latter two groups because it was a black suffrage bill. Angered Republicans between the
extremes joined with radicals and on 18 January 1866 passed an unrestricted bill. As it turned
out, the Senate version was effectively killed in committee when the radical controlled District
Committee, taking a wait and see attitude, back on 13 December had refused to release the
bill to the whole Senate.1001
Worried about the potential for divisions that could emerge between the Congress and the
President, Benedict reports that in December conservatives William Fessenden (Republican,
Maine) and Reverdy Johnson (Democrat, Maryland), both Senators on the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, had visited Andrew Johnson to pledge to him their desire to avoid such a
rupture. The President, in what retrospectively could only be called dissembling, left the
Senators sensing they had achieved an understanding with him. That understanding had
bearing on two of the other three bills formulated in this session of Congress, the Freedmen's
Bureau and Civil Rights bills. The former bill, by extending the life of the Bureau, aimed at
materially assisting a freepeople in its transition from slave to waged labor, and included a
federal appropriation for managing the agency and land set-asides on public lands in specified
southern states. The latter bill, aimed at new reality of a freepeople announced in the
Thirteenth Amendment, assured inhabitants (not voting citizens) of all states the rights to
transact their business in the marketplace (for blacks to sell their labor, exchange it as a
commodity) without fear of discrimination or criminal penalties. These assurances were to be
guaranteed in federal courts. Now, in the Senate, these bills were passed out of committees
controlled by conservative Republicans, and crafted to appeal to the President along lines he
1000For Doolittle's speech, Barnes, Ibid, 38-42; for Welles analytic sleight of the hand, Benedict, Ibid, 138; on the

significance of the Connecticut referendum, Ibid, 115-116.

1001For the DC suffrage bill, Benedict, A Compromise of Principle, 145-146, Foner, Ibid, 240, Barnes, Ibid, 50-51 (for
a flavor of the arguments), and Ibid, 51-94 (for reproduction of selections from numerous speakers in the House). For
a list of Congressional legislation, Benedict, Ibid, 43-48 (charts 5 and 6).

laid out to the Congress in his message to both Houses as Congress convened back in early
December. They passed the Senate with amendment but no resistance: The Freedman's
Bureau bill originally passed on 25 January and the Civil Rights bill on 2 February.1002
In the House, the Bureau bill was assailed by radicals led by Thaddeus Stevens and Ignatius
Donnelly of Minnesota, both of whom offered amendments. Stevens attacked the restricted
land distribution provisions that provided extremely poor quality lands (such as the Florida
everglades), the cost of lands salable to freemen and the bills possessory limitations (three
years). Stevens attached amendments to expand the land base, qualitatively lower its costs
and remove all limits on period of ownership. Donnelly added an amendment to authorize the
Bureau Commissioner to provide a common school education for all refugees and freemen. In
the end, none of these amendments were accepted. The bill passed the House on 6 February
and with other amendments went to the Senate. (The attempt to remove restrictions on the
period of ownership, to be sure, ran smack up against Constitutional prohibitions on
"corruption of blood.") By 9 February, both chambers had concurred on a Freedmen's Bureau
bill that was sent along to the President. Similarly, the House passed a Civil Rights bill on 3
March with amendments to which the Senate concurred on 15 March. Johnson Democrats,
conservative Republicans, and the Republican centrist swamp all felt confident they had
produced legislation the President would sign. But on 19 February, Johnson vetoed the
Freedman's Bureau bill extension and, on 27 March, he vetoed the Civil Rights Bill.1003
[Intent of and Opposition to Presidential Restoration Become Conscious]
Johnson veto message objectively and subjectively polarized the Congress against the
President, and against the numerically small fringe of Johnson Democrats and extreme
conservative Republicans in both legislative bodies.
Johnson likely felt secure in his northern popular support and was at any rate determined to
defend the restored southern order he had since July of the previous year staked his fortunes
on. Fierce political fighter that he was, he rejected the soft-edged draft prepared by his closest
high-ranking advisor, Secretary of State Seward: In his veto message Johnson, so to speak,
came out of the closet. He revealed what he was defending and he explicitly and
unequivocally articulated its defense.
Johnson's message indicates he had two broad types of opposition to the Bureau bill, one
general and one directed to the bill's "particulars." The two forms are logically confused: The
President's message intended the general objections to be grounded by reference to and by
Presidential exegesis of the Constitution. Particular objections were set forth with reference to
the "actual situation of the country." Additionally, Johnson engaged in a lengthy polemic
(approximately a third of the entire message) that asserted the Presidentially restored status
of the states made them states in the full Constitutional sense that entitled them to
Congressional representation.1004
1002For the Senators meeting with the President, Benedict, Ibid, 145; for the Bureau bill, Ibid, 147-150, Barnes, Ibid,

104-108 (wherein passages from the bill are quoted at length), 138-139.
1003Donnelly's amendment, Barnes Ibid, 145-146; for Stevens' amendments, Ibid, 156, Benedict, Ibid, 150.
The fourth major piece of Congressional Reconstruction legislation was the Fourteenth Amendment sent on to state
legislatures for ratification. See the discussion under the same heading, above.
1004The Freedmen's Bureau bill veto message is reproduced in full in Barnes' legislative history, Ibid, 164-170. All
citations refer to this reprint of the document.
The two forms of argumentation are logically confused for the following reasons. First, in more than one case of the
particular type of objection Johnson adduced Constitutional grounds. Second, he founded another particular type of
objection on a strictly logic model of societal relations without mediation by or reference to "the actual situation of the
country." Third, he introduced and understood a general type of objection as a particular one. The entire document is
driven, and the confusions generated, by Johnson's determination to compel the Congress to recognize states he

Generally, Johnson objected to the bill's design for military as opposed to civil enforcement of
black civil rights, to the martial law context of this enforcement, and to the lack of southern
representation in formulation and passage of the bill. For each of these considerations, the
President found no warrant in the Constitution. Johnson's Constitutionally grounded objections
presupposed the achievement of a normal situation on the ground (viz., a non-emergency
situation, one not provoked by the disintegration of civil government, by rebellion against the
national government or by class conflict raised to the pitch of actual class war). The normal
situation, in turn, could not be certified without grossly misconstruing all evidence to the
contrary, and ultimately only circuitously, by recurrence to fiat, that is, to the bald assertion of
the restored status of those Presidentially restored states. This presupposition as well as the
misconstruction is obvious and will become ever more so in review of his opposition to
"particulars."
Those particular objections included the allegedly novel peacetime mission of the Bureau
framed by the extension bill, the indefinite extension of the life of the Bureau and the powers
granted to its agents, land purchases authorized by the bill (conflated with "confiscations"
without legal proceedings), the creation of an "immense patronage" constituted out of the
multiplicities of officers, officials and clerks that the bill allegedly envisioned to administer the
Bureau's programs, and the purchase of homes for a specific class of people. Underlying
these objections is, first, a dubious construction of the original design of the Freedmen's
Bureau, namely, its creation as a "wartime auxiliary to the military task of destroying slavery,"
and, second, the identification of the situation on the ground in the South, the "actual situation
of the country," with the ordinary, peaceful context of daily life under conditions of what
Johnson took to be capitalist production. The construction is easily dispensed with: As we
noted above, the original mandate of the Bureau (created a year earlier on 3 March 1865)
called for, among other things, preparations for the postwar resettlement of ex-slaves, and the
wherewithal to accomplish this task. (The Bureau had been put exclusively in charge of all
abandoned or confiscated southern lands.) The second assumption entailed a description of
the state of affairs in the South that aimed at concluding this section had returned to normalcy.
While, according to Johnson, "offenses ... may be committed by individuals ... the country has
returned, or is returning, to a state of peace and industry." Perhaps the North was, but not the
South. As the President would have it, the situation in the South was not characterized by the
terroristically enforced, gross constriction of the movement and conditions of work of freemen
since by fundamental law they "possess a perfect right to change ... place of abode," and if
"[they do] not find in one community or State a mode of life suited to [their] ... desires, or
proper remuneration for [their] ... labor, [they] ... can move to another, where that labor is more
esteemed and better rewarded." The President had, of course, deduced the specific situation
on the ground in the South from the concept of free, waged labor, and consciously failed to
mediate his characterization of a basic social relation with the evidence of that situation as
revealed by innumerable sources. But it was not that Johnson was unaware of the "actual
situation" in the South. He had secretaries to summarize the newspaper horror stories he
didn't himself read, he had informants in the South, he had reports of the sworn testimony
taken by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction - testimony largely presented by southernstationed northern army officers that detailed the barbarous treatment of blacks in the different
parts of the South, and he had the lengthy report of one of his envoys, Carl Schurz. It is likely
that he simply dismissed all of this as "Yankee propaganda."
While Johnson's insensitivity to the "actual situation" of newly freepeople (viz., to the abuse,
degradation, humiliation, intimidation and bodily harm including murder) shocked northern
opinion, the President's callousness was not simply a matter of personal predilection.
Presidentially restored as rightful members of the Union.

Insensitivity was given with the class perspective of white southern yeoman that Johnson fell
back on in his vetoes. For the President, as for most white Southerners and the yeomanry in
particular, blacks were by assumption and habitual practice, invisible, totally outside of the
domain of human considerations. Engaged in a life and death struggle to keep from being
locked out of the postwar settlement on the ground, the poor southern white mass at the
bottom were at the very moment of the veto exhibiting the inverse side of this assumption
taken for granted at the top by making blacks the highly visible targets of their social panic.
Both the insensitivity and the class perspective underpinning the Bureau bill veto message
were overwhelmingly apparent in his Civil Rights bill veto message five weeks later. This veto
message lacked systemization and the limited clarity of the Bureau veto message: Johnson
proceeded methodically enough, considering the bill section by section, but instead of
consistently relating his objections to, say, Constitutional limitations on Congressional power,
real incongruities between the existing body of law and the bill, etc., he first and foremost
presented Congressional representatives with a compendium of class prejudices in place of
reasoned arguments to buttress his position. The President had several objections relating to
the Federal "invasion" of the domain of state competence, but his overriding concern was that
the bill conferred by law the novel "right of Federal citizenship" on blacks. He objected that
having just emerged from slavery, freemen lacked the "requisite qualifications to entitle them
to all the privilege and immunities of citizens of the United States," that they provided no
"evidence of their fitness to receive and exercise the rights of citizens," that the bill
discriminated "against large numbers of intelligent, worthy [because white], and patriotic
foreigners" who were subject to a lengthy period of probation. He objected to "a perfect
equality of the white and black races" "fixed by Federal law ... over the vast field of state
jurisdiction" relating to civil matters, that is, to the Federal arrogation of powers historically
held by states that, each "according to its own peculiar circumstances," could well enough
look to "the safety and well-being of its own citizens." He objected that Congressionallylegislated civil equality between whites and blacks set a precedent that would later allow
Congress to repeal state laws securing political inequality, that is, such a precedent might led
to "suffrage and office" equality "between the two races."1005
Johnson's arguments were transparent assertions of antebellum white supremacy in the face
of Congressional attempts to codify a minimal victor's settlement of the war. These arguments
were shabby. They began with an obliviousness to and denial of two hundred years of labor,
production and domicile as adequate grounds for national citizenship. They ranged through an
effort to frighten by suggesting civil equality could spill over into social equality (particularly
"miscegenation"), and the use of evidentially unmediated logical models of social development
to obfuscatorily deduce, in fact contravene, the "actual situation" on the ground in the South.
And, these worn, politely speaking, inelegant arguments ended in the patently ideological
assertion of a logically possible abstraction (viz., the perpetration of a galaxy of projected
injustices against the logical class, the "white race") as real, while the actual situation of
1005The Civil Rights bill veto message is reprinted in full in Barnes, Ibid, 246-253. All citations refer to this reprint of

the document.
Criticisms of the Federal incursion into the domain of state sovereignty included those of the denial of state
jurisdiction in case of conflicting laws, the assignment of Federal officials to prosecute offenses against Federal laws,
the denial of immunity to state legislatures, judges, etc., in acting according to state laws that contravene the laws
emanating from the projected Civil Rights bill, and the centralization of Federal-based, national power implied by the
bill. The President's defense against this invasion was grounded in state sovereignty or, if you prefer, the doctrine of
state rights. The movement of Johnson's earlier discussion, from objections to "race" equalization to opposition to
State centralization on the ground of state rights, was not fortuitous. The assertion of state rights had shifted form a
de jure plane, whereon it was articulated as a bastion against attacks on slavery, to a de facto one, whereon now it
had become an openly and poorly constructed obfuscatory, ideological defense of white supremacy in the practices
of daily life.

injustice and evil perpetrated against an oppressed class-people was systematically ignored
and denied. Rooted in a rural, agrarian society wrecked but not transformed by the Civil War,
Johnson failed to recognize and could not comprehend the changes in the role, function and
place of the national State in the life of the "nation" that waging the war had produced.
Instead, he took his stand with the most politically reactionary, backward looking resistance to
a truly moderate effort to bring the South into line with those changes.
[Objective, Historical Meaning of Presidential Restoration]
On 16 July, Johnson vetoed the second attempt to extend life of Freedmen's Bureau. The veto
message was read in the House, a vote to override was immediately taken and passed. This
action was, in turn, at once announced to the Senate where a similar vote was taken with the
same outcome. Both House and Senate overrode the President's veto of the second Bureau
bill, and on the same day the veto message was delivered to the Congress, the bill became
law.1006
Between the first veto of the Freedmen's Bureau bill and that of the Civil Rights bill, the
President had, in unmistakably revealing what he stood for and who he stood with, isolated
himself from the bulk of his supporters in the Congress as well as the mass popularity he had
enjoyed in the North just months earlier. On 26 June, he issued a call for a convention of his
followers to be held later in the summer. Held in August, the pro-Johnson Philadelphia
Convention was a miserable failure as evidenced by the paucity of leading national political
figures (a handful of Johnson Democrats) who attended. The coalition of party forces that was
his to put together in the last half of the previous year had deserted him. A year after
Johnson's "reconstruction" policy shift was in full swing, Presidential restoration lay in
shambles. Congressional Reconstruction was already underway.
Andrew Johnson veto messages asked the bulk of his (by now) one-time Congressional
supporters to overturn the objective outcome of the war, namely, destruction of planter
supremacy in the national State. Such a request was unacceptable, even unthinkable.
Acceptance would have entailed the full restoration of the antebellum political leadership and
retention of a legally sanctioned, undisguised form of black domination formally similar to prewar southern class structure of slavery. Restored and basing itself on that domination, the
reconstituted planter aristocracy would have in short order been contending for political power
nationally (since the old three-fifths formula was rendered meaningless by the Thirteenth
Amendment and the South would have been representationally strengthened in the
Congress). Immediately this would have meant repudiation of the Union war debt. Eventually
it would have meant balkanization of the nation, destruction of a northern financial and
industrial capitalist-controlled national market, and an end to industrialization on a continental
scale. The old planter-centered, southern society, to be sure transformed by the abolition of
slavery, would have on Johnson's terms of Presidential restoration reemerged: Having lost the
war, the South could have won the peace. Still the issue of a postwar settlement of the South
was hardly decided. Here, in the South and on the ground, the array of class forces aligned
against each other had not yet taken a fixed shape.

1006The first Freedmen's bureau bill was overridden in the House, and on 20 February in the Senate failed (by a vote

of 30-18 in favor) to receive the necessary two-thirds majority by just two votes. The Civil Rights bill veto was
overridden in both houses of Congress and became law on 9 April.
Conservative Republicans did everything they could to accommodate the President in rewriting the second Bureau
bill. His "reasonable" objections, such as restriction of Bureau life (to two additional years) and reduction of the setaside acreage, were incorporated into the revised, second Bureau bill. Still even conservatives saw the writing on the
wall. That writing, written in large letters in the hand of Andrew Johnson, read, "this is a white man's government."

Between "Nigger-Lord" and Slave: The Role of non-Planter Whites in the Postwar Southern
Settlement1007
[This] is a government framed by the white race for themselves ... and we will not agree to
hand it over to the negroes.
It is for this end we are to have negro equality, negro suffrage, negro freedmen's
associations, negro troops to take full possession of the country; while the right of the white
race in the constitution, in the soil, in all the improvements of property to which their
civilization has given birth is to be surrendered.1008

[Race Consciousness and Political Commitments]

Historically, the consciousness of yeoman farmers and poor whites in the South had been
formed by their original backcountry encounters. Four moments of this awareness are worth
briefly developing. First, the native populations had to be "cleared" of the lands these settlers
coveted, and, accordingly, Indian-hating and Indian-fighting were central moments of that
consciousness. In this respect, Andrew Jackson was a figure of legendary proportions. The
Hero's commitment to whites' only egalitarianism reinforced the primitive equality experienced
in the leveling conditions of frontier life. Thus, second, an egalitarian community of white men,
a Herrenvolk democracy first felt and lived in relation to Indians and then to blacks, was
assumed to be at once the natural and moral order of things. The condition of this order was
the legal codification of the racial oppression first undertaken in colonial Virginia; and the
guarantor of this racist community was the Union understood as a white man's government.
Accordingly, there was the (epigrammatically) cited, further emotional attachment to an
encompassing national community. Third, poor whites held the black slave in contempt,
largely because of the striking similarly in the material context of their respective lives: Cabin
sizes and construction, types of food and dress were virtually identical. Thus, with nothing
objectively substantial to distinguish the poor white from the slave, slavery offered, as it were,
the poor white what they felt was a "defense of their self-respect." Fourth, the lack of social
intercourse rooted in production and exchange, isolation, and, on this material ground, the
primacy of kinship, and the rationality that evolved from it, made all these populations highly
individualistic, and it made the male householder willful, his kin, based on their dependency,
submissive. Among the yeomanry, these personalities, and interpersonal relations, all
developed, of course, within the context of isolated local communities.1009
1007For the historical and productive contexts in which non-planter whites in the South lived and worked, see the

Prologue to this chapter, above.

1008Jeremiah Black, prominent Pennsylvania Democrat, unofficially on behalf of the northern Democracy in July
1865, writing to Montgomery Blair in a letter whose real audience was President Johnson. Cited in Cox and Cox,
Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865-1866, 63.
1009For legal codification of racial oppression see the section "Legal Sanction of Racial Slavery" in the Preface,
above; for material similarity in life conditions among poor whites and slaves, A.O. Craven, "Poor Whites and Negroes
in the Ante-Bellum South," 16-18; for self-respect, "Ibid," 20; and W.M. Brewer, "Poor Whites and Negroes in the
South Since the Civil War," 27.
"How would you like to hav a niggar feelin' just as good as a white man? How'd you like to have a niggar steppin' up
to your darter [daughter]?" Craven, "Ibid.
"The distinction between (yeoman) farmers and poor whites, which at least in respect to racism is crucial. Craven
notes ("Ibid," 20-21) that slaveholding yeoman families worked with their slaves in the fields as well in the home (e.g.,
a mistress and a female slave doing the work of household reproduction at a loom, spinning wheel, etc.), they ate
together and slept in the same room that is, in the same cabin. Such interaction in production and consumption could
not given rise to an unalloyed racism. Yeoman slaveholder efforts, like those of great planters, to reintroduce black
dependency after the war would also be motivated by concerns for labor, its use and control. Finally, it should be
noted that even among poor whites and slaves there were cooperative relations. Craven ("Ibid," 19-20) points out that
corn whiskey was bartered by poor whites to slaves in exchange for labor at night in his patch (as a slave slipped out
off plantation lands), or, more rarely, in exchange for stolen plantation tools and supplies.

In the 1830s, that is, during Jackson's Presidency, trans-individual and social class elements
seemed to have entered the consciousness of the yeomen and poor white populations of the
backcountry South. Actually, though, it was the Hero who railed against the planter
aristocracy, the monopolists and the banks, while extolling the virtues of the honest farmers
and mechanics of the nation. Thus, this awareness was supported by and relied on the
Andrew Jackson himself and the Democratic party apparatus for its elaboration and
propagation: The lack of immediate contact between classes resulting from social relations of
rural isolation did not make for an explicit awareness - sedimented in feelings of e.g.,
humiliation, justified anger, resentment and hostility as experienced at the point of production of oppression, opposition and conflict. Instead, for at least four reasons it was diverted: First,
the social inferiority of blacks as slaves was self-evident to all free men in a culture within
which self-understanding of personal worth and humanity was mediated by classical
republican concepts of virtue and independence. Second, the local and "national," big-city
newspaper editors in the South diverted what consciousness of class existed into race
prejudice.1010 Third, the organizational components of the "second party system," especially
the Southern Democracy after it was captured by the large planters (who by 1840 had
become increasingly conscious of themselves as a class), suppressed economic-based and
fiscal-based intra-sectional issues that, if openly discussed, would have revealed social class
underpinnings.1011 Fourth, by this time there was no political party to articulate and then
pursue the interests of the, strictly speaking, poor whites.1012
The emotional and ideal commitment of the poorer white populations was largely to planter
society. If a yeoman could afford just two slaves, her (a slave's) labor would qualitatively
lessen the work of a yeoman's wife and similarly lessen the household's dependence on
children for labor in the fields. Even if property in slaves and plantation-sized holdings were
beyond the reach of the non-planter white strata, the existence of slavery and plantation
agriculture, because taken together both vastly restricted the penetration of capitalist
productive and exchange relations, in effect acted as a buffer and helped a stratum of the
yeomanry to preserve their own and their families' subsistence-based, non-market autonomy.
It also, it might be added, helped the truly "poor whites," as noted above, to preserve their
"dignity." (At the same time, because of the proximity of markets, the better-off strata of
yeomen farmers were occasionally able to engage in market transactions. Thus, it allowed
them to purchase goods, e.g., implements, foodstuffs, clothing, etc. that they themselves
could not produce.) The self-consciousness of the Georgia and South Carolina upcountry
yeomanry, for example, can be partially characterized by a "world view" "infused with the
slaveholding ideal"; by, from the yeoman's standpoint, the similarity between yeoman and
planter with a view to independent ownership of land; and by a contempt for those who in this
stratified society were below them (a contempt, which like European middle classes of 19th
century and the American middle strata today, characterizing, in class terms, those situated in
a middling position in society). These yeoman-held attitudes were contradictory in the
perspective of his relation to the great planter: The latter was at once admired as a social
model and resented for his wealth and power. In fact, the lower we go down on the southern
Most adequately, we can say, following Craven, that poor whites and black slaves were suspicious of each other.
(And, in the immediate post-war context, because war-wrought destruction marginalized farmers as we elaborate
below, poor whites included the yeomanry.) These points are important, especially with a view to the actual post-war
settlement of southern affairs: Racial hatred did not inevitably decree that the postbellum South would look much like
the antebellum South minus slavery.
1010Shugg, Class Struggle in Louisiana. 29-30.
1011Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 112-113.
1012Shugg, Ibid, 31.

white social structure, the more common it is to see exhibited a class hatred for wealthy
planters and a racist revulsion for black slaves. All these attitudes were, of course, served up
with equal doses of republicanism and whites only egalitarianism.1013
Among the yeoman and Unionist strongholds of the South, eastern Kentucky, East
Tennessee, western North Carolina and northern Alabama, and among the mountain people
further upcountry, an unadulterated, abiding distaste for the great planter appears to have
been the dominant sentiment: Among many, a scorn for slaves that extended to freemen was
inseparable from a true hatred of the "nigger lord." This attitude was materially grounded in
planter appropriation of the best lands, and decades of encroachment on yeoman lands as
cotton production expanded.1014 The war intensified this hatred: In East Tennessee, western
North Carolina and northern Alabama particularly, southern Union loyalists, "Tories," were
subject to Confederate conscription, their livestock and crops were expropriate without
compensation, their farms were overrun, and the families and kin of those who refused to fight
(deserted or went north to fight for the Union side) were subject to harassment, intimidation,
and violence that regularly included murder, and, on occasion, developed into full scale little
wars."
[Southern White Populations in the Civil War and its Immediate Aftermath]
After winter 1863-1864, those areas where fighting was heavy included East Tennessee,
northern Georgia, and northern Alabama.1015 Because yeoman populations dotted these and
1013Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 131 (citation), 132, 134. He writes that, "Racial slavery [w]as a unifying force of

free society - this was one of the recurring themes of proslavery writers throughout the South " Ibid.
On the material premises of the yeomen's attachment to slavery, Oakes, Ibid, 95, 109; for planter recognition of the
buffer slaveholding provided to yeomen, Hahn, "Ibid," 185: "The proslavery argument, especially as directed toward
Southern non-slaveholders, proclaimed that the enslavement of blacks secured the independence of all whites by
restraining market relations. ... [It was] insisted that free labor in the North reduced poor folk to the status of 'wage
slaves,' and they predicted identical consequences in the South should emancipation be effected." "Ibid"; for the
"slaveholding ideal," Ford, "Labor and Ideology in the South Carolina Upcountry," 27. "For Southerners, the
prosperous planter represented the virtues of the independent yeoman writ large." And, "the psychological appeal of
mastery reached yeoman farmers as well as slaveholders. The presence of black slaves allowed an entire race of
would-be masters without slaves to enjoy certain caste privileges and to flaunt a certain instinctive sense of natural
mastery. White skin made men masters, even if they actually owned or controlled barely anything." "Ibid."
1014Oakes, Ibid, 129.
1015At the outset of the war, there were non-planter, white populations who had grievances against the established

states governments. In Louisiana, prior to the constitutional convention of 1845, poor white populations were simply
disenfranchised by a property qualification; after 1845, the wealthy New Orleans commercial interests and Black Belt
planters managed to effect a similar result - regardless of the party in power - through control of the legislature
(Shugg, Ibid, 123-124, 125, 132-134, 138, 139, 141, 155-156). In North Carolina until 1835 (i.e., until constitutional
changes were introduced), the western part of the state was underrepresented in the state legislature since seats
were apportioned by counties and not on the basis of population. (The western portion had become more populous.)
Until 1857, state senators were elected only by those meeting property qualifications (McKinney, Mountain
Republicanism, 4). In East Tennessee, there was resentment of a state government that refused to fund exploitation
of mineral resources in the region (Ibid).
The advent of railroad (in the 1850s) further exacerbated material-grounded productive differences: Rails ran north
and south. This encouraged middle and western Tennessee to trade with the agricultural South, and East Tennessee
to trade with the more industrialized border states and the North (Ibid, 5).
In Virginia, particularly, in the southwest and northwest (i.e., present-day West Virginia), differences were more
pronouncedly political: Wealthy planters openly controlled state government, and were better represented in the
legislature (Ibid, and Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 125-126). This disaffection, particularly in East Tennessee and
northwest Virginia (and also in eastern Kentucky), fed existing animosities of poor white populations toward planter
aristocracies. These economic and political differences were intensified by the secession crisis. A number of these
areas were strongly and actively committed to Unionism, especially East Tennessee, northwest Virginia and eastern
Kentucky (McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicanism, 20). War sentiments of the upcountry populations of
northern Georgia and Alabama were divided, some strongly rebel, others pro-Union and still others simply indifferent.
(Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 110-122). Southwest Virginia and western North Carolina, though

other regions (especially the western Carolinas and southwest Virginia), they were adversely
affected like the poorer white mountain peoples: The draconian 1862 Confederate
conscription law and successive laws (that in a patently obvious sense discriminated against
the white farmers and mountaineers), and the behavior of rebel troops in these regions
(forcibly impressing men into service, taking and slaughtering livestock without compensation,
stealing horses, etc.), confirmed their worse suspicions (poor men fought in a war to defend
rich men's property) and turned the peoples of these regions against the Confederacy.1016
The war destroyed the independence of the southern upcountry yeomanries. It rendered
individuals, families and communities, whose market integration prior to war was limited, 1017
abjectly dependent. War-time practices, such as conscription which took adult males from the
farm and thus left the fields and barns largely to be run down, uncompensated expropriation of
crops and livestock to support rebel armies in the field, the trampling of fields, the similar
ravages of occupying Union armies, and bands of marauders often made up of deserters
created extraordinary deprivation, completely unsettling social life. During the war, by and
large pro-Unionist, southern whites were persecuted by rebels,1018 often hunted by patrols.
The war accelerated marginalization of the white non-planter populations, and converted an
extreme situation of the most isolated "poor white" into a social norm. "At the close of
hostilities the condition of the people in the poorer regions was pitiable. Stock, fences, barns,
and in many cases dwellings had disappeared; the fields were grown up in weeds; and no
supplies were available. How the people managed to live was a mystery. Some walked twenty
miles to get food, and there were cases of starvation. No seeds and no farm implements were
to be had."1019
Hugh McCulloch, Andrew Johnson's first Secretary of the Treasury, adopted a policy of
repaying, in particular, the great northern financial capitalist in species (gold) as opposed to
greenbacks (paper) that greatly restricted money supply and starved the entire South for
credit. Northern manufacturing and financial capitalists were unwilling to lend or invest in an
unstable (i.e., conflict ridden) social environment. Operating on free labor assumptions,
Republicans, in firm control of the Congress, would not think of creating a program to ease the
burden of debt of and to issue credits to loyalist farming Southerners. State policy
unwillingness on top of wartime loss and destruction, then, guaranteed a painfully slow
recovery in the upcountry South, and insured the continued marginalization of small farmers.
[Counterrevolutionary, White Terror against Freemen]1020
not favoring secession, nonetheless provided large volunteer forces to rebel armies. (They were at any rate cut off
from Union army protection.) In those regions that opposing armies at one time or another occupied and in which
battles were fought, military marauding was generalized: "Farms [were] destroyed and foraged and subsistence [was]
consumed" to the point were the survival of the civilian, mountain populations was at stake. (Confederate general
James Longstreet quoted by McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicanism, 20).
1016, 22-23; and, McKinney, Mountain Republicanism, 8-11.
1017 Hahn, "The 'Unmaking' of the Southern Yeomanry," 181. Also James Oakes, Ibid, 111-112, 113-114.
1018After the war, southern Unionists continued to be persecuted by ex-rebels (to the extent of hangings), see, for

example, Fleming, Ibid, 659.

1019Fleming, Ibid, 713.
One of the ways they managed to life was through gratis food distribution by the Freedmans Bureau. Hard to escape,
such proved to whites that they were no better than blacks. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons it was so hated by
this massified white population. Empirically, Hahn ("Ibid," 186) provides some evidence for desperation in the northern
Georgia upcountry, an area that did not suffer as much war-wrought destruction as others. From 1860 to 1870, a not
altogether reliable federal census indicated that this region generated 40% less bushels of corn, 35% less heads of
livestock.
1020For the following account relies on Eric Foner's Reconstruction, 1863-1877.

Where they could, freepeople did not take the violence aimed at them lying down. Though the
instances were uncommon, they fought back. (It goes without saying that Democratic
sympathizing military commanders appointed by Andrew Johnson did nothing to intervene in
the course of the Terror.) Geographically, violence itself was unevenly distributed: Some
areas, predominately black, were never touched by the white Terror. Violence was
concentrated in the upcountry regions were black and white populations were roughly even,
and chances for political ascendancy of the two major political parties were roughly equal.
There, of course, the good white citizenry and its politicians stood to lose.1021
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the single programmatic measure that could have
undertaken to destroy the power of the great planters was to break up the large estates. Land
redistribution aimed at both ex-slaves and non-planter whites, combined with debt relief and
an ample credit supply, would at the same time have lifted the latter out of the degraded poor
white status that had become a social norm, and created the basis of a class alliance upon
which revolutionary democrats could have hegemonized the South through the Republican
party.
As a matter of historical fact, alliances were created (e.g., in North Carolina), and, even prior
to Congressional Reconstruction (which we date from 1868), a real basis for such alliances
existed as late fall 1867 in upcountry Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas.1022
Yet, the mass of non-planter whites either directly participated in or were, for obvious reasons
of fear of retaliation, indirectly complicit in violence against freemen. The first large upsurge of
violence (that included whippings, beatings, shootings and lynchings) as well as instances of
various forms of electoral fraud occurred in the run-up to the 1868 national election. Among all
those whites that hoped to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, it was intuitively recognized
that the victory of Horatio Seymour, ex-governor of wartime New York, on the Democratic
party ticket would mean the end of Reconstruction, and effectively restore the status quo
antebellum, would, in other words, portent the de facto re-enslavement of blacks, slavery
without its juridical forms. Grant's victory, and Republican victories in elections thereafter did
not alter this understanding of the chances for a restoration: From this time forward until the
final, late 1876 "redemption" (of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina), surges of
counterrevolutionary violence occurred in advance of each and every state and national
election.1023
The Klu Klux Klan, for example, first appeared and grew rapidly in every southern state during
the first great upsurge of violence that began with the run-up to the 1868 election. In an
objective, historically efficacious sense, the Klan, as Foner remarks, was a military arm that
advanced the interests of the Democracy - as the party of counterrevolution, the planters as a
class attempting to recoup their wartime losses, and all those who dreamed of a total
restoration of whites over freemen.1024
Violence was not indiscriminate. It had specific objects, the first of which were local black
leaders, politicians, ministers, artisans, men prominent in their communities especially those
who had been vocal in their support for and encouragement of black political rights. Second,
1021For the geography of terror, Foner, Ibid, 430-431; for instances of black resistance, Ibid, 435-436.
1022304 (NC), 314, 347. Work with the Republican party in North Carolina in building an alliance of freemen and non-

planter whites formed the experiential basis for Albion Tourgee's novel A Fool's Errand (1880).
1023For a short summary of organized, Klan, violence against freepeople, Foner, Ibid, 325-344; for a more lengthy
discussion of the role of violence in the Reconstruction, George Rable, But There was no Peace: The Role of
Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction; and, for the reader who can stomach it, the entire course of most egregious
and criminal violence is laid out in Allan Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction.
1024Foner's characterization of the Klan, Ibid, 425.

specifically politically inspired violence was aimed at white Republicans, the much maligned
"scalawags." Third, much less frequently the violence took the entire Republican party and its
leadership as its object. At this level, mass murders were carried out. In all respects, here, the
intent was to insure that no "nigger [would] ... hold office in the United States."1025
But violence was not just political, because the intent was not merely to restore a "white man's
government." Here, the presence of men of property, large and small, but in particular large
planters, lawyers, other upstanding citizens (politicians, newspaper editors, etc.), who
organized the violence, must be recognized. The mass of small farmers and white trash made
up the bulk of the perpetrators of organized violence, but the good citizens not only organized
it but also were present and participated in its execution. This is especially clear in the
numerous instances throughout the South during the entire period of Reconstruction where
violence was aimed at labor control. For the sole beneficiary in this regard was the planter:
Blacks who challenged planter determination of crop portion allotments at the end of the year
were frequently singled out by Klansmen, whipped or driven off the plantation without their
shares. Other freemen who refused to work without payment of back wages, who sought to
change employers, who worked altogether off a plantation say on a rail construction crew, or
who, rarely, had the audacity to call an employer before the Bureau or to take him to court,
were all treated similarly, assaulted and then, of course, warned to assume their proper role
and place in southern life. Here planters and leading Democratic party figures instigated,
organized, and, it even appears, controlled the violence. Where prosecution was attempted
the good citizenry defended the perpetrators, and moreover, they encouraged and materially
aided campaigns of violence by engaging in constant vilification, in public forums (churches,
political rallies) and newspapers, of the "niggers," "scalawags," and "carpetbaggers" who
inflicted the evil of black control on Southern communities.1026
But violence did not end here. A whole other retrospectively discernible strand of violence was
pursued throughout the South. First, "uppity niggers" were regularly assaulted: Men and
women who had refused to cast their eyes downward in white presence, who spoke to whites
as equals and not subserviently, or who did not yield the walkway to whites, were all pilloried
and attacked usually under the cover of darkness. Second, the newly created domains of
black community and autonomy were subject to frequent targeting, especially schools and
churches. Teachers were attacked (for "making" blacks "like white men") and educated
freemen were also often selected for assault. Thirdly, perhaps the most likely freeperson to be
singled out were those who had achieved some economic success. Blacks who owned their
land and livestock, and produced a subsistence in crops at once defied the conventional view
of the role and proper place of blacks in society, and rendered themselves productively
independent, that is, free of the planter.1027
Violence, it must be stressed again, did not merely mean brutality, such as beatings and
whippings. Men, women and children were first and foremost to be intimidated, and this often
entailed selective murders. Violence was discriminating, organized and systematic according
to a plan: It aimed to disenfranchise freemen, render the Republican party functionally
useless, re-institute control of and over black labor, and to reassert white supremacy in all
spheres of life. However ubiquitous, its instigators were not, as is commonly asserted, poor
whites as a distinctive group as they existed prior to the war. They were rather men of
property, large and small but particularly large property, who organized the two great waves of
1025Ibid, 426-427.
1026For the central role of men of property and standing, and the evidence supporting this view, Ibid, 432-434; for

incidents of violence aimed at labor discipline, Ibid, 428-429.

1027For assaults on the simply humanity of blacks, on the domains of black autonomy and economically successful
blacks, Ibid, 430, 428-429.

counterrevolutionary Terror that swept over the South. Reconstruction era violence against
blacks constituted a counterrevolutionary or white Terror, first, because it aimed to reverse the
revolutionary outcome of the war, namely, the expropriation of planter property in slaves, by
re-instituting some form of de facto re-enslavement on the ground; second, because, it sought
(in the bulk of southern states subject to Congressional Reconstruction) to overthrow those
black-based governments elected after 1867; and, third, because it aimed to establish a
racially oppressive reign of white supremacy in all domains of daily life.1028
[Northern Silence. Tacit Backers of CounterRevolution.]
Newly elected President Grant demonstrated what was becoming an all-too-common callous
disregard for the Terror. (Given his unique military genius, and the power at his disposal, moral
failure and complicity, not just apologetic realpolitische savvy should be the historical
standards to evaluate his lack of action and his two Administrations' hesitancy, indecision and
irresoluteness.) He neither removed the Democratic sympathizing military commanders
installed by Andrew Johnson, nor ordered them to enforce the terms of the Reconstruction
Acts. Either Grant suffered the same "free labor" limitations of visions as other soon-to-be
liberal Republicans (i.e., he considered a formal act of legislation all that was permissible in
securing the freedom of a newly freepeople), or, more likely, he was politically astute enough
to recognize the requirements for a southern settlement tacitly deemed necessary by the
leadership of the bloc of classes that had put him in power (and astute enough regardless of
the rather quirky, good old boyish initial Cabinet appointments he had made). Across the
North, a maddening silence over the daily atrocities visited upon southern freepeople
characterized the legislative forums and the national newspapers. Underlying it was a
consciousness of the class interests of the various actors in the North in their relations to and
prospects in the South.
Northern capitalists of all hues would have nothing to do with land redistribution, combined
with debt relief and an ample credit supply, aimed at freemen and non-planter whites. The
stratum of New York, Boston and Philadelphia financiers bankrolling the cotton trade,
international import-export merchants, and the great textile manufacturers, as well as the
layer of truly great financiers who organized the New York City money and bond markets
(even if only indirectly involved in cotton exchange), all ruling class social groups, one and all
had far too great a stake in plantation agriculture to allow the large estates to be reduced to
40-100 acre plots, and thereby run the risk of creating a class of self-sufficient yeomanry
whose interests in cotton production would, at least over the entire breath of the South, likely
be marginal. Similarly, manufacturers of farming implements, and those emerging
industrialists at the heart of the capitalist dynamic, such as iron producers whose interests
centered on rail production, had no desire to see the great plantations parceled up and a
potentially huge market left undeveloped. The perspective of western capitalist farmers, grain,
beef and pork producers, was similar to that of the manufacturers. Finally, Yankee
entrepreneurs, the ubiquitous carpetbagger of revanchist mythology, men who would make
this all possible through the employment of free, waged and former slave labor (itself the one
moment of the anticipated huge market), who in re-capitalizing the great estates and
undertaking their full integration in the capitalist world, were eager for their opportunity to
enrich themselves through purchase, ownership, and production and exploitation of waged
1028"Red" and "white" as colors designating revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forms of organized violence stem

from the flag colors of communist forces and their regrouped Tsarist armed opposition during the Russian Civil War.
The pun on white is intended and the irony here should not be missed: Fifty years before the western capitalist
intervention to dislodge the Bolsheviks and effect a counterrevolutionary restoration on the bayonets of the
fragmentary ex-Tsarist armies and the fourteen supporting imperialist "expeditionary" forces, white terror had been
established as counterrevolutionary in the American South.

labor on large plantations. If northern capitalists were opposed to land redistribution in the
South, then, of course, so were those politicians who shared their commitments and pursued
their interests in the Congress. On this particular issue, war Democrats and conservative
Republicans formed the largest single, and unbeatable, bloc in the national legislature.
Anyway one cut it, it was better that freepeople return to the plantations as waged
workers.1029
[Immediate Postwar Fate of non-Planter Whites]
The mass base of the Klan, and similar organizations (Knights of the White Camellia and the
White Brotherhood), rested on the small planter and poor whites who had been largely
homogenized by the course of the war. `With handouts from the Freemen's Bureau, planters
who had reasserted themselves through Presidential pardons, and with neither land
redistribution nor credits and fertilizers forthcoming from a Congress that outside its
revolutionary democrats largely represented great northern capitalists, socially and
economically reduced non-planter whites were left to fend for themselves.
In this context, the ascendancy of a newly freepeople was an unbearable, unacceptable
psychological blow to the mass of this greatly enlarged poor white stratum: What if black
freemen and freewomen succeeded? All those absurd and meaningless assertions Yankee
abolitionists had made about the slavish Negro might be true. The war, and southern planter
culture it defended, might itself have been wrong. While depth-psychological motivations
remained, in an immediate sense race bigotry was largely underpinned by this fear among the
non-slaveholding white population.
Other social groups and class fragments, more or less attached to the economic activity of the
planter, viz., overseers, slave managers and merchants, also shared this fear with varying
degrees of intensity: All non-planter groups feared that the productive ascendancy of freemen,
based, say, on economic concessions by planters in conjunction with the presence of the
Union army, would establish freemen as viable, independent farmers with an autonomous
social life. Organized and directed by their social betters, non-slaveholding white farmers, "the
mass of half-starved farmers and peasants," dreading this outcome the most, bitterly opposed
freepeople and expressed this opposition in frenzied violence toward blacks that superficially
and retrospectively appears arbitrary and most brutal because it was the intimidation, assaults
and murders aimed at the simple humanity of blacks, their capacity for productive success
and their creation of autonomous institutions.1030 With little of nothing of their own, the
establishment of white supremacy as a total cultural fact became a driving emotional and
psychological compulsion.
Forced to choice between their class-based hatred of the planters and their race-based
revulsion for blacks, with support from neither northern nor southern Republican parties, and
pushed to the edge by the overwhelming anxiety that in settlement of southern affairs as it
took shape on the ground they would be bypassed, pushed to the bottom of the social order,
non-planter whites opted for white Terror.
[Summation]
In the war's aftermath, then, the ruin of farms, starvation conditions, and extreme
impoverishment left the mass of non-planter southern whites desperate and wound up with
anxiety over their future and fate.1031 Retrospectively, it may also be true that the meaning of
1029Recall that, as late as 1870, cotton exports constituted 72% of the total U.S. exports by volume. See William

Parker, "Comment," 74, in Gilchrist and Lewis, Economic Change in the Civil War Era.
1030Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 608 (citation); and, also 573, 601-602, 609-610.

emancipation after Appomattox entailed the destruction of the vision of mastery, 1032 or it may
have left these southern whites with the less than comforting knowledge that the system of
social relations based on slavery which had once buffeted at least certain non-slaveholding
white strata from entrapment in the market as wage-laborers (in other words, from a loss of
independence) had been destroyed. But the centrality of these sentiments for southern
yeoman and poor white populations was not given with the course of events. The
reemergence of race as the central issue in the settlement of southern social life was not a
necessary outcome of Civil War, the defeat of rebel forces, emancipation or even the warwrought state of nature. In the first, crucial months following the formal end of the war poor
whites, like almost all Southerners, were consumed with procuring the immediate necessities
of life.1033 Moreover, there was, as we demonstrated above, a socially generalized willingness
to accept whatever settlement the North would impose:1034 There was no commitment to a
racist settlement of southern affairs in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of slavery,
and of the concomitant loss of planter wealth, prestige, and power. A different settlement was
possible, or at least the settlement (southern Redemption) that has come down to us, was not
simply given with the course of events as the war ended. It was only the facile success of
Presidential policy, and, accordingly, the lack of organized opposition in those crucial early
months which made this success possible and that gave the old "natural leading element" of
the South hope of restoration.
The settlement that has come down to us as the outcome of Reconstruction, a settlement that
was largely decided in the fateful first half year following the formal end of the war, was a
consequence of the northern failure to carry through the revolution against the planters. That
is, it was a result of the failure to not merely deprive planters of their largest single property
component, chattel slaves, but the failure to immediately and completely expropriate their
lands, redistribute them among poor whites as well as freemen, to make credit readily
available to both strata and to institute a debt moratorium on behalf of white farmers. Had this
been done, the logic of these actions would have compelled further one. Political
disenfranchisement and social exile, imprisonment or limited execution of planters, exConfederate military commanders and politicians would have had to follow. Reduction of the
former southern states to territories governed by Congress, ruled by impeccably loyalist
southern Unionists as territorial officeholders holding office on the basis of ironclad oaths (with
the necessary machinery to determine past and secure future loyalty) would have been the
overarching political framework for carrying out these actions. And, before ever coming this
far, territorialization would have been backed up by the immediate, long term Union military
occupation of the South together with a freepeople armed in its own self-defense, a purge of
the Union command in the regions of the South, and the ruthless suppression of all white
violence against freepeople.1035
1031Du Bois' description (Ibid, 608) of "half-starved peasants and farmers," and Union army officers' characterizations

of poor whites, as a gaunt, bony, wild-eyed and threatening physical type, were social and physiological, historically
specific expressions of this state of affairs.
1032 "Ibid," 27.
1033Taylor, Louisiana (Reconstructed 64-65, 323-324), Wharton (The Negro in Mississippi, passim) and Williamson

(After Slavery, passim) all make the same point.

1034See "State of Nature," above.
1035Even with the most revolutionary measures, the objective possibilities describing the limits beyond which no

settlement could have gone must be recognized. Those limits were circumscribed, not by the "material" moments of
the context of southern postwar society, but by the free labor consciousness that informed the actions of army officers
within the Union armies and the Freedmen's Bureau as each operated in the immediate aftermath of the war. As long
as Union army officers in the South acted on free labor convictions (viz., labor and capital had essentially identical
interests, without regard to societal context relations between these two poles could never become fixed and ossified,

But, starting with land redistribution, none of the above came to pass. Nonetheless, opposition
to Johnson from the leadership of the Freedman's Bureau over the Presidential perversion of
the Congressionally-legislated Bureau mandate would have made a restoration of the
southern ruling coterie extremely difficult: It would have slowed down and dragged out
Johnson's work of rehabilitation, made it possible for Congressional opposition to organize, if
not earlier then, before restoration on the ground was a fait accompli achievement. With class
struggle between freemen and planters at such a pitch in the latter half of 1865, through 1866
and into 1867, the prospects for an effective beginning to land redistribution, and with it the
constitution of a black yeomanry in, to start, various geographical pockets, were real. The
unity of movements from above and below would have created a practical logic that, in turn,
would have driven this objectively unified movement to attempt to break once and for all the
class power of the planters. The success of the effort, however, would have depended upon
support of yeoman farmers and poor whites. That would have only have been possible if all
strata of poor whites would have been enlisted in a class alliance against planters on the
basis of a share in land redistribution and debt relief. Securing this alliance would still have
necessitated military intervention and occupation by Union armies (whose most egregiously
offensive officers would have had to have been purged and whose black soldiery component
would have had to have remained intact) in order to break the back of recalcitrant resistance
to the growth of black autonomy.
However, with Andrew Johnson's pardons policy as the means of rehabilitation, planters,
southern politicians and newspaper editors, no longer capable of acting nationally, were
nonetheless able to pursue a policy aimed at restoring "home rule." With little or no hope for
establishing productive life on a new, small propertied basis free of debt anxiety, the desperate
massified strata of poor whites, lacking any other alternative, and guided by men of large
property and social standing, pushed and bullied themselves into the settlement of southern
affairs through the use of racist Terror.

and, the interests of freemen would be best realized by returning to work for planters on their estates under terms of
labor contracts), then, with the Army exercising a monopoly of force and, accordingly, as the final arbitrator on the
ground, freemen would have not been able to push beyond a generalization of the conditions at Port Royal or Davis
Bend as those conditions existed at the end of the war under direction of the Army's most enlightened officers (e.g.,
Rufus Saxton, Thomas W. Conway). The next paragraph in the text attempt to suggest those limits beyond which no
settlement could have gone. For the free labor assumptions among army officers, Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877,
153-155; for our perspective on the maximum potential consciousness-based objective limits of change historically
significant actors are capable of pursuing, see the Preface, "The Planter Ruling Class and Constitution of Class in
History," above.

Lenin in America
In the original version of this section, a counterfactual history of Reconstruction at its origins
was sketched out in order to exhibit those conditions under which Reconstruction might have
permanently transformed the South along the lines of a qualitative advance in human
freedom.
To designate the truly revolutionary character of a situation that could only be imaginatively
and counterhistorically constructed, this section was entitled Lenin in America. While we see
no need to discard this title, the author has since come to the view that those conditions can
simply be straightforwardly stated.
For Reconstruction to have been successfully institutionalized, Andrew Johnson would have
had to have been removed from office prior to the assembly of the Thirty-Ninth Congress in
early December 1865. In our original sketch, this was made possible by a shocking rupture
with the rhythms of American politics: Said rupture consolidated opposition to him and
provided the impetus for this action. (Even Johnsons sudden death due to, e.g., natural
causes, would not have achieved this end, even if a radical such a Ben Wade, as president
pro temp of the Senate, succeeded him to the Presidency according to fundamental law.) In
our imagined account, such a rupture was provided by a broadly based conspiracy in which
Johnson was objectively implicated, one in which leading military supporters of Reconstruction
(Grant, Butler, etc.) were murdered. Obviously, nothing of this sort ever occurred.
Such, in our sketch, compelled Republican party military officers to seek out an alliance with
the left wing with of that party, the revolutionary democrats (Stevens, Wade, et al.), to
forcefully remove Johnson, place him, as it were, under house arrest. On this basis, a purge of
the Congress (the Court, the Executive and the army) on the model of the Prides Purge of the
House of Commons (1649) was carried out. The Congressional Rump was, then, in a
position to legislate the necessary measures to insure Southern submission in a manner
consistent with a radical Reconstruction.
To imaginatively state these initial conditions is to immediately recognize the abyss that
separated actual historical development form historically real, but unactual, liberatory
possibilities. Nonetheless, the measures that would have made realization of these
possibilities imminent and actual, that would have more or less guaranteed the newly acquired
position of a freepeople, can be stated.
First, the new Cromwell would have had to invoke the war powers of the President in order to
formalize what would have had to already have been a de facto condition of martial law in
Washington.
Second, a series of measures aimed at circumventing any concerted counter-response to
their actions would have to adopted and implemented immediately. These measures would
have included a ban on all publication by Copperhead newspapers in the North - particularly
those in New York City, deposition of all non-Unionist Democratic governors in the North and
the West, a call for an immediate convocation of state legislatures under federal military
supervision to secure passage of the anticipated constitutional amendment enfranchising
freemen, cashiering of any Union military officers hesitant to abide by this Reconstruction
program, and militarily enforced territorialization under martial law of the entire South with
action to ensure that the fruits of the victorious Northern army and the status of the freedman
would not be endangered.
Third, in Richmond, New Orleans, Atlanta, and in the cities of other states of the old South and
the border states of Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, large troop movements

would have been to have been positioned in order to quickly implementing the series of further
measures regarding the defeated states.
Fourth, those further measures would have included:
(i) Dissolution of all rebellious states into territories organized along geographical and
economic lines, ruled by provisional, loyalist governors on the basis of martial law backed by
Union regiments made up of white and black troops. High-ranking territorial officials chosen on
basis of an ironclad oath, for past record of Union loyalty, and for professed fealty to the
program of Reconstruction, with, of course, the threat of repressive machinery to insure oaths
would not be violated.
(ii) Military tribunals to speedily try all the Rebellion's leaders, especially high ranking
Confederate officials, governors, state court justices and military commanders above the
regimental level - the penalty for guilt being death by firing squad; lengthy prison terms for all
those Confederate military officers above the rank of lieutenant (those not subject to
execution) and low level officials including mayors, county judges and sheriffs; and,
confiscation of the estates and banking accounts of and permanent exile as well for all
financial supporters of the Rebellion.
(iii) Repudiation of the Confederate debt and confiscation of all planter lands above two
hundred acres in order (a) to retire the Union war debt, and (b) to undermine the economic
foundations of seigniorial planter power. Closing and confiscation of all Southern newspapers
supporting the Rebellion. Newspaper editors subject to the same military discipline as exConfederate officials and military leaders.
(iv) Sale of confiscated lands to, first, black freedmen and white Southern loyalist farmers such as those who the inhabited eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama - at nominal per
acre rates with no interest loans and long-term repayment schedules with, as a last resort, a
guaranteed Government market for sale of produce. A maximum purchase of 160 acres would
be imposed. Southern Unionists who courageously opposed the Confederacy during the late
war of Rebellion would be generously compensated for land loss, lost slaves, etc.
(v) Moratorium on all outstanding debts owned by southern farmers and small planters. Low
interest loans with long-term repayment schedules for acquisition of confiscated lands to all
ex-Confederate soldiers, on condition of an oath of loyalty to the Union and acceptance of the
newly acquired status of the freedmen. Seed, fertilizers and implements made available on a
similar basis.
(vi) Ban on all extra-legal armed force. Capture of those seeking to "regulate race relations"
through said organization punished with summary execution.
(vii) Establishment of federally funded and military supervised system of schools for the
freedman and non-slaveholding white farmers of the southern territories.
(viii) After an indeterminate period, elections - under military supervision - based on universal
manhood suffrage would be held for representation in territorial legislatures. Martial law would
be gradually lifted and at a future, equally undetermined date, military troops would be
withdrawn and elections would be held. On this basis, states would be reconstituted and
readmitted into the Union. Said indeterminate period could have lasted as long as twenty
years (i.e., for a generation).
Initiation of all of these measures would have flown in the face of a sensitivity to Constitutional
norms in an era, unlike our own, when this sensitivity was largely real. Beyond Constitutional
scruples, and this is what really put an institutionally permanent Reconstruction beyond the
pale, lay the increasingly capitalist character of free labor assumptions by wars end among all
the leading actors on the ground (especially army officers, planters, and Bureau agents), of
course, less the freemen and their families themselves. It was free labor, no longer in the

sense of self-work and self-sufficient production in the overall context of a market economy,
but in a sense that more and more stressed the market character of the economy and work for
wages in it, work that would get cotton production going again. The older sense had lost its
socio-political dominance, and within northern society, particularly in the West - precisely the
region(s) from which a conquering army with emancipatory intent sprung, it was the latter
sense that was embedded in and drove the efforts at reconstruction of the agricultural South.
The Civil War was transformed, it must recalled, from a war for the Union into a revolution
against Southern property in slaves, but that revolution was bourgeois. Freedom in a fuller
historical sense among ex-slaves ran up against these unsurpassable barriers.

Conclusion
Civil War Outcomes: Foundations of a Centralized State and the "Progress of Freedom"
Foundations of a Centralized, Modern State
[The Problem of Financing War Expenditures]
Prior to the Civil War, the national government had derived revenues to finance its operations
from land sales and tariffs on imports. Short of the enactment of very high tariffs and the
printing of vast sums of paper money (and, as the institutional foundations of the latter,
creation of a federally-controlled, national banking system), the Civil War created a financial
crisis that would have brought Lincoln's government to an impasse. The costs of feeding,
clothing, arming and transporting a huge army - the likes of which the Republic had never
seen before - were astronomical. In the years of the heaviest fighting (1863, 1864 and 1865),
federal expenditures including debt service totaled $4,100,000,000, tariffs and taxes brought
in $711,000,000, while popular war bonds-generated revenues raised as much as $1,000,000
daily. When retrospectively averaged, these revenues, including anticipated ones, still left the
Treasury Department with a $1,270,000,000 shortfall. In point of fact, as of 31 October 1865
the actual deficit presented by Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch was $2,800,000,000. To
put this problem in perspective, recall the remarks of Andrew Johnson in his last address to
the Congress as President: From the beginning of Washington's Presidency in 1789 right up
until June 1861, federal expenditures totaled some $1,700,000,000 - and this figure included
the costs of waging wars against Britain (1812), Mexico (1845) and numerous Indian wars as
well as the land purchases of Florida, "Louisiana" and Texas. Yet, the costs of just three years
of civil warfare were 2.4 times greater than, the shortfall nearly two-thirds again, federal
expenditures for the entire 70 previous years of the existence of the national government.
While the specific amounts were obviously not foreseeable, the scope of the problem was.
Salmon Chase, Secretary of Treasury in the first Lincoln Administration, calculated in early
spring 1861 that the Union government would need $320,000,000 to conduct the war - and
this was prior to the loss of navy yards, custom houses, mints, ships and arms to Confederate
forces in the first year of the war. The army, for example, had merely 20,000 men and officers;
the navy, in an era when steamships had been regularly engaged in ocean-going travel for
nearly thirty years, sported a force of ships mostly under sail. Yet when Chase examined the
Treasury balance in spring 1861 he held less $2,000,000, all of which had already been
committed and appropriated ten times over.1036
[Conditions and Forms of Planter Hegemony in the United States Antebellum
Era (I). Decentralized, "Free" Banking and State Rights]
The condition for raising money was control over the banking system. Recall that, historically,
Jacksonians had, in their hatred of monopolies (with memory of the Panic of 1819 still fresh)
and driven by a class of rising nouveau riche entrepreneurs, destroyed the national banking
system in the 1830s. This destruction was institutionalized during Van Buren's Presidency
and, rendering it complete, the national government was forbidden by law to engage in
currency transactions in private markets as borrower, payer or payee. Thereafter privatelyowned state banks, issuing their own notes and guaranteeing their issuance with their own
specie reserves (or, more dubiously and more likely, with notes held from other banks, from
borrowers and from owners), had come to dominate the local, state and regional components
of the national economy. By 1860, there were some 1,642 banks in twenty-eight different
states, without oversight or supervision, each issuing their own notes. Before the national
1036For government finances, Montgomery, Ibid, 46, 60; for the actual size of the debt in October 1865, Du Bois, Ibid,

295.

government could regularly borrow it had to re-establish itself as a creditor, and that entailed
(re)institutionalizing national control over the monetary system. Until that time came, Chase
was reduced to emergency measures secured by Congressional authority.1037
The character of the banking "system" that Chase struggled against had, then, very old origins
in a powerful, yet co-opted, popular classes-based reaction against capitalist development.
That reaction was rooted in the personal ruin of countless individuals, and the fears ruin
generated, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1819. The organized national beginnings of this
reaction were signaled by Andrew Jackson's emergence into national prominence in the
Presidential election of 1824. His election in 1828 anticipated the ascendancy of a great
planter hegemonized, new entrepreneurial-yeomen-artisan-planter class coalition over
national political institutions.
The greatest institutional achievement of the Jackson Presidency was the destruction of
Second Bank of the United States which laid the foundations for the creation of a dispersed,
state-centered American banking "system" (anomalous characterizations aside). This
accomplishment of the Jacksonian class coalition partially achieved what it aimed at, namely,
a dismantling of the centralized, eastern financial control of tempo of capitalist development
(insuring unregulated economic growth especially at the margins of society, e.g., unhindered
speculation in land sales), and had the unintended consequence of reinforcing, and thereby
rendering seemingly irreversible, a socio-economically grounded sectionalization that was
already ongoing: Thereafter, decentralized and state-based (incorporated but unregulated)
"free" banking, currencies, and other instruments of commerce were tailored to the needs of
regionally dominant social classes, or class alliances on the basis of which a regional ruling
class stratum governed. In the absence of a truly national banking system, the compulsion
exercised by a single uniform nation-wide currency in (unevenly and onesidedly) imposing the
most advanced terms of capitalist development on the rest of the country (terms generated in
the commercial and manufacturing centers of the Northeast) was likewise absent. Thus,
decentralized, state-centered banking practices were a material premise of political
domination of the great planters, a hegemony theoretically expressed in state rights' doctrine.
Justifications for that doctrine found in, say, strict constructionist accounts of the original
Constitutionally-incarnated relations of states to the Union, make for, in our view, highly
dubious historical interpretations. Nonetheless, in fact, the theoretical content of state rights'
positions expressed customary, settled practice. The ubiquitous, popular and political hold of
this doctrine clearly revealed the massive extent of hegemony of the slaveholding aristocracy
over the cultures of societies of the North as well as the South.
[Conditions and Forms of Planter Hegemony in the United States Antebellum Era (II).
State Rights and State Militias]
Banking decentralization was a necessary presupposition of planter domination, but it was not
the only way in which state rights' doctrine had become settled practice. In particular, the
organization of military self-defense was itself state-based: While having a presence in a small
national force embodied in the regular army, the vast majority of northern soldiers before 1864
were organized into either state militia or volunteer regiments called into being by state
governors working on the basis of their own methods of organization.
1037For Chase as Treasury Secretary, the situation of the armed services and the dominance of local and regional

banks in the national economy, Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in the America, 720-732.
The figure of 1,642 was given by John Sherman in his memoirs (Recollections of Forty Years. Chicago, 1893: 289),
cited by Hammond (Ibid, 726). Sherman, in his capacity as a U.S. Senator (R-OH), was instrumental in the passage
of the Civil War-driven, National Bank Act of February 1863.

Lincoln's first call for troops, 15 April 1861, raised some 80,000 militia-based soldiers. This
force was short-termed, required by law to serve only 90 days. The President's second call
was for 500,000 three year volunteers. Within a year, he would call for another 300,000
volunteers. In the case of all these forces, the state governors recruited the soldiery but also
took charge of arming and clothing their respective troops. State governors' agents contracted
for armaments purchases (rifles, sabers and revolvers), for boots, uniforms, greatcoats, and
blankets, as well as transporting troops to sites where they joined federal regulars. Moreover,
state governors were responsible for the formation of their troops into military units, for
providing for their combat training, and for appointing the officer corps that commanded these
soldiers. This often led to narrowly, political party-based commissions, and, because
reappointments of officers in the field following, say, a casualty, was also a governor's
prerogative, led straightaway to a certain portion of the battlefield incompetence that so
consistently characterized northern generalship in the first two years of fighting. Once clothed,
armed, "trained" and transported, the state-formed soldieries passed under federal control.
But that did little to stem the liabilities of, by modern bourgeois standards, an antiquated
system of military self-defense that was rooted in policy designed to conform to state rights'
doctrine-informed customary practice. At any rate, throughout 1861-1862 and up until
Congressional passage of 3 March 1863 Conscription Act, Lincoln was almost entirely
dependent upon the good will of state governors to provide troops for waging war against the
Confederacy.1038
State militias were not merely the visible sign of gubernatorial, ultimately legislative,
sovereignty in the existing antebellum federal system. If a riot broke out in Boston or Buffalo,
the governor of Massachusetts would call out his militia to suppress it. If a disturbance on a
Mississippi plantation was beyond the ability of overseer(s), sheriff and the slave patrol to
control it, the planter would request Mississippi's governor to mobilize militia for purposes of
repression.
Now in the Civil War after March 1863, popular responses to conscription such as draft riots
occurred in the "Butternut" belts of central Ohio, and western central and southern Indiana;
and, in at least nine different locales in all parts of Illinois, and as well as in large cities of
Milwaukee and Chicago.1039 Not only were popular reactions responses to a national
legislative enactment (impinging, not on the states but, on farmers and workers as citizens of
the United States) beyond the authority of state governors, but those reactions were so
diffused and widespread that the state governors would have, in the event, been unable to
cope with the draft riots solely by bringing in their militias. National responses would be
forthcoming.
[Centralization and Augmentation of National Power]
The examples of the banking, and military self-defense and repression are not arbitrary, since
redistribution of existing forms of power away from the states was synonymous with national
concentration within the existing federal system. The shift in existing forms of power led to a
conflict between the Executive and Congress, but it also masked the whole process of
augmentation of power as such: This shift led later to an enhancement of existing forms and
the creation of new ones (viz., to an extension and centralization of power identical with the
1038For the organization of northern armies, James Randell, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, 241-245, 410-

414, 418 n. 20; and generally, William Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors.
1039The riot locales included the town of Mayfield, and counties of Morrow, Crawford and Knox in Ohio in March
1863; Sullivan, Clay and Owen, and Orange and Crawford in Indiana in June 1863 and October 1864; in Illinois, in
Johnson, Fulton, Putnam, Clay, Boone Counties in June 1864, the towns of Paris, Hardin and Charleston in March
1864, Lewistown in May 1864 and Fulton in October 1864; and Milwaukee and Chicago in May and June 1863. See
Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War, 111, 137-138, 164-165, 194.

formation of a truly modern State).1040 Novel power was implicit in the foundation of a national
banking system, and the creation of standing military establishment and institutions of
repression. Statization was in part hidden because formation of a national banking system, a
standing military establishment and other repressive institutions over which the party of
northern capital exercised immediate control were conditions of the destruction of the political
power of the planter aristocracy. It was, however, the destruction of the socio-economic power
of the great planters - uncompensated expropriation of the bulk of their private property in
production, i.e., chattel slaves, that was the condition of northern military victory in the war.
This expropriation would be largely a part of the great nationalizing tendencies that began to
come to fruition in 1863, but it was only under the whip of necessity that a reluctant Lincoln
Administration, headed by a even more reluctant President and supported by the largest
faction of the informal party of property in Congress, would undertake these measures. The
necessity Lincoln encountered was shaped by the course of the war.
[Locus of National Power in the Pre-Civil War American Political Tradition]
Prior to Lincoln and the Civil War, Whigs as a party advocated a strong national government in
order to, among other things, aid and direct internal improvements. But contrary to our more
"modern" experience, Whigs did not intend (though, as Republicans, they brought about)
State centralization, and they did not even indirectly suggest strengthening the Executive.
Rather, they advocated Congressional concentration of existing, Constitutionally-delegated
powers. From the side of both anti-nationalist, primarily southern state righters and nationalist
Whigs, the reinforcement of Presidential control was morally offensive and politically
dangerous calling forth denunciations of "executive tyranny" and "corruption."1041 For both,
this perspective had its roots in a classical republican tradition carried over from the 18th
century critique of unrepresentative English monarchical power, itself directly assimilated from
the late 17th century English Whig parliamentarians assimilation of James Harrington
devastating critique of kingly power.1042
1040Referring to the coterie of politicians, administrators and bureaucrats who enjoyed immensely their sham

independence and "despotic" power (product of centralization), the radical diarist, Adam Gurowski remarked, "Even
financial measures discussed and accepted by Congress, also by the best of the patriots, are stained by this
European tendency to consider the interest of the Government as distinct from the interest of the people, to centralize
and to absorb as much as possible of the people's interest. The bank bill will concentrate almost the whole capital of
the country. Its greatest condemnation is that L. Napoleon admires it and would wish to see it adopted in France".
Entry for 25 May 1864, Dairy: 1864-1865, III, 237-238.
1041Such a perspective might and did appear obvious coming from state rights supporters as the criticism of
Jackson's 1830s practices suggest. But Whigs shared the same concerns as diary entries by John Quincy Adams
demonstrate. Referring to rising excitement nationally developing around the prospects of the annexation of Texas,
Adams remarked, "'The Union is sinking into a military monarchy,'" and nearly seven years earlier he suggested the
class coalition between yeomen and planters on which Jackson's Presidency was based in terms of the formation of a
"rootless, brutalized rabble, ready for political demagoguery and military adventure". This attitude was not restricted to
the pre-Republican, Whig era of nationalist politics. During the war itself, Ben Wade, a radical Republican ex-Whig
Senator from Ohio and central figure among the extreme radicals pushing for more vigorous prosecution of the war,
consistently harangued against Executive usurpation. The first remark by Adams appears in his Memoirs (10: 19), 14
June 1838, cited by Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 86, and the second remark is a summary
formulation by Saxton (Ibid, 88) of Adams entry for February 19, 1845 (Memoirs, 7: 171); for Wade, Trefousse, Ibid.
Since they were standard fare, Van Deusen, "The Whig Party," 336, 338, refers (without realizing their historical
significance) to the denunciations of "executive tyranny" and "corruption"; Hans Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade,
27-28, recognizes the formative importance of anti-Executive (viz., anti-Jackson) attitudes in the development of the
Whig party; for states' rights criticisms of Jackson, Van Deusen, "Ibid," 352; for similar Whig criticisms, "Ibid".
1042For the late colonial-early national assimilation among North American landed gentlemen and commercial elites
of classical republican tradition, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 34-54, and John
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, chapters XII and XV.

Under pressures of military reversals on the battlefield and growing opposition, Lincoln cited
the war powers clause of the Constitution and undertook both questionable and patently
unConstitutional Executive actions (e.g., employing military force to insure Republican
victories at the polls) to suppress opposition to his government. Clearly, Lincoln realized for
the first time in United States history the real meaning inherent in the Constitutional
expression "Commander in Chief." Moderate Whig that he remained to the day of his death,
he gathered to himself the reigns of power in balancing himself against Copperheads on the
one side, and radical Republicans on the other both in the North at large and especially in the
Congress.1043
[Conditions of Centralization and Augmentation of National Power (I). Banking]
With radical Republican support in the Congress, beginning in January 1863 Chase, himself a
radical, was able to get what came to be a series of bills passed that concentrated control
over the monetary system in the hands of the Treasury, that is, a Cabinet department within
the Executive and not in Congress, by establishing a national currency and the conversion of
existing state banks into privately operated national ones supervised by the Treasury
Department. With or without centralized control, amounts of the magnitude needed to
prosecute the war could only raised by borrowing, and the only sources of capital that could
generate these amounts were the large financial houses in the New York, Boston and
Philadelphia (and in Europe). Among both radicals and conservative Whigs, men like Hamilton
Fish, there was indeed plenty of support for both Lincoln's government and the centralizing
tendencies implicit in its war-generated fiscal needs. In the event, the Executively-supported
Congress was able to impose taxes, print greenbacks (paper money) ahead of anticipated
revenues, borrow (creating inflation) and establish a national banking system, and impose
very high tariffs at national borders because the largest portion of the organized center of
historical opposition to these measures was no longer present in what had become a Union
Congress: The Southern Democracy had, it might be recalled, taken up new residency in the
hallowed halls of a Confederate Congress sitting in Richmond.
[Conditions of Centralization and Augmentation of National Power (II). Standing Army, its
Bureaucracy and other Institutions of Repression]
Lacking a standing army that had engaged in lengthy conventional warfare against other
military establishments that fielded huge, mass armies, with the existing national military
school (West Point) animated by the vision of southern planters for whom a military career
was a laudable gentlemanly pursuit, Lincoln had to find himself a general, viz., both an overall
military commander possessed of strategic genius as well as other requisite martial qualities
and a body of similarly seasoned, high ranking officers to direct and led the northern war
effort. The blunders and mistakes of the northern armies in the fields of battle during the first
two years of war, extraordinarily costly in blood and treasure, were testimony to a war in which
northern generalship was literally forged in the crucible of combat.
Coordinating this army from atop, conduct and the course of war compelled Lincoln and his
supporters to massively enlarge and centralize the military-related departments and agencies
of the Executive within the national government.
As late as 1856, the platform statement - specifically in considerations of slavery in the territories (i.e., Kansas) - of
the first national convention in Philadelphia of the newly formed Republican party took for granted that the locus of
national power was in the Congress.
1043For discussion of Constitutionally questionable Executive actions and their ramifications, Michael Benedict, A
Compromise of Principle, 73-75; and Randell, Ibid, 36-41, 149-150, 175-176, 514-515; Hesseltine, Ibid.

The War Department under Edwin Stanton, in particular, grew enormously especially as the
size of the Union armies themselves grew. Once state-raised regiments were placed in the
hands of national authorities, not just feeding, clothing and arming but creating the
mechanisms for supplying, warehousing and transporting, and once produced, food, clothing
and arms to the men passed into federal hands. A bureaucracy of mostly military officers
engaged in letting contracts for armament production of all kinds from cannons through
revolvers, for supply wagons, mules and horses, for cattle, pig slaughter and pork production,
for fresh vegetables and fruits, for uniforms, great coats, blankets and shoes, etc., developed
and expanded during the course of the war. Moreover, the failure of state governors, in the
face of fierce Democratic party-supported popular opposition, both to adequately provide the
troops requested by Lincoln and to suppress resistance to fighting, entailed creation of the last
great centralizing feature of the war - the national draft.
This resistance grew out of the working classes, particularly Irish laborers in the large port
cities (New York, Boston), Irish miners in the eastern Pennsylvania anthracite fields, and poor
farmer opposition to fighting a war now aimed at emancipating blacks from planter mastery.
Relying on a small, but powerful bloc of northern commercial and banking interests historically
tied to the distribution and marketing of the cotton of southern planters and, of course, on
workers' and poor farmers' resistance, state Democratic parties, at conventions and in their
legislatures, and Copperhead newspapers called not only for open resistance to the draft, but
desertions from Union armies as well, in order to compel the Lincoln Administration to
negotiate with the Confederacy on the basis of a restoration of the status quo antebellum,
even if these terms entailed de jure recognition of the South as a separate nation. The
Copperhead movement, which also extruded secret societies with similar aims, generated a
political atmosphere in the urban North in which opposition in the streets to conscription was
the surest likely outcome.
The first of Constitutionally guaranteed personal rights to disappear under pressure of
resistance to the conduct of the war was the writ of habeas corpus. It had been suspended on
many occasions prior to the draft riots of 1863 and 1864. In fall 1861, the Lincoln's
government had established Military Departments with a district for each state in the entirety
of the territory of the North behind friendly lines. In July 1862, Congress, at Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton's request, had created an office (Bureau of Military Justice) to supervise
military trials and examine decisions of military commissions. But opposition to states'
recruitment drives in the North, and especially to Lincoln's announcement of an imminent
Emancipation decree, were invoked to justify a new civilian oriented machinery of repression
that was became elaborate. In September, Stanton instituted the office of a special provost
marshal (Provost Marshal General) within the War Department, replete with an complex
apparatus of hundreds of local offices and field officials stationed across the North, ostensibly
to uncover, investigate and punish cases of disloyalty, treason and espionage, actually to
enforce the terms of the draft and to circumvent peace party-dominated local officials' refusal
to cooperate with conscription. In other words, all these organizations were created to
suppress dissent. That they did: The provost marshal's office broke the back of a more or less

spontaneous resistance to conscription by enforcing the terms of the draft, rounding up

deserters, and by arresting the latter's supporters.
The conscription enactment placed its enforcement directly in the hands of the Executive,
lodging it in a cabinet office-subordinate agency. Because this agency acted through the
personages of the provost marshals, the draft acted directly on individuals (and not on the
states as the legitimate political body representing individual citizens): Conscription more than
any other wartime measure contemporarily, and not merely retrospectively, embodied the
expansion and centralization of national power.1044
[Republican Party. Party of National Power]
The concentration of national power in the office(s) and personage of the Executive violated
the classical republican senses of permissible concentration that were still operative in
American political culture right down to the Civil War. Outside pockets of resistance such as
that which unfolded in New York City, and rural "Butternut" belts, federal government
centralization was accepted in the North (where it counted) as a matter of nationalism, but in
the Republican party-dominated Congress the form it took, Presidential power, was often
bitterly contested. To the very end of Lincoln's life and well into Andrew Johnson's Presidency,
this contest remained unresolved. Nonetheless, centralization of national power was accepted
both because the party in power was conducting the war and because the most vociferous
(peace Democratic) opposition was pro-southern, hence, traitorous. But these were matters of
war, and the Statist implications of an incipit expansive centralization were largely unforeseen,
or, where the insight was generated (yet undeveloped), clearly circumscribed in the minds of
Lincoln's supporters by the conditions of war.
Nonetheless, the war managed to do for the conservative Whig element of the Republican
party, politically professional representative of the great financial and banking interests of the
Northeast, what of itself it was powerless to accomplish, namely, it recreated the national
government, now deeply committed to fiscal-economic regulation, along novel lines not
entirely envisioned by old line Whigs. However, the conservative Whig faction within the
Republican party could, in this case, only ride the course of events to achieve its ends. The
reason why it could do no more is as simple as it is socio-historically ubiquitous: The
development of capitalism itself creates the conditions for concentration and centralization of
capitalist finance, while its bourgeois democratic political form - where its exists - makes it
impossible as well as undesirable for a financial oligarchy to openly rule. Where capitalist
finance achieves political expression, lacking a social base of its own it can only rule in and
through coalitions and inter-class alliances.1045
During the Civil War, the informal party of property concentrated conservative Whigs,
independent Unionists and war-Democrats, most of whom were also to be found in the
1044For the organization and activity of provost marshals is described in reports to the agency head, WR, Ser. III, V.

5: 712-933.
As an example of the serious problem of resistance, Indiana can be cited. Under a precursor militia act passed by
Congress in 1862, Indiana Republican Governor Oliver Morton had outlined a detailed plan to meet his state's quota.
Instead of relying on county sheriffs to prepare lists of eligible soldiery - which was the federally sanctioned method,
Morton created a system of county commissioners for this task. In a state half of which had been settled by
Southerners from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, and in which Copperhead sympathy ran strong, local sheriffs
simply were not trustworthy. For Morton's plan, Randell, Ibid, 246 n 15.
1045We do not refer here to the historically and economically specific social group, "finance capital," inasmuch as the
latter - actively engaged in the operations of already cartelized industrial production - both as a social reality and as a
category of analysis only emerged as a central, dynamic moment of the era of trustification in that very era. If the
constitution of finance capital lies in the (immediate) American future, it should also be noted that the East coast,
financial capitalist oligarchy of the Civil War and Reconstruction era did, in fact, form the nucleus of later finance
capital concentrated in the House of Morgan.

Republican party, in coalition with radical Republicans. War Democrats, like radical
Republicans, articulated and elaborated largely western farming, social class interests but not
their capitalist but their poor, "Butternut" side. Historically opposed to the Whig program, they
would not come around to a program of federal-controlled economic development. With the
exception of their most extreme elements (Stanton, Ben Butler, John Logan, etc), they more or
less acted as a pressure group on conservative Republicans and acted in Congress out of
their unwavering commitment to the Union as well as from their desire, like that of
independent Unionists, to mitigate hostility toward the border state (and, by extension,
southern) slaveholding aristocracy (i.e., to prevent or limit landed property confiscation,
emancipation of slaves, enactment of criminal penalties for treason, etc.). In pursuit of these
commitments, Democrats and independent Unionists could be persuaded to temporarily
accept measures concentrating power.
After the conclusion of the war, the line of division within the Republican party was between its
dominant and truly Republican factions, radicals and conservatives. Unlike war Democrats,
both political tendencies within the party could (for different reasons, of course) support the
concentration of the national government created as a consequence of wartime measures,
that is, as a result of direct taxation and conscription to support the armies in the field, new
military and enlarged bureaucratic apparatuses, emancipation, and a government-controlled
currency. Conservatives, on the one side, were committed to federal power from the get-go:
They desired, on the one hand, to (re)create the State as the guarantor of the legal and
organizational principles of a specifically capitalist system that they would have it legislatively
and executively construct and, on the other hand, to have the State develop the material
presuppositions of that system, especially infrastructure - rails and telegraphs, roads, bridges,
canals, aqueducts, and institutions of financial regulation such as a central bank, which were
beyond the capacity of any single capitalist. Radicals, on the other side, were nationalists
committed to the State-guided destruction of slavery and its auxiliary institutions and to the
State as the guarantor of the citizen rights of the ex-slave freeman. Thus, because both
political tendencies held to a vision of the national State which altogether transcended the old
Jacksonian concept, a common meeting ground for two political programs otherwise wildly at
variance was in principle possible. Given that both radicals and conservatives sought basic
changes in the fabric of American society, it should not be surprising that the common meeting
ground assumed the form of a change in the "fundamental law," a change embodied in the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.1046
The "Progress of Freedom"
Liberty did not suddenly predominate in states nor reason in governments and
constitutions. The application of the principle to secular conditions, the thorough
interpenetration and molding of the secular world by it, is precisely the long process of
history. ... History ... is the progress of freedom ...1047

On secular and materialist presuppositions, Hegel's philosophy of history illuminates the

American Civil War as a struggle against unfreedom, objectively against slavery. But, for us,
unlike Hegel, history is not of necessity a process of the realization of freedom. The sphere of
popular autonomy, self-determination and independence can be, but need not be, enlarged.
For us, unlike Hegel, history is not of necessity rational. Rather, it can be rendered rational.
History can be made to be progress in human freedom. And for us, unlike Hegel, the
realization of freedom does not unfold dialectically at least in the positive sense (of the
1046For the Fourteenth Amendment, see the section so entitled in chapter 10, above.
1047G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, 24.

necessary retention of each previous moment or stage in its very supercession). The
realization of freedom is not of necessity progressive and linear; it is subject to setbacks,
regressions, and mere partial realizations. But, in those case where progress in the realization
of freedom has been achieved, history is rendered rational: The domain of Objective Spirit is
more just and less pervaded by xenophobias, bigotries and discriminatory practices; is
organized more popularly and directly, and is less subject to control by ruling class social
groups and bureaucratic administrators; more fully achieves material security for all, especially
the young, aged and disabled, and is less subject to the diktat of property and profit;
materializes a more harmonious, integrated relation to surrounding nature and is less given to
its despoliation.
[A Freepeople and their Freedom]
Blacks stripped themselves of their status as slaves by abandoning "their" masters and
plantations, and, as slaves becoming a freepeople and as soldiers, in so doing they played a
decisive role in bringing the Civil War to a conclusion on northern terms. Under long
anticipated conditions not of their own making, blacks remade themselves into a freepeople.
In the period following the end of Presidential Reconstruction the social weight of a massive
array of class forces aligned against a newly freepeople might have seemed overwhelming. To
the north, the great financiers of the East (with or without direct ties to cotton exchange), the
merchant community as a whole, and the great textile manufacturers all desired to maintain
plantation agriculture and resume cotton production. Emerging industrial manufacturers of iron
products (farming implements, rails, etc), railroad companies and western farmers producing
grain, beef and pork, looked forward to potentially huge market that masses of waged laborers
and a humming plantation economy, it was believed, could provide. Yankee entrepreneurs
were eager to enrich themselves through purchase of plantation land, and production and
exploitation of waged labor on these large estates. To the south, planters were anxious to
recoup their fortunes by imposing a new serfdom on former slaves. Newspaper editors and
Democratic party politicians fought mightily to reestablish southern power in the nation and
home rule in the South. Reduced to penury by a meaningless currency and homogenized by
generalized destruction, famine and lack of employment, non-planter whites weighed heavily
in this alignment of class forces through an ubiquitous practice of racist terror against this
newly freepeople.
Objectifying and materializing the class practices of the forces arrayed against blacks were
objectively repressive social relations (waged labor) codified in the labor contract and the
Black Codes, and the institutions underpinning them such as the Freedmen's Bureau and
southern legislatures, and even the contradictory institution of the Union Army (guarantor of
freedom from slavery, yet enforcer of labor contracts). These social relations and institutions
bore down with enormous economic weight on freepeople.
Finally, the radical vanguard of the Republican party itself split. The struggle over land reform
had set in motion a process of polarization within the party. The vast majority of party
members recoiled from the implications of the confiscation of private property in land. After the
nomination of Grant as the party standard bearer and the acquittal of Andrew Johnson in his
Senate impeachment trail, both in the month of May 1868, but especially following Thaddeus
Stevens' death in August of the same year, new lines began to form within the party. Civil
service reform, President Grant's use of the patronage and his alleged corruption, and
Sumner's lost of the Foreign Affairs Committee chair to the opportunist Cameron all gave rise
to a general fear of "Tammanyization" of the party, as the party itself more and more openly
avowed the interests of the emerging great corporations. Opposition to this direction gave
birth to a liberal current within the Republican party. In this light, the ratification of the Fifteenth

Amendment (30 March 1870) was seen as consummation of the party's mission, and an
opening for its membership to pursue with good conscience new issues. Hand in glove with
Democratic party reformers, the racist party of southern slavery, these men called for an end
to a military occupation in the South that had only just begun: Freepeople of the South were,
in other words, to be left to the tender mercies of phalanx of planters, merchants, and poor
whites with otherwise largely inadequate protection from the army. The split in the party did
not end the occupation, but the party of Lincoln no longer existed, having discarded its
emancipatory outerwear for the dirty underwear of America's newly trustifying firms. The Panic
of 1873, the first industrial capitalist crisis in American history, at once exhibited that, outside
the South, America had been industrially transformed, industrial class issues had become
dominant, and the Republican party had become the party of capital.1048
Still in the face of the array of class forces aligned against them, the institutions of repression
bearing down on them, and the rendering ineffectual of a radical current in the Congress,
black freemen and freewomen did not succumb.
In the class struggle on the ground that raged across the South in the three years after the
end of the war, newly free men and women were able to compel estate owners to abandon
the labor contract, and with its disappearance the once nationally hegemonic, old planter class
began to dissolve. Before the passage of the Reconstruction Acts (1867) and the beginning of
military occupation, the postwar settlement had already achieved a shape in labor relations in
the process of constitution: A system of sharecropping tenancy was emerging as the dominant
form of agricultural practice in the South. A product of their antagonistic interaction, alone
neither freepeople (who were becoming a class of tenant farmers) nor the class of merchant
landlords (who absorbed those planters that hadn't disappeared economically) made this
social relation. Yet its making unmade and heralded the end of the planter economy. With the
self-sufficiency derived from food production and without overseer or boss, and though merely
the occupant of the soil and a de facto possessor of implements or livestock, sharecropping,
heavily weighted against the freeman and his family, nonetheless preserved a dimension of
autonomy that existed neither under slavery nor on the terms of the labor contract. This
dimension of autonomy was carved out by a class of ex-slave, tenant farmers decades before
"redeemers" were able to legally formalize the status of blacks as a color-caste segregated at
the bottom of the social order. It persisted through the long night of racial apartheid and legal
segregation right down to the 1940s industrialization of southern agriculture that finally
destroyed the southern black farmers relation to the land.1049
1048Stevens had been the pivotal figure in the articulation of the need for and Congressional pursuit of land reform.

See the note, "Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Reconstruction" to chapter 3, above.
One of the first to jump ship was an ex-military radical, Carl Schurz. In the next two years (1869-1870), radicals with
roots in the middle strata, reformers such as Solomon Chase (now chief justice of the Supreme Court), Charles
Francis Adams and Horace Greeley, and even true radicals such as George Julian and B. Gratz-Brown joined hands
with moderate and conservative Republicans, party politicians or opportunists, such as William Seward, Oliver
Morton, Roscoe Conkling, Simon Cameron, Lyman Trumbull, and David Davis.
Good materials on the emergence of this liberal current can be found in George Julian, Political Recollections, 330352; Carl Schurz, Papers, Correspondence, and Political Papers, II: passim; and also, Foner, Ibid, 488-499.
1049On the transition from labor-contracts to sharecropping tenancy, see Lacy Ford, "Labor and Ideology in the South
Carolina Upcountry," 29-35; and, Davis, Good and Faithful Labor in its entirety, Hahn, "The 'Unmaking' of the
Upcountry Yeomanry," 186f, and William W. Rogers, The One-Gallused Rebellion, 12f.
The collapse of land values after the war taken together with the uncompensated expropriation of chattel slaves and
the inability in the face of freemen's resistance to get plantation production going again, largely destroyed southern
planter fortunes. Older planters advised their sons to seek new careers in business and the professions. Over 10,000
planters left the South following the Confederate defeat to attempt to rebuild their fortunes in the North, in Europe, or
in Mexico or Brazil. Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 130, 400. The great planters disappeared as a class, some
were absorbed into a "new bourgeoisie," but effectively, they were replaced by landlords composed of merchants,
railroad promoters and bankers. Ibid, 395, 408.

[Cunning of Reason]
Neatly dovetailing with an otherwise admirable lack of stomach for the slaughter that was the
invariant outcome of major confrontations between the two opposing armies in the East, the
pervasive political perspective on the war among the Union generals in the East, particularly
McClellan, nonetheless insured an opposite outcome: The failure to see fighting, i.e., a
skirmish, a battle, a campaign, through to the end regardless of the costs in the skirmish,
battle, campaign, inevitably guaranteed that tomorrow, next week, a month or year later, there
would be another bloody skirmish, battle or campaign. It guaranteed that the war would
continue its bloody course, becoming ever more costly, and would compel that most
conservative of civilian leaders, Lincoln, against his predilections, dispositions and confirmed
judgment to go beyond the bounds of his operative, propertied-centered conception of
propriety and unleash a war against slavery and, accordingly, against the culture and form of
life of the South.
At the same time, as the war progressed and unfolded without a quick end in sight, as
northern casualties mounted, and attitudes on both sides hardened, and as the role and
significance of the slaves in the war became increasingly weighty, the attempt to hide that role
and significance, say in terms of fighting the war for the integrity of the Union, became
increasingly difficult. The more McClellanists in the East pursued their go-slow, cautious, proslavery political instincts, the more it became necessary to overthrow the entire planter
regime.
There was, furthermore, a terrible, historical irony at work in ideological commitments to
slavery: Whites' only egalitarianism, or, as we prefer, racial privilege, had come to be
understood by the classes and strata who were its carriers largely in terms of a classically
republican tradition. Anti-militarism was a central moment of this tradition. Popular hostility to
military institutions, expressed not only in highly restricted Congressional funding but
particularly in lack of oversight of the spirit animating West Point, insured two outcomes. First,
the model of southern gentlemen would hegemonize the school by default; and, second,
Union nationalist doctrine would fail to develop at the core of the West Point's curriculum.
Instead, as an engineering school vitalized by an "aristocratical" temperament, West Point
failed to train and impart to its northern officers a military-intellectual perspective that would
have greatly assisted them in performing as competent leaders of men in a struggle in which
the fate of the Union hung in the balance. Once consequence of their miserable performance
as Union military commanders was the extraordinary toll in lives of young, white males, the
vast majority of whom held a "whites only" egalitarian perspective. The irony? The
objectification of racial prejudice as popular Spirit (Geist) dialectically resulted in the massive
sacrifice of life (in a war whose goal would become undercutting the objectified, institutional
forms of this Spirit) precisely by those who bore this Spirit. A final, fitting irony, a grand
historical and dialectical ruse, was also at work here: It would be the degraded object of this
bigotry, the class of black slaves as freemen, whose social weight would decisively shift the
balance of military forces in the war and, in securing victory for the Union, finally put an end to
the slaughter that was bleeding the popular classes in the North dry, bleeding them, as it
were, "white": In the end, the Union could not be preserved. It had to be reconstituted. In the
end slavery could not only not be studiously ignored, it had to be revolutionized, i.e.,
abolished. Slaves, acting to free themselves, played the deciding role in the outcome of the
war. Anonymously, a slave-class-becoming-a-freepeople was the real subject of the war.
[Causality of Destiny]

Thus, Northerners had to undergo, in Hegel's terms, the experience of the causality of
destiny:1050 As the war neared its formal end, Lincoln, in ways not fully intelligible to himself,
recognized blacks' central role in the constitution of the meaning and significance, and
determination of the outcome, of the war. "One eighth of the whole population were colored
slaves ... These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest
was, somehow, the cause of the war."1051
Lincoln did now understand, however, that the restoration of the Union that he so fervently
desired bore a price. That price was not explicable in the bourgeois sense of a commodity that
could be bought and sold. Though quantitatively measurable, specifically in lost human lives,
this price concerned social justice which now could only be rendered or made real,
"purchased," in terms of human freedom: For the Union itself had been rendered, its unity
sundered at its origins, as Lincoln now understood, by the great, unspeakable crime of
slavery. From the outset of the war to the present slaveholders and their supporters were
unrepentant. "To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war." They even prayed, or so it seemed, to the
same God: "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in
wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces... "
Unrepentance would not restore the Union. The integrity of the Union demanded justice.
Justice, however, required not just healing, not just reconstitution of the Union on novel terms
of a new organic or fundamental law (Thirteen Amendment), because healing, in order to
seen as necessary, itself first required loss, enormous loss.
Yet [a just God may require that]... all the wealth piled by the bond man's two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and... every drop of blood drawn with the lash...
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.

This loss inspired recognition of the role of blacks in the outcome of the war, a prise de
conscience in which knowledge that blacks in that role saved even further loss of blood and
treasure. Gratitude for this role was objectively embodied: Modification of the fundamental law
of the nation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, taken together with the
Civil Rights Act, set forth the conditions for reconciliation, of surpassing (aufheben) the guilt
constituted in the intuition of the abysmal injustice of the original crime. The rupture of the
Union could now be healed. That, however, has never fully occurred: Because southern
whites were only objectively subject to but did not live and experience the causality of destiny
as such, as a nation, Americans were not reconciled.
The failure of radical Reconstruction had its objectively necessary outcome in Southern
redemption (which, to be sure, was the other side of the dominant role that an emergent
industrial capital played in dictating the direction of development in the United States). That
1050In his fragment, the Spirit of Christianity, Hegel conceives the nature of social life morally. The unity of society is

achieved in mutual satisfaction of needs and mutual recognition of rights. This unity is sundered by one who
oppresses another. He is a criminal. This violator of the moral integrity of the community at first only experiences his
criminality obliquely: Experienced in new hostilities, personal affronts and injuries, fear and anxieties, and, most
importantly in the belligerent, aggressive and perverse assimilation of domination, the weight of his crime strikes back
at him, so to speak, behind his back and over his head. This is the causality of destiny. As the weight of his crime
becomes conscious, an awareness formed in the loss of past friendships and genuine exchanges and interactions, he
experiences his guilt, which itself is at first only the peculation upward through repression of grief over an once
integrated but now absent life. The yearning for this sundered life allows him to grasp his own estranged self in the
being of the other who he has oppressed, and whom he confronts as enemy. The ossified positions on both sides can
now begin to relax. Reconciliation becomes possible.
1051Abraham Lincoln, "Second Inaugural Address" (4 March 1865), in Basler (ed,), Collected Works, 6:276. All of the
following citations are from the text of this address.

failure insured that the original, colonial planter intent remains embedded in a racist legacy of
unrequited criminality. While the long nightmare of racial apartheid and legal segregation has
formally end, objectively and socially embodied in the central institutions (work, housing,
education, etc.) of contemporary America, a color line still constitutes the fault line dividing the
exploited and oppressed:1052 The most important, contemporary outcome of the failure of
radical Reconstruction has been denial of full integration (integration without all the baggage
of race) into the ranks of the exploited of the historically most militant group in American
society, blacks, in particular black workers.
[Progress of Freedom]1053
On a summer day in early July 1862 on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula, Lee
sought to drive the Union Army of the Potomac off that peninsula. He ordered an attack
against Union infantry that, well dug in, commanded a rise known as Malvern Hill. Fifty-six
hundred Confederate soldiers suffered death or injury before the afternoon ended. In
December, under pressure from the War Department and the President and also anxious to
win a redounding victory, Burnside not only ordered a frontal assault against impregnable
fortifications at Fredericksburg but demanded continued attempts to surmount entrenched
Confederate defenses long after the most unastute recognized the hopelessness of the
assaults. Thirteen thousand wounded, dying and or dead Union soldiers fell in a single day. In
late May 1863, Lee, concurring with the southern President, sought to win a decisive victory
on federal soil thereby enhancing, perhaps insuring, British-French mediated peace
negotiations that would have issued in, among other outcomes, European recognition of
Confederate independence. He led the Army of Northern Virginia in an incursion into Union
territory, and began a march that contemporarily appeared to be aimed at Harrisburg, perhaps
Philadelphia. Shadowed by Union forces, the two great armies collided over five hills, a ridge,
several ravines and a peach orchard for three full days in early July. In this, the greatest single
battle of the war, some forty-eight thousand men were wounded, maimed or died. Beginning in
1052This objective situation is subjectively lived by all: If she be a person of color, especially "black," she suffers the

daily humiliations and corrosive personal effects of living, in part, outside of what societally constitutes the human
community; if he be "white," all reality is pervaded for him by fears, anxieties and fantasies that constitute the contents
of an imaginary social relation to a "black" other which is crucial to his understanding of life and activity in society.
And none of this, of course, touches, institutional racism. To this day, each and every American bears the burden of
racist legacy of unrequited criminality, suffers, as if fated, the debilitating consequences of an unmastered past. The
daily, precognitive comportment of "black" and "white" vis--vis one another is just one, albeit pervasive aspect of this
situation. (This is, of course, a situation that, having its origins in "white" comportment to native peoples and having
developed into a "model" in two centuries of "black" enslavement, has been transposed onto all peoples of ethnically
and "racially" diverse formations.) There is also a far more volatile depth-psychological component. Fantasy based
and projected, arcane fears and repressed sexual desire (especially those of "white" males concerned about the
safety of their "women," or similarly of "white" females concerned about their own safety, both in relation to a
projected "black" male threat, or again, repressed "white" male desire that takes the "black" female body as an
"object" for its satisfaction) can be released in non-normal situations: Intense conflict among social groups, unsolved
crimes against the person in unintegrated, "racially" "mixed" communities, individual isolation, etc., can lift emotional
repression permitting fantasies and fears to function as "understanding," that is, in lieu of comprehension and
explanation, resulting, for example, in racial massacres, lynching, or rape. Arcane fears and repressed desire are
collective, that is, a defining moment of the identity of a social group, and, accordingly, count as a sort of effective
"knowledge" for that group (e.g., of "whites"). A classical account of depth-psychological racism and its function as
"knowledge" guiding "action" can be found in Perry Lentz's novelistic treatment of the Fort Pillow massacre during the
American Civil War. See his The Falling Hills, especially 384-442.
1053Hegel's perspective is nicely summarized in the following remark:
"Freedom ... is the ultimate purpose toward which all world history has continually aimed. To this end, all the sacrifices
have been offered on the vast altar of the earth throughout the long lapse of ages. Freedom alone is the purpose
which realizes and fulfills itself, the only enduring pole in the change of events and conditions, the only truly efficient
principle that pervades the whole." Reason in History, 25.

spring of the following year, Grant undertook a final campaign to once and for all destroy the
same Confederate army. Over a period of two months, at otherwise geographically and
historically unknown and insignificant points on a map, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold
Harbor, the Army of the Potomac incurred over fifty-four thousand casualties. In the aftermath
of Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah, and into and through the two Carolina, the
Union army cut paths of destruction, burning barns and dwellings, demolishing bridges,
destroying fences, tools, and livestock.
In the immediate aftermath of the war itself, towns had been occupied or overrun, and
plantations in some regions, fallen into disuse, unoccupied and broken up, no longer could
even be expected to produce. Rails had either fallen into disrepair or been destroyed by
wartime sabotage. Because levees and dikes along the Mississippi River had gone
unrepaired, floodwaters extensively damaged crops as the river overflowed at more or less
regular intervals. Food was scare, families had been torn apart, and large numbers of people
were landless, homeless and helpless. Worse of all was the loss of life. Almost 260,000
Confederate soldiers and officers died during the war, and this does not account for the
maimed and permanently injured. Men, women and children were prey to a life made brutal by
generalized destruction: Disease was on the rise, the currency was useless yet most of the
populace was burdened by debt, there were food shortages, and there was hunger and little
or no employment. By and large on the plantations and in the yeomen communities of the
South, life sunk so far below the achieved levels of civilization that existing conditions could be
perceived as a return to the savagery of a retrospectively projected primitive state of nature.
The North did not suffer the same destruction to agricultural lands, farms and dwellings, to
industrial plant and equipment. But the loss of life, and the maiming and crippling, was even
greater. So, with Hegel we ask, "To what principle, to what final purpose, [had] ... these
monstrous sacrifices been offered?" Through the torturous development of the war with its
ironies and grand ruses, with Hegel, we answer, these sacrifices have been offered to
freedom.1054
De jure, human freedom is inextricably and inseparably bound to social justice. De facto, they
are almost always separated. For divided, historical societies, the meaning and significance of
social justice and human freedom are socio-historically relative to achieved levels of objective
substance (levels of material culture), forms of Objective Spirit (economic, legal and social
and state institutions) and the classes and social groups that constitute society. In the eras of
Civil War and Reconstruction, human freedom meant at the minimum the abolition of slavery,
while social justice meant incorporation of blacks into the American political community.1055
This era was historically unique in that, in social practice, human freedom and social justice
were unified. Recall the remarks from George Julian cited at the outset of this work: "... [In] the
South, to put back the governing power into the hands of the very men who brought on the
war, and exclude those who have proved themselves the true friends of the country, would be
utterly suicidal and atrociously unjust. ...The ballot should be given to the negroes as a matter
of justice to them."1056
As in our era, it is evident that southern "redemption" in fact again severed social justice from
human freedom. The abolition of slavery had been achieved by way of an incredibly bloody
and enormously costly war, but social justice was denied as a ruling class in the agrarian
1054Ibid: "... History ... [is] the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the

virtue of individuals have been sacrificed..." Ibid, 27.

1055For masses of women and men, the real content that followed this negative determination (abolition of slavery)
actually implied wage labor, the unrestricted right to transform one's creativity and lived time into labor power and
dispose of it for whatever quantitatively inadequate remuneration it might fetch.
1056Williams H. Barnes, History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States, 78.

South was eventually reconstituted and a freepeople was denied political rights. Nonetheless,
always reversible, progress in freedom was made. Incorporated into fundamental law and
expressed as Objective Spirit, it has, albeit inadequate, nonetheless been substantial
progress: On the one hand, for seventy-five years black farming families were able to
preserve a narrow sphere of autonomy in their work; on the other, because citizen and political
rights now were now the patrimony of anyone born in America and now existed as law, other
oppressed groups have been able, albeit on too infrequent occasion, to compel those who
rule to recognize their similar rights.1057

1057It is a patrimony to the extent the exploited and oppressed struggle to maintain it. In periods of rising reaction,

ruling class social groups invariably attempt to reverse previous, even if institutionally embodied, gains. Such gains
will never rest on secure foundations short of, most minimally, a revolutionary and communist transformation of
American society.

Eleven Theses on American History and the Civil War

1. The material foundations of American civilization (1695-1900) rest, first, on ongoing Indian
expropriation and genocide, and then, on racial slavery.
2. In colonial British America, racial slavery came into being in the late seventeenth century. It
was a historically formed, successful ruling class strategy to divide bondsmen.
3. The resulting peculiar structure of oppression and exploitation created a vertical division
among the oppressed and exploited, characterized by two large social groups, namely, a
racial class of "black" slaves, and a buffer stratum of "poor whites" whose life chances were
qualitatively superior to the slaves below them in the hierarchy of oppression.
The entire development created these two groups as "races" of "blacks" and "whites" (the
latter, a "racial" group which included not only poor whites but yeomen, planters and a tiny
southern urban stratum as well, all adjuncts to the class rule of the great planters).
4. Technological innovations (primarily the cotton gin) saved the planter class, and perhaps
slavery, from oblivion. The exploitation of slave labor in turn created enormous planter wealth,
and, through the circulation of that wealth, the ports, canals and roads which formed
infrastructural foundations of specifically capitalist development to the north.
The role of slave-generated planter wealth in the development of distinctive societies North
and South weighed heavily in favor of planters, allowing them to assume leadership in the
federal political system that, together with the reciprocal economic penetration of the two
social orders, bound these societies one to the other. At the same time, mastery of the
agriculturally backwards plantation rendered, through cotton exchange, planters subordinate,
their "peculiar" economy an agricultural adjunct, to British capital.
5. The relation of mastery of planters to slaves, together with planter wealth and political
power, gave rise to specific planter-aristocratic culture, society and, tendentially, civilization
which, all the while productively tied to, more and more came into objective conflict with, the
unfolding capitalist society to the north.
6. This conflict, fought out at first largely in and through the political system, spilled over into
civil war when planters lost control of the polity.
7. Both to the north and south, this objective conflict was assimilated, internalized and
consciously pursued by vanguard groups each of whom thought its culture and society
superior.
Generally, southern planters hegemonized a disparate alliance of classes and strata along the
lines of a defense of "republican liberty" and slavery. The political organization of this alliance,
existing North and South, was the Democracy. From the time of Andrew Jackson until the midfifties, planters dominated the State through their control of the Democracy. This control rested
ideologically on a whites' only egalitarianism, racial privilege, and state rights that fused rural
and urban laboring strata (North and South) to a planter program of limiting tariffs and internal
improvements, unregulated banking, and territorial expansion of slavery to match the similar
aggrandizement of the Union as a whole.
A specifically northern, Copperhead Democracy found its historical anchorage in the
objectively proletarian ethnic laborers and the cotton exchange-based, merchant-financial
community of the great cities, and among poor farmers in the Butternut belts of the old West.

In the North, a vanguard of abolitionists had stood isolated for two decades prior to the
outbreak of war. In the West, an emerging class of prosperous capitalist farmers and,
particularly, tenants (disguised proletarians), as "free men" engaged in "free labor" on the
foundations of "free soil", were propelled by their prospects, aspirations and life situations into
opposition to slavery. Together with Whig representation of ruling class social groups, their
political representation created an organization, the Republican party, to oppose expansion of
the system of southern, slave labor relations. This organization absorbed the otherwise
isolated abolitionists.
8. For the first two years of war, stymied by, in particular, a southern-sympathetic, Democratic
party political faction that exercised a leading role in the Union armies, the North was unable,
even as its armies achieved combat maturity, to elaborate a grand strategy consistent with the
goals of Republican party Executive. Within twenty months of actual fighting, the opposing
armies on the fields of battle had achieved rough parity in terms of organization, armament
and leadership. As a consequence, the struggle stalemated. In this context, the socioeconomic weight and activity of blacks became crucial. Pursuing a self-emancipatory practice,
as slaves they abandoned "their" plantations and masters, and as freemen they enlisted and
fought in the Union armies. Their practice decided the outcome of the war.
9. Northern victory in the war created and secured the hegemony of a national State (in the
longer term politically organizing and stabilizing industrial capitalists as a distinctive ruling
class social group) not only over the political system but over a territorially expanding and
economically rapidly developing society. This victory, moreover, made both of the latter
possible by laying the foundations for a unified national market, and freed the nation of its
plantation agriculture-based, neo-colonial dependency upon British capital.
10. The resistance of northern capital taken together with, far more importantly, the poor
southern white commitment to racial privilege (whites only egalitarianism) blocked prospects
for a division of planter estates based on an alliance of freemen, poor whites and Republican
party radicals. Such was the singularly advanced historical resolution of the crisis of southern
society following defeat in war and the destruction of planter property in slaves.
11. Defeat of this alliance in the South secured inter-class division along racial lines, blocked
economic development, insuring sectional backwardness for the next three-quarters of a
century, and allowed a merchant-landlord stratum (formed in part out of the remnants of the
old planter class), subordinate to northern financial and industrial capitalists, to exercise
"home rule."
Having struggled to reject the otherwise universally accepted labor contract as their fate on
the land in the immediate aftermath of the war, and confronting further, now institutionalized
oppression in imposition of racial apartheid and legal segregation, black freepeople, having
carved out a narrow sphere of autonomy in becoming sharecropping tenants, nonetheless did
not succumb.

Theses on Racial Apartheid, the Origins of Sunbelt Capital, and the Re-Ascendancy
of Southern Property in the American Polity1058
1. In all its historical incarnations, Southern property has never abided with democratic norms
in political life. Bluntly stated, Southern property, whether as masterly dominion over slaves,
as Jim Crow legality or, in contemporary, neo-Right and Christian fundamentalist dress, has
never given a damn about law and the Constitution when it comes to self-defense of its
interests, and actions on behalf of those interests.
2. From the very moment that the great planters of Virginia and South Carolina cohered as
regions ruling classes in the early eighteenth century, Southern property, based on slave
production, was self-consciously aristocratic, gentlemanly, and profoundly illiberal and proudly
anti-democratic.
With the exceptions of part-time legislative bodies and weak executives and, in particular, a
military-police function, though decentralized (slave patrols, sheriffs), that characterize all
State-forms, the antebellum southern state governments had precious few of the institutions
which distinguish modern capitalist states. (Obviously so. They were neither bourgeois nor
capitalist.) The southern polity, tiny by the standards of the contemporary world, was the
private preserve of the great planters. Remuneration in monetary form was small, a product of
a conscious great planter effort to insure that a stratum of politicians hailing from the ranks of
the yeomanry did not emerge, in order that those great planters could, unhampered by small
men with aspirations for power, rule in the style they saw fit, a style fitting the great seigneurs.
Reconstruction changed all this, but only temporarily.
3. Much to the dismay, and imagined terror, of men who have never had to answer to anyone
(but perhaps their peers) for their actions, the achievements of Reconstruction put the South
in the democratic camp.
4. Examine a state, South Carolina, where those achievements reached their most advanced
form.
In South Carolina, blacks played a key role in the state constitutional convention, and in a
state where free elections saw a largely formerly slave, black population vote, this electorate
sent, not surprisingly, blacks to the state legislature.
Codified de jure in the Fourteenth Amendment, civil rights were written into the states
fundamental law. As legislators, freemen established ownership of land or, more precisely, the
right of private property in land for themselves as well as the mechanisms of the laws
enforcement (i.e., a government commission to buy lands and sell homesteads to freemen). A
divorce law was instituted for the first time in the states history and the property of married
women was no longer subject to sale to offer relief to a husbands debtors. Guided by elected
freemen, the state legislature set up free (state-sponsored) universal education, a common
school system, and established a state Bureau of Education to oversee it in a South where it
had never before existed.
Codified de jure in the Fifteenth Amendment, political rights were legislatively spelled out and
acted on en masse. Blacks voted, served on juries, participated in political parties, and served
in public offices (as legislators, as judges).
Reform of the state institutions was further undertaken. Judicial circuits were transformed into
counties with the establishment of a Court of Probate for each county. Judges were elected
1058For more further elaboration, see the relevant sections in our Community and Capital (Prolegomena): Reflections

on American History. (The Roles of Southern Property, Blacks and Workers in the American Polity), St. Paul, 2006.

instead of appointed by the governor, hitherto invariably a man of the planter class. Property
qualifications were abolished and debtors prison was eliminated (both of which obviously
benefited poor whites as well).
Carrying out by a population that was slaves within the same lifetime, these changes, it should
go without saying, amounted to a revolutionary introduction of bourgeois democracy into a
land that had, for two centuries, been ruled without popular consultation by an aristocraticseigniorial class of great planters who wealth and power had rested on private property in
slaves. Defeat in civil war overthrew chattel slavery, but it was a newly freepeople that
instituted democratic norms in civil and political life.
5. The defeat of Reconstruction can be traced back to the transformation of the social
landscape of class, a transformation itself rooted in the objective, historical outcomes of the
Civil War. Within a couple years of the end of the Civil War, a large and diverse softly stratified
middling stratum, otherwise known as the free labor mlange, had disappeared and new,
polarized social classes had appeared.
6. During that war itself, the enormous demand for food, clothing, and armaments, as well as
troop movement itself highlighted the centrality of the railroads for distribution.
But even prior to the war, the foodstuffs raised by western farmers, consisting largely in wheat
and corn, milk and cheese, and pork and beef, were shipped to urban centers to feed the
growing urban populations. From the East, the rails brought implements to those farmers.
Farmers' purchases not only included mechanical implements (plows, threshers, reapers, etc.)
and of course, hand tools (hoes, scythes and axes) but also embraced building materials and
clothing, boots, shoes and luxuries from eastern manufacturers produced by a nascent
industrial proletariat.
By 1860, this double movement created a North-West sectional axis, an economically fully
integrated urban, industrializing Northeast and agricultural West similarly dotted with
industrialized towns and cities, created a network of capitalist productive relations as the
market integration of metropolises with hinterlands formed an inter-regional relation and
generated a self-sustaining dynamic of capitalist development.
The dynamic itself gave birth to an elaborate complex of middle men including agricultural
processors and corporate grain-elevator operators, who mediated the deepening network of
mutual dependencies between agricultural producers in the West and dependent urban
populations in the East, and who, in exercising monopoly control over storage, transportation
and distribution, especially, rail freight, in the wars immediate aftermath drove western
farmers as a group to the ground. In the West, the independence of small property owning
capitalist farmers was destroyed, their life chances were reduced to a level of tenants and
agricultural laborers.
Polarization in the rural areas and small towns drove young men and women into the cities to
look for work. These populations formed the basis of a class of wage earners that fed the
demand for labor, by 1854, in a small yet well-developed metalworking sector that was also
involved in provisioning the western farm economy (above). The urban wage-earning
populations themselves drew in their wake production for consumption, in sectors such beer
and other drinking alcohols, sugar and chemicals, glass, earthenware, etc. By concentrating
production in larger and larger units to met the demand of, productively speaking, an entirely
non-productive and dependent, huge military population (well over a million men by war's
end), the Civil War also accelerated development of an industrial sector and, with it, a class of
large and small manufacturers (also above).

7. Once forced by ongoing social class transformation to elaborate its sense, bearers of the
consciousness of the disappearing free labor mlange developed the ambiguities inherent in
this vision in two distinct directions.
8. Revolutionary democrats among radical Republicans insisted on enfranchisement of
freemen and the socio-economic transformation of the South. The latter, seen as the only
means to secure black suffrage and the guarantor of an ascendant Republican party in the
South, entailed land redistribution achieved through the uncompensated expropriation of all
southern planter property. The men holding this position had never been very numerous. The
death of Thaddeus Stevens in August 1868 dealt radical Republicanism a blow from which it
would never recover. Increasingly, the remnant revolutionary democrats, both within and
without of Congress, were compelled to support the conservative Grant Administration, itself
increasingly the center of the party of big capital, because only the "old general" demonstrated
an albeit unforgivably hesitant and half-hearted willingness to enforce the Reconstruction Acts.
9. Emergent liberal republicans differentiated themselves from the revolutionary democratic
counterparts by their emphasis on reform of the State (not its legislative procedural dimension
but it bureaucratic and patronage component), their laissez faire attitude toward State activism
and their stress on formal equality before the law (i.e., on abstract, bourgeois right), and,
concomitantly, their doctrinaire commitment to the abstraction of the "nation" and hence their
obfuscatory opposition to "class" legislation (both in the sense of "special interests" and social
classes). These men were part of an emergent, liberal middle stratum intelligentsia with ideal
and practical interests in "reform. That middle strata had objective social foundations, first, in
greatly, war-enlarged bureaucratic apparatuses of the national State; and, second, in the
revolutionizing of production and distribution, and their integration as mass production and
mass distribution, as well as the nascent development of vertically integrated firm
characterizing the era of trustification at its outset (1873). This novel movement of capital not
only created a qualitatively novel economically dependent middle strata of supervisors,
managers and administrators whose position in production was fixed according to capitalist
needs and whose status as such was quite distinct from the older, now defunct free labor
mlange, but also gave rise to this new organic intelligentsia the political expression of which
was liberal Republicanism.
10. In the South, new social classes also appeared as older ones, slaves and planters,
disappeared.
As freemen, ex-slaves were pushed (by the occupying northern army forces, the Freedmans
Bureau, and Yankee capitalists trying their hand at cotton production) to become waged
laborers engaged in plantation-based cotton production.
Landlords, composed of merchants, railroad promoters and bankers, absorbed the remnants
of the old planters, and were led by Whig politicians, men who would seek redemption of the
South by abandoning the old, Democratic vision of limited government that did not interfere in
the affairs of the states, and, in its place, opting for a refurbished version of the Whig rallying
cry for expansive, State-protected and State-encouraged economic growth otherwise known
as internal improvements.
11. Inexplicable without reference to the class transformation of the South, the volte face on
State intervention by Southern politicians undermined the basis for Reconstruction which
rested on the fear, endemic to the Northern financial community, that a reconstituted South
could, with freemen with voting rights, actually increase its representation in the Congress

and, together with Copperhead Northerners, reassert control over the national government. At
the heart of this fear, was the anxiety that Southern politicians would repudiate the warincurred, Eastern financial capital financed national debt.
12. No longer willing to military support black Reconstruction in the South, a deal between the
northern political party of nascent, industrial capital and the southern party of
counterrevolution was made.
The outward form of the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes and liberal
Republicans in control of the Executive (against the actual winner, Samuel J. Tilden, of the
1876 presidential election) in exchange for a withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina
and Mississippi and restoration of southern home rule. This much it was. The only problem
was that all the parties involved where already committed to the latter prior to formulation of
the compromise. Effectively, and essentially, what happened was that trustified, rail capital
no longer had to chose between its own, nascent finance capital guaranteed existence and
opposition to a regional, southern ruling class return to the national polity, i.e., it was no longer
under any compulsion to support black political rights, since southern politicians no longer
threatened repudiation of national debt incurred during conduct of the Civil War. Instead, the
newly constituted, southern regional ruling class centered in the figure of the landlord put
forward the old Whig demands for State-financed repair and rebuilding of dykes, levees, dams
and canals, draining of harbors, all severely damaged or destroyed by civil war, and, centrally,
construction of the Texas Pacific railroad that would link Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee
(and points east and south in the Old South) to the Far West. There were, of course, other,
specifically, political demands that were part of the compromise that had to do with reforms
and control in the Congress.
Putting an end to Reconstruction, the Compromise exhibited the new constellation of class
forces operative on the terrain of American society.
13. The development pursued by Southerners was not the kind that implied capitalist
transformation, i.e., industrialization. So-called improvements were aimed at securing the
presuppositions of agriculture, not at advancing, by way of transformation, agriculture as
such Redeemers sought primarily, if not exclusively, transportation infrastructure changes.
By connecting them to markets for their agricultural produce without effecting the social
relations of agricultural production, the improvements that were made fastened a servile black
tenantcy even further to the land that was owned from seed, through implement, to product,
by the merchant-landlord. Blacks were fixed deeper in a subordinate socio-economic status,
while the political liberty they had achieved was ground down and finally abolished. The
Compromise of 1877, Redemption, would secure, in the historically effective sense,
economic stagnation, on one side, and political disenfranchisement, backed up by an array of
brutal, criminal and illicit means, a system of racial apartheid and legal segregation that has
come down to us a Jim Crow segregation, on the other.
14. In Reconstructions immediate aftermath, power in the South remained largely what it had
been before the Civil War: Local, exercised over large groups of servile laborers on a specific
plantation, and dispersed, exercised by landlords and sheriffs over tenant farmers (black and
white) spread over huge spaces each family occupying a tiny plot of land.
In this socio-geographical and political setting, the foundations of Jim Crow segregation were
laid in different places as different times, ranging from the early 1870s to the aftermath of the
1892 New Orleans dock strike. It should also be recalled that all through Reconstruction

stretching back to the end of the Civil War, counterrevolutionary white terror was carried out in
different places at different intensities.
15. By the turn of the century, the overall effect of Redemption, i.e., the counterrevolutionary
restoration of home rule, was to institutionally establish a system of racial apartheid and
legal separation in the states of the Old South.
Politically, this system entailed a total disenfranchisement. Blacks did not vote, they did not sit
on juries, and they did not hold political office or participate in political party activities. They
could be subject to unwarranted search and seizure at any time by sheriffs and deputies. For
blacks, due process had no meaning. Even when and where a crack in these relations
appeared, it could not be enlarged. Witnesses to an atrocity or a frame-up were afraid to
testify, they were bribed or intimidated; verdicts came back that vindicated white executed
murder, thuggish behavior, theft; and so on.
Disenfranchisement had its social counterpart in legally maintained, racial separation, a
system of relations complementing political subjugation. These included racially separate
neighborhoods for the minority of blacks living in towns, racially separate churches, eating
facilities, public restrooms, public leisure including clubs and theatres, hospitals and
cemeteries, and, later, public transportation.
Atop these dual systems of subjugation lay the whole domain of daily comportment. Never
outpace a white citizen. Glance cast downward, blacks did not look at whites eye to eye.
Blacks did not initiate conversation speak when spoken to. Speech itself had its familiar,
subordinate cadences and rhythms politeness, respect, docility and obsequiousness raised
to the level of a speech art form.
And, underneath the dual, interlocked and mutually reinforcing systems of social and political
subjugation, founding both, lay the productive relations of plantation agriculture that rested on
oppressed and superexploited black labor engaged for the most part in cotton farming.
16. After the Civil War-based destruction of Southern, planter property in slaves, nearly all
plantations were divided into individual farms or plots of ten to thirty acres. Owned by a white
landlord, these plantations, dotted with rows of tiny, one-room cabins that housed black
families, were individually worked by the same families. Three types of labor almost
exclusively dominated plantation agriculture, tenancy (the most desirable), sharecropping and
waged labor.
Working halves, i.e., paying the landlord half of the crop his family produced, the tenant was
from year to year pushed deeper into debt as he had to rely on the merchant (the landlord in
another guise), as the black family was compelled to put up further portions of its crop for the
food, clothing, seed, and, more often than not, animal and tools it needed during the course of
the year.
Sharecroppers exchanged their labor for a share of the profits on cotton sales they produced.
The return to the croppers invariably was less deductions for housing, provisions, tools,
animal, and seed advanced at the beginning and during the year. When it came time to settle
up, the croppers, with rare exception illiterate and unable to check the calculations (no
landlord would have allowed it anyway), were hit with further deductions that reduced the
profit shared out to them. It was less than enough to begin the next season without recourse
to the merchant, and more often than not, it was less than nothing, i.e., the sharecropper was
in debt to the landlord-merchant. This debt, too, progressively mounted. Waged laborers were
similarly trapped, since their wages did not allow them to cover their expenses. Additional
deductions were part of a conscious strategy employed by the landlord-merchant, who,

counting on black illiteracy, cheated his client in order to maintain the social subordination of
blacks and to provide him with superexploited labor.
Tenancy and waged labor under these conditions, and sharecropping in particular, was a form
of debt peonage, i.e., perpetually indebtedness which effectively translated into perpetual
captivity in the same locale.
The law, backed up by the sheriffs and deputies, secured these relations: Liens were placed
on crops to insure the credit provided by the merchant was repaid. The sanctity of the lien was
written into the statutes as were laws prohibiting employers from competing by offering black
labor higher wages. When seemingly not employed, blacks were arrested on trumped up
charges (often at harvest time), most commonly vagrancy, and incarcerated.
17. In all this, the political disenfranchisement of blacks remained unchanged.
In this era, that of trustified capital, one in which Southern property had no decisive impact on
the national State, it nonetheless reigned supreme in the agricultural backwaters of America:
The same politicians were elected and reelected to positions in the state legislatures, and,
more importantly here, to the Congress at the national level. This system of social relations,
the standard-fare electoral gerrymandering taken together with bribes and intimidation, a few
crumbs and white acquiescence, all resting on a racially oppressed population itself firmly
rooted in the superexploitation of whole communities of black tenant, sharecropping and
waged laboring households, secured the continuing appearance of the same southern faces
in Congress. This was the system of rotten boroughs. Once instituted in the Old South, it
reigned throughout the entire era of Jim Crow segregation beginning around 1900 right down
to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
18. Product of rotten boroughs, the longevity of southern Congressmen conferred on them
chairmanships on the Armed Service and key appropriations committees in both the House
and the Senate. In turn, these chairs allowed their holders to locate military bases, with all
their attendant spending, construction and auxiliary facilities in their home, southern states.
This spending increased dramatically during and after the last imperialist world war as the
counterrevolutionary projection of military power on a global scale became a central concern
of and policy for the U.S. ruling class. To put a date on it, this dramatic increase in southern
military spending took off in 1950, i.e., at the outset of the Cold War.
Hitherto, there had been industrial growth, even a new large-scale industry (textiles) but not
industrialization of the South. The region remained dotted with small towns economically
based on tenant agriculture in cotton production. Low-waged, unbenefited and unskilled labor
was the other side of a labor-intensive agriculture that relied on the large labor reserves of the
region.
After 1950, however, federal monies poured into the South. These were not New Deal TVA or
Farm Security Administration funds, but military expenditures. In the 1950s, the Souths share
of military spending was 7.6% of the national total. By 1970 (and throughout the seventies),
that total and grow to (and remained at) roughly 25%.
During the last imperialist world war, federal officials authorized the construction of
infrastructure for the defense industry. In the South, this included industrial plants, testing
facilities and military bases.
19. The longstanding chairs of key committees were southern Democrats, historically leaders
of the party of Jim Crow (whatever their later conversions and commitments to civil rights),
political representatives of Southern property.

L. Mendel Rivers, Democratic representative from South Carolina, second ranking member of
the House Armed Services Committee and later its chairman, typified the significance of the
rotten borough phenomenon. Under his leadership, Charleston was transformed into a small
universe symbolizing military-industrial civilization: Charleston saw the construction of an air
force base, naval base, a Polaris Missile maintenance center, a naval shipyard, ballistic
submarine training station, a naval hospital, Coast Guard station, mine warfare center and the
Sixth Naval District Headquarters.
20. The complex of military bases, naval shipyards, support centers such as hospitals, high
tech defense installations, and armament manufacturing plants were originally constructed on
the basis of sites chosen and contracts awarded by long-term, fraudulently elected Southern
powerbrokers in Congress based not only on rotten boroughs but also on traditional
gerrymandering of districts. Following from this construction were jobs, populations and
loyalties that permitted this southern Congressional leadership to reproduce itself anew, even
after legal segregation had in the formal sense ended. The same complex created spin-off in
industrially related, high tech sectors, support industries in electronics, aerospace, composite
materials, oil, etc., and spawned in the New South (including the Southwest and Far West)
industries associated with urban growth, construction, tourism and recreation.
21. The fortunes made in servicing this new, vastly enlarged, military sector created the
Sunbelt as a capitalist phenomenon as Keynesian defense expenditures, for example, in the
South transformed the region, industrializing it at the same time as the mechanization of
picking, rendering black migration to the North inevitable, destroyed cotton tenancy. Old
classes, tenants and landlords-merchants, disappeared and new ones, an industrial proletariat
and Sunbelt capitalists, emerged.
22. The military Keynesian outcome, consciously intended at the level of Executive power,
neatly tied anti-Sovietism, or more broadly, counterrevolutionary practice, to the other
characteristic features of a region, namely, anti-democratic norms in political life, antiproletarian practices in production, and rightwing fundamentalist religion as a consciously, and
ideologically, unifying perspective on the entirety of existence. These practices and the
orientations they express are distinctive features of Southern-based, neo-Right that fully
emerged in the latter 1970s.

Appendices

Appendix I
Benjamin Butler and Political Generalship
As I looked on their bronzed faces upturned in the shining sun to heaven as if in
mute appeal against the wrong of the country for which they had given their
lives ... feeling I had wronged them in the past ... I swore to myself a solemn
oath ... to defend the rights of these men who have given their blood for me and
my country.1059
Butler in Baltimore. The War's Onset
The sole, significant exception to the rule that only military trained officers received
independent field commands was a war Democrat, Ben Butler. Butler exercised his politically
appointed command toward the end of the war as commander of the Army of the James
during the Bermuda Hundred Campaign (April-June 1864). He has been roundly, and in our
view mistakenly as well as unjustly, because ideologically, criticized as a paradigmatic
instance of the incompetent exercise of the politically appointed command. Before taking up
this criticism, it might be fruitful to first note his other more weighty military contribution to
Union integrity and stability.
Butler's military service at the beginning of the war - his unauthorized subordination of the city
of Baltimore and clearing of hostiles from its environs - saved Washington DC from
engulfment in a rising tide of pro-Confederate, popular sentiment, a tide which may have well
culminated, if unchecked (precisely at the time Butler checked it), in a popular rising that
would have forced Union authorities to abandon the capital. Having done so, it is hard given
the course of events not to hold that by the end of August 1862 (if not earlier), France and
Britain would have accorded recognition to the Confederacy and brought enormous diplomatic
pressure to bear on the Lincoln Administration to enter negotiations with the southern
Confederacy (as an independent State) to end the war.1060
Butler and the Bermuda Hundreds Campaign
[Command Arrangements]
It is, however, Butler's service toward the end of the war that generates criticism. In the
hundred and thirty-two years since the end of the war, Butler had been regularly accused of
failing to direct his army to seriously advance upon, then seize and hold, Petersburg. Thereby
he, it would appear, prolonged the time it took to capture Richmond. In fact, this alleged failure
did not materially affect the task assigned to the major Union army in the eastern theatre of
the war (Army of the Potomac) with which the Army of the James' efforts were designed to be
synchronized. That task was, of course, the wrecking of the Confederate State's most
1059Benjamin Butler, the floor of the House during the 43rd Congress (1874), reflecting on his war experience,

specifically, we believe, on the 29 September 1864 battle of Chaffin's farm, as spoke in defense of black rights in the
struggle to turn back counterrevolutionary efforts under cover of denial of civil rights to renew a de facto form of black
enslavement. Cited by Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, 533.
1060Butler proceeded with this action without formal authorization from Gen. Winifred Scott, head of the Union armies
in spring 1861. He had, in fact, a blanket order to proceed at any time to seize "property, arms, ammunition and
provisions in Baltimore," but not an explicit order to capture and occupy Baltimore. Benjamin Butler, Autobiography
and Personal Reminiscences, 225-226 (citation), 227 (hereafter cited as Butler's Book). The military crucial capture
and retention of Annapolis and a relay house (a junction controlling rail movement from Baltimore both to Washington
and westward), eight miles south of Annapolis, occurred a full two weeks earlier (20-21 April 1861) and was carried
out under Butler's direction by the 8-MA and 7-NY. Ibid, 181-202. The critical character of this operation was that it
covered Washington, allowing troops to move south from New York and New England by water and, to come ashore
at Annapolis, and gave them direct and immediate rail access to Washington, while precluding the possibility of the
enemy from doing likewise. Ibid, 186-187. For these reasons, prior to this action, Washington was indeed at risk in
early spring 1861. Ibid, 220-221.

powerful armed body, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. But this happy coincidence (not
materially affecting the work of Meade's army) does not effectively undermine the criticism.
Rather, more to the point, Butler did not fail in his assigned mission. The weight of any failure
must rest with Grant; first, because his instructions to Butler for the campaign were
ambiguous, if not altogether vague, and second, because, his designated, experienced
military advisor to Butler, William F. ("Baldy") Smith, failed to produce the type of combat
leadership that both the campaign required and Grant had anticipated he would provide.
Having assumed command of the all the armies of the Union, Grant met with Butler 1-2 April
1864 at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The purpose of the meeting was, from Grant's perspective, to
determine whether Butler would retain his command of the military Department of Virginia and
North Carolina. (Grant, expecting he would reassign Butler, had brought along with him a
replacement, Smith.) Aware of Butler's military limitation, namely, his lack of battlefield
experience, Grant was nonetheless impressed with him - with his quick mind, his obvious
organizational and administrative ability along with his efficiency, and with his strategic insight
into the upcoming campaign requirements (viz., Butler, without prior consultation, understood
the strategic requirements of the campaign along lines that Grant had laid out). Butler retained
his position. Troops from less defensible assignments within Butler's department were
recalled, Smith was given a corps to command (XVIII Corps), and Quincy Gillmore,
commanding the Department of South Carolina and Florida, was reassigned with ten
thousand men in his command (X Corps) to Butler. The two corps were to make up the Army
of the James. Smith was to function as Butler's chief military advisor (while Smith assumed
Butler would actually take tactical direction from him).1061
[The Dispute]
In his Memoirs, Grant stated Butler accomplished the "first step contemplated in my
instructions to ... [him]," namely, the seizure of City Point and Bermuda Hundred (see Map
13). He further stated, "He [Butler] was to act from here, looking to Richmond as his objective
point. I had given him to understand that I should aim to fight Lee between the Rapidan and
Richmond if he would stand; but should Lee fall back into Richmond I would follow up and
make a junction of the armies of the Potomac and the James on the James River. He was
directed to secure a footing as far up the south side of the river as he could at as early a date
as possible." Butler, Grant went on to note, "made no great effort to establish himself on that
road [the rail line running between Richmond and Petersburg] and neglected to attack
Petersburg, which was almost defenceless."1062
Butler recollections, however, exhibit a nuanced difference, one in emphasis and priorities.
According to Butler, his first task was to secure a fortified base on the James. Once this was
done, his army was to demonstrate in front of Petersburg, threatening it briefly, then move
north toward Richmond. This movement would entail efforts to break up the Richmond and
Petersburg railroad, and was to be guided by the movements of the Army of the Potomac.
Looming important in Butler's thinking was a ten-day framework within which Grant indicated
to him that the Army of the Potomac would pin Lee's army to Richmond. Butler's
understanding of his instructions laid the stress on establishment and construction of a
fortified base to secure future operations, while Grant's emphasis was on movement toward
Richmond, with the accompanying effort to tear up the rail lines, an accomplishment which
would put strain on Lee's supply lines and reduce the number of reinforcements Lee could
expect from troops occupying the Richmond defenses. The respective memoirs themselves
1061For this meeting, a reconstruction of its contents and what about Butler likely impressed Grant, William Glenn

Robertson, Back Door to Richmond, 21-22. Robertson's work is recognized as the definite study of the campaign.
1062Memoirs, 424.

offer no way to decide whose recollection should be taken at face value. According, it is only
with reference to Grant's written instructions to Butler that the basis for judging whether Butler
is to be held culpable for the alleged failure of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign can be
formed.1063
[Campaign Instructions]
Before leaving Fort Monroe, Grant formulated his directions to Butler in a letter. He stated,
"when you are notified to move take City Point with as much force as possible. Fortify, or
rather intrench, at once, and concentrate all your troops for the field there as rapidly as you
can. ... Richmond is to be your objective point, and ... there is to be co-operation between
your force and the Army of the Potomac[.] ... [This] must be your guide. This indicates the
necessity of your holding close to the south bank of the James River as you advance. Then,
should the enemy be forced into his intrenchments in Richmond, the Army of the Potomac
would follow, and by means of transports the two armies would become a unit." On 18 April,
Grant sent a staff officer to Butler with finalized directions. In these instructions, he sounded
the same themes. "I shall aim to fight Lee between here [the Rapidan] and Richmond, if he
will stand. Should Lee, however, fall back into Richmond, I will follow up and make a junction
with your army on the James River. Could I be certain that you will be able to invest Richmond
on the south side, so as to have your left resting on the James above the city, I would form the
junction there. ... use every exertion to secure footing as far up the south side of the river as
you can, and as soon as possible. ... If you hear of our advancing from that direction, or have
reason to judge from the action of the enemy that they are looking for danger to that side,
attack vigorously, and if you cannot carry the city, at least detain as large a force there as
possible." On the face of it, then, Petersburg is not even mentioned in Grant's instructions.
Equally significant, the movements of the Army of the James were linked to those of the Army
of the Potomac. (Note our added emphases.) Grant, in other words, simply assumed that
Union forces under his (Meade's) command would have little trouble pushing Lee's army back
into Richmond. The question of Butler's comportment in the case where Lee neither "stood"
outside entrenchments and fought nor retired to Richmond never occurred to Grant. But this
was precisely the situation that evolved.1064 Not only was it the situation that was to evolve, it
developed only after Butler had received several telegraphs from the War Department in the
first days of the campaign indicating that Grant's army was pushing Lee's back toward, and, in
pursuit, moving rapidly on Richmond. In light of this misleading, better simply wrong,
information, Butler pushed his subordinates to move onto Richmond in order to secure the
juncture, and hence cooperation, of the two armies that Grant's instructions indicated was
primary.1065
Having been informed by Sheridan of Grant's failure either to defeat Lee's army in the field or
to push the Army of Northern Virginia back into Richmond, and having some sense now of
exacting where the two opposing forces stood, Butler prepared to pursue Grant's alternative
outlined in his instructions, namely, to bring the Army of the Potomac to a juncture with the
Army of the James (to come to Butler as Grant now appeared to be doing) at City Point.
1063Butler's Book, 628-629, 631, 637, 638; and, Robertson, Ibid, 22.

City Point is on the James River south, southeast of Richmond (say, 20 miles) and northeast of Petersburg (say, 8
miles). Bermuda Hundred is a roughly sixteen square mile piece of lowland formed by the James on its east,
northeast and north and the Appomattox on its south. City Point is just east southeast across the (James) river at the
southeasterly most point of Bermuda Hundred.
1064WR, Ser. 1, Vol. 33, 794-795 (citations). Emphasis added. Also the document as cited by Butler, Butler's Book,
630-631.
1065Butler, Ibid, 646-647, 650-652.

Accordingly, Butler fortified his encampment at Bermuda in order to secure a base of

operations for Grant's army south of Richmond. 1066 In a substantive sense, Butler had carried
out Grant's instructions. "I had done up to this time what I had agreed with General Grant to
do: I had seized City Point and Bermuda by a surprise; I had brought my army, against all
opposition and without any considerable loss, to the intrenchments of Richmond, and was
there victoriously awaiting him; and I had kept more than thirty thousand rebel troops more
than ten days, busy defending Richmond, so that they might not join Lee's army. I had also cut
the Weldon Railroad two successive times by my cavalry. I had cut the Petersburg Railroad
and prevented the sending forward of troops and supplies, and I had cut in many places the
Danville Railroad, the other supply road of Lee."1067 This, as Butler claims, is borne out by
reports forming the official record of the rebellion.1068
As a consequence of fulfilling Grant's orders, Butler was not, it should be noted, in anyway
"bottled up," that is, incapable of offensive operations from inside Bermuda Hundred. The
expression, the term adopted by an engineer on Grant's staff (Gen. John Barnard), to
describe to Grant around the end of May the position of the Army of the James, was not
merely conceptually impoverished, it simply did not adequately describe the situation on the
ground: Butler had some twenty miles of shoreline on the James guarded by the Union navy
along which he could embark and disembark troops.1069 After all, at the time (early June)
Butler was able to release eighteen thousand men under Smith to join the Army of the
Potomac in its assault at Cold Harbor. The movement of Smith's troops gave the lie to
Bernard's, and later Grant's, expression; and, worst of all, having been free for offensive
operations, engagement in battle at Cold Harbor produced a fate far more deadly for those
troops that any counterfactual entrapment at Bermuda Hundred might have.
[Butler's, Smith's and Gillmore's Predilections as Military Commanders during the
Course of the Campaign]
Thus, in fact, Butler did seize, hold and fortify City Point and Bermuda Hundred: He had his
cavalry attack the rail lines both west of Richmond and south of Petersburg (though, in the
event, the damage done, as in almost all cases of rail destruction during the war, was rapidly
repaired); and, he had his forces make a demonstration in front of Petersburg. As his
command advanced on Richmond, it tore up the rail lines along the way. Attacking and holding
"defenceless" Petersburg was out of the question if Grant's timetable was to be adhered to.
But the advance on Richmond was, though no fault of Butler, half-hearted. Instead, his
generals can and should be held accountable for this shortcoming.1070
Butler, in fact, was unlike the typically cautious and initiative-refusing leadership of the eastern
armies. (Thus, for example, he was unlike his two corps commanders). During the course of
the campaign, he waxed and waned aggressive. But it important to note that his moments of
caution were determined both by adherence to his understanding of Grant's instructions and,
in particular, by the fully accepted tactical advise of his corps commanders, especially Smith.
Butler, in fact, clearly recognized his own lack of battlefield experience and consistently sought
1066Ibid, 656-656, 664.
1067Ibid, 656-657.
1068WR, Ser. 1, Vol. 33.
1069Butler's Book, 858. For Barnard, see fn. 21, below.
1070Butler's claim of a ten-day timetable (in Butler's Book) was published in 1892, that is, after Grant's death. Neither

Butler's detractors nor Grant's defenders have, to our knowledge, ever challenged this claim. There is no reason to
believe that Grant, confident of his army's ability to defeat Lee's forces in the open and (reasonably) underrating Lee's
willingness to entrench and assume the tactical defensive, did not lay down such a timetable.

out and accepted the tactical guidance of Smith. In two decisive cases, this was, with a view
to the success of the campaign, unfortunate.1071
The first instance occurred late evening of 5 May. Having easily taken City Point and
established a beachhead on Bermuda Hundred, Butler, having received information that
Richmond was nearly without troop defense, proposed to at once march on the city, simply
extending the existing operation. Both Smith and Gillmore, feeling the panic that rises from the
fear of undertaking a real risk that exposes the quality of the leadership and mustering all the
caution they could, forcefully objected. Before giving up the idea, Butler went so far as to ask
one of his divisional commanders (Godfrey Weitzel) to lead this projected advance, but he
also thought it too risky.
The second case took place on 16 May during the battle of Drewry's Bluff. P.T.G. Beauregard,
the commanding Confederate officer, had the left wing of his forces, Robert Ramson's four
brigades, attack the Union right, Smith's corps. On Beauregard's right, four brigades under
Robert Hoke, were to vigorously demonstrate in front of Gillmore's corp. On the Union right,
Smith had had his artillery removed, since an early morning fog (which, in the event, would
clear) would have made it difficult to accurately fire upon an advancing enemy force without
also shelling his own forces. Smith would dearly miss that artillery, especially after three
Alabama regiments broke through on the extreme Union right along the Old Stage Road. The
breakthrough, in turn, gave them access to the Union rear. Smith's right was very thinly
manned and not anchored at all, a fact that Smith gratuitously blamed Butler for. (The
responsibility lay with Smith's brigadier, Charles Heckman, and ultimately with Smith himself.)
Butler had a brigade (of Ames' division, Gillmore's X Corps) held in reserve. Two fresh
regiments were brought up along a crossroads to the Old Stage Road at which, along the
shattered extreme right, elements of Heckman's brigade sealed any further advance. Along
the middle of the XVIII Corps line, the rest of Heckman's regiments and Weitzel's other
brigade under Isaac Wistar held firm, and Smith's other division (Brooks) with a single brigade
(Burham's) along the left of his line had little trouble in repulsing Confederate attacks. Yet
Smith, unable to get a view of the field for a fog that had yet to lift, panicked by the rebel
penetration on his extreme right, and with visions of a renewed Confederate assault, hastily
ordered a retreat across the entirety of his line. (A decision he again regretted once the fog
lifted.)1072
Butler was no better served by Gillmore. Gillmore had plodded along from the very beginning,
before the campaign even got underway. He was so slow getting his forces up from South
Carolina that he nearly delayed the start of the campaign. Accordingly, he participated little in
the formulation of the details of the campaign. And on the morning of 16 May, he temporized
after Butler, reasoning (much like Grant in front of Petersburg in the coming months) that to
attack in force on his left Beauregard had likely weakened his right, ordered Gillmore to
assault the Confederate right. The ordered was issued at 6 am. Gillmore, after a good of
fretting and dilatory behavior, unenergetically, hesitantly and feebly responded around 10 am.
During the afternoon, Butler ordered Smith to probe the ground for rebel forces in front of the
Union right. His response was qualitatively similar to Gillmore's that morning. Having met
rebel forces, Smith ordered the resulting feeble advance to retire. Gillmore, on the other hand,
1071For those instances when Butler attempted to provide aggressive, bold, initiative-seizing leadership, Butler's

Book, 640-642 and Robertson, Ibid, 69 (unrealized advance on Richmond); Butler's Book, 662, 672, 677-679 and
Robertson, Ibid, 119 (Gilmore's aborted assault on Petersburg); Butler's Book, 686-694 and Robertson, Ibid, 239-240
(actual assault on Petersburg); for those instances where Butler limited himself by adherence to his understanding of
Grant's instructions, Butler's Book, 648 and Robertson, Ibid, 92, 109, 116, 120; for those instances where Smith
tactical advise should have and did come into play during the campaign, Ibid, 111, 119-120, n.6 (129), 135, 148, 155,
170, 232, 233, 250. 252; for the unrealized advance on Richmond (5-6 May), Ibid, 69.
1072For Smith's sorry performance at Drewry's Bluff, Robertson, Ibid, 192-193, and also Butler's Book, 658, 663-666.

simply redrew his corps without orders while Smith's force was making its probe. This ended
the fighting. Angrily Butler was compelled to order the Army of the James to retreat back to its
base at Bermuda Hundred.1073
But Smith and Gilmore refused to give full support to the other for fear of seeing him
succeed.1074 Smith was cautious, hesitant and consistently refused initiative (thus, he
reproduced in the campaign leadership comportment typified in the history of command of the
Army of the Potomac); Butler, to the contrary, when following his own "instincts," was
aggressive and bold. Unfortunately, Butler, under instructions from Grant to take his tactical
direction from Smith, did not consistently pursue those "instincts" where a reasonable chance
of success existed. Smith undoubtedly had motive for his behavior: His campaign plan, a
variant of which was initially accepted by Grant, had in the end been shelved for the James
River expedition: He was at first led to believe he would command the army which formed
Grant's right wing. (In Grant's thinking, Sherman's force was left and Meade's was his center.)
In light of his expectations, Smith was "pessimistic" about the chances of success of the
campaign actually undertaken. He came to resent Butler's reliance on his tactical judgment
(no doubt thinking this aspect of their relation alone proved he merited command). And, in the
end, he actively sought to undermine the campaign and to have Butler relieved. (To James H.
Wilson and, in particular, Sheridan, whose cavalry had in mid-May made a run around Lee's
army and was resupplying itself at the Bermuda Hundred base of operations, Smith painted a
campaign without a chance of success guided by an incompetent leadership.)1075
Smith's efforts bore fruit. While in practice his ineffectual, timid leadership effectively wrecked
the campaign (no little assistance from Gillmore), his maneuvering and subversion resulted in
another altogether different and quieter campaign (instigated by Sheridan and Wilson) among
Grant's staffers (Comstock, Rawlins) to poison the well at which Butler drank. On 25 May,
Grant, having likely heard from his staff how poorly the James River Campaign was going,
wired Halleck to have Smith's corps detached from the Army of the James in order to join the
Army of the Potomac. Smith and his XVIII Corps soldiery, though, had the bad fortune to
engage in the most deadly and one-sided battle, Cold Harbor, fought in the entire Civil War.
That battle left Grant with a bitter taste in his mouth (perhaps the feel that all those charges of
butchery were not so groundless), and compelled him to develop a new orientation toward
Lee's army. Grant gave up his efforts to meet Lee in the open field. Instead, he instructed
Meade and his corps commanders to move south, to cross the James in an attempt to get into
Petersburg and cut the supply lines of the Army of Northern Virginia and the city of Richmond
as well. Smith's corps, reinforced at it approached Petersburg with troops from Butler
remaining forces, was in the vanguard of this action: On 15 June, it was first across the James
River.1076
1073For Gillmore in the run-up to and during the campaign, Butler's Book, 639, 642, 645, and Robertson, Ibid, 35-36,

55-56, 121, 198-200, 239-240, and at Drewry's Bluff, 200-205, and, also 207 n.1; for the Smith's probe, Gillmore's
withdraw and the final retreat, Ibid, 204-205.
1074Butler's Book, 651.
1075For the plan originally preferred by Grant and favored by Smith throughout the campaign, Robertson, Ibid, 13, 21;

for Smith's pessimism, Ibid, 55; for his resentment of Butler (Robertson calls it contemptuousness), Ibid, 155; for his
active efforts to undermine the campaign, Ibid, 155, 173.
The meeting between Smith and Sheridan was "private," i.e., Butler was not informed and did not learn of it until
years later (Butler's Book, 654 note). As a meeting in which official army business, i.e., the development of the
Bermuda Hundred Campaign, its leadership, etc. was discussed, this privacy violated the chain of command. Butler,
in other words, should have been informed of it and its projected contents in advance, with full prerogative to forbid it.
But Butler was a political general. The corporate character of the caste of West Point regular army officers is nowhere
more apparent in this meeting, fully insubordinate, of an eastern and western general behind the back of another
commanding officer.
1076For the fruits of Smith's efforts to subvert the campaign, Robertson, Ibid, 224, 225, 231 n.31, 233.

The outer line of defenses at Petersburg (the Dimmock Line) was immediately breached by
regiments of black soldiers (Hinck's division) under Smith's command. The inner line, and with
it Petersburg and its rail lines - lifelines to Lee's army and Richmond, was there for the taking
too. Smith was told this, and, jittery, hesitant, altogether not wanting any kind of fight, he
temporized spending a good two hours surveying those inner defenses. He also concluded
they were virtually unmanned, or manned with little that could stop an entire corps. It was
Smith's moment of glory, the command decision he had waited for since the victory at
Chattanooga (late November 1863). What did he do? He, in command on the field of
operations, shirked his responsibility by attempting to pawn the attack off on Hancock (II
Corps commander just on the scene). The attack was never made.1077
[Grant's Response and Later Assessment]
Grant may have been impatient with Butler, but he now saw Smith was the problem. (After
Cold Harbor, Smith had not confined his criticisms to Butler. Meade's butchery, perhaps
correctly, was now the object of his wrath. But in this context his openly voiced criticism hit
Grant personally and made the man reflect on just what had happened at Bermuda Hundred
and Petersburg.) Twenty-one years later, Grant regretfully stated, "I believed then, and I still
believe, that Petersburg could have been easily captured at the time." Soon thereafter Smith
was packed off to New York and would not hold a command for the balance of the war. Grant
would, also in later years, recognize his Smith-derived assessment of Butler was mistaken:
"Butler as a general was full of enterprise and resources and a brave man. If I had given him
two corps commanders like Adelbert Ames, MacKenzie, Weitzel, or Terry, or a dozen others I
could mention, he would have made a fine campaign on the James, and helped materially in
my plans. I have always been sorry I did not do so."1078
Butler's Postwar Detractors in Light of his Contributions to Black Emancipation
With the alleged exception of the Army of the Potomac linked failure to threaten Richmond, in
all other aspects of its mission Butler's Army of the James was successful. So how is it that
Butler has been tagged in Civil War literature with the sobriquet, "Bottled up" Butler?1079
1077For Smith's failure to take Petersburg, Richard Sommers, Richmond Redeemed, passim; Butler's Book, 685,

686-693; and Grant, Personal Memoirs, 514-516.

1078Ibid, 515 (citation); Grant's reassessment of Butler appeared in John Russell Young, Around the World with
General Grant, II, 304, cited by Robertson, Ibid, 255 n.17. It is also cited by Butler, Ibid, 859, 862.
Butler patiently waited to the end of his life to undertake his self-vindication. A sharp, bright mind and an excellent
pen, Butler, writing in the years just before his death in 1892 (the date of publication of his Book), had in front of him
the volumes of the Official Record of the War of the Rebellion published in series from 1880-1889, and with the
pertinent volume(s) all the documentation necessary to exonerate his wartime command. For Butler's entire account
of the sobriquet, "bottled up," Grant's apology, and his (Butler's) interpretation of the entire sense of the original
remark and the apology, an interpretation that is entirely consistent with his account of the manner in which he
faithfully executed Grant's orders during the overland portion of the 1864 Virginia Campaign, Ibid, 852-863. Butler
correctly laid responsibility for his falling out with Grant, and the eventual withdrawal of his command, at the feet of
career, West Point officers who, smugly and wrongly self-assured of their superior military prowess, could not tolerate
serving under an officer lacking their credentials. Ibid, 852. See chapter 4, above, for general treatment of this entire
state of affairs.
1079A list of texts which malign Butler is provided by Robertson, Ibid, 254 n.3.
In late May 1864, Grant instructed Halleck to investigate the situation of the Army of the James. Halleck sent the
Union armies' chief quartermaster (Montgomery Miegs) and engineer (John Barnard) down from Washington to
Bermuda Hundred. In a discussion with Grant a short time later, Barnard used the metaphor of a tightly corked bottle
to describe the position of the Army of the James as it fronted west and there confronted Beauregard's rebel force. In
fact, this was the only position from which neither Butler's nor Beauregard's forces could not move, though, as it
proved, Butler's army was quite capable of action in other directions (e.g., south toward Petersburg). Grant's military
biographer, Adam Badeau (Military History of Ulysses S. Grant) used the metaphor against Grant's explicit request to
the contrary, and thereafter it stuck. See Robertson, Ibid, 246-247, and Grant, Memoirs, 426, wherein the latter

Benjamin Butler was a radical, a centralizing nationalist in an era in the United States history
in which such a position coincided with the active pursuit of a liberatory-revolutionary project.
Consider that the post-Reconstruction "redemption" of the South and the post-Reagan era
(1980 forward) in the United States generally join hands with the antebellum South in their
reaction against, respectively, black emancipation and material efforts (e.g., affirmative action)
to lend some reality to the ideology of "equal opportunity." Consider, too, that most of the texts
which belittle Butler are products of these eras. Then consider that Butler himself, a man who
voted in support of Jefferson Davis' nomination fifty-seven times in the 1860 Democratic
convention, came into his own with the onset of the Civil War: Recognizing black humanity as
such and consequently fully aware that once trained freemen would make an excellent
soldiery, he fought to have, promoted, organized and then extensively utilized a black division
in his Army of the James. After the war, Butler was in the vanguard of historically efficacious
efforts to give substance to black emancipation. He was one of the floor leaders in the House
of Representatives in 1867 seeking impeachment and a House manager in the 1868 trial of
Andrew Johnson, a man who desperately sought to turn back the clock on emancipation.
Finally, consider that Butler along with George Boutwell, left standing alone because of death
(Stevens, Sumner) or otherwise long deserted by the radicals who had gone over to
liberalism, organized the last legislative defenses of black rights (the Civil Rights bills of the
42nd and 43rd Congresses, 1873-1875) in the face of northern capital supported, mounting
counterrevolution in the South. In other words, disparaging Butler is an intellectually accepted
method, conscious or otherwise, of denigrating black achievement, a truly "whites only"
pastime.
Typical of the direct, prompt and effective action Butler took with regard to black emancipation
is the following account. In October 1864, Butler found that that Lee's army was employing
blacks to reconstruct and extend the fortifications at Fort Gilmer in front of rebel lines (i.e.,
effecting using their lives, as prisoners of war, to shield the reconstruction of Confederate
defenses). Moreover, as he discovered, among these men were recently captured, Union
army black soldiers. In response, Butler immediately took a hundred Confederate prisoners of
war and put them to work - on a canal his soldiery had been digging across a neck of land
(Dutch Gap) on the James. This was a strictly military project that, like the work at Fort Gilmer,
required work parties to labor within range of enemy guns. Having done so, Butler then sent
word across the lines as to why, namely, his action was in retaliation for the treatment that was
being given Union prisoners. He got Lee's attention. Lee, while still using black Union soldiers
as slaves, put a stop to their frontline use.1080
Consider Butler's "other" historically weighty services to black emancipation, here
synonymous with the cause of human freedom. First, there was his de facto refusal to abide
by Lincoln's policy on the protection of southern slave property early in the war (i.e., his
emancipatory-tending military use of slaves under the rubric of "contraband").1081 Second, as
military administrator of occupied New Orleans (an essentially political position as Lincoln
himself was to demonstrate in his recoil from Butler's hard line (i.e., the latter's undiplomatic
treatment of southern sympathetic foreign consuls, his policy toward southern "womanhood,"
and his intolerance of treason, which ended in dismissal of Butler as military commander of
the Department of the Gulf),1082 he enrolled the first blacks in the Union armies. Consider,
third, his role as a leading radical in the immediate postwar Congresses. These considerations
apologizes for the "injust" use of the term.
1080Butler's Book, 607-608, and Catton, Grant Takes Command, 373-374.
1081Bruce Catton, Ibid, 146, referred to Butler's "invention" of a "canny legalism" ("contraband") that "made it possible

for men to set the slave free without becoming abolitionists." For Butler's own account of the origins of the term and
its legal standing, see his Book, 256-258, 259-260.

suggest that Benjamin Butler's political contributions to the destruction of not just planter
hegemony but also planter property in human beings and to the integrity of the Union as a
nation, that is, to the objectively historical expansion of human freedom, far outweighed his
alleged military failures.1083

1082Butler's accounts on each of these issues provide a sense of what was involved and a feel for his thoroughly

consistent behavior with a view to the Lincoln Administration's grand strategic objectives, Butler's Book, 414-453.
Butler's main difficulty with Lincoln and his Administration (Stanton supported him, Steward didnt) was that he
thought in terms of and made hard war months before Lincoln came to be committed to such a practice. In this
respect, Butler held both Grant and Lincoln far from radical enough, the former in his failure to adequate protect
Union Southerners (Ibid, 619) from rebel censure and life-threatening abuse, and the latter in his failure to punish
(i.e., hang) rebel commanders for, what today would be called, crimes of war (Ibid, 619-621).
1083In New Orleans, Butler indicated he would solve the continuing problem of women insulting and harassing Union
soldiers by treating them as common prostitutes. He also hung a Confederate supporter without providing him with
the opportunity to legally defend himself. Butlers Book, 415-419.
In New Orleans, Butler undertook the arming of free blacks, coloreds or mulattos. (New Orleans had a population
of roughly 10,000 free blacks whose legal status predated the establishment of statehood in 1812.) Up until 1834, free
blacks had been organized in a militia, and the tradition was revived in 1861 with secession. Isolated, and with
inadequate soldiery to detach troops for Farraguts assault on Baton Rouge, garrison Ships Island and provide
protective screen for the city in its immediate environs, Butler formed three regiments of free blacks between August
and November 1862.
In New Orleans, there were two categories of these slaves that, moreover, in Butlers thinking had been de jure
emancipated. The first were slaves of British and French masters, citizens of nations that had long ago abolished
slavery. He treated these slaves as free. The second were slaves of rebel masters in territory held by Butlers Union
forces. Though not free before the war, these slaves were now free under terms of the July 1862 Second Confiscation
Act. From both groups, Butlers agents recruited blacks. See Howard Westwood, Black Troops, White Commanders,
43-48, and chapter 8, above.

Appendix II
A Note on Union Army Bigotry: A History of the XI Corps, Army of the Potomac, with
Special Attention to its Role in the Battle of Chancellorsville
[We are] not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but
called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defence of own
and the people's just rights and liberties.1084

Part I
Origins of IX Corps
Blenker's Division and War Department Bigotry
Bigotry in the United States, and in the Union armies in particular, was not merely directed at
blacks. Besides the racist bigotry explicit in the practice-orienting assumptions of "whites'
only" egalitarianism most Northerners openly and proudly engaged in ethnic bigotry toward
non-Anglo European immigrants. In the Union Army of the Potomac, somewhat less than onehalf of the soldiery in one corps was made up such immigrant Americans. Though XI Corps
was not a primarily "German" "foreign contingent," its prehistory prior to its establishment as a
combat formation in that army gives some credence to what otherwise constituted terms of
nativist abuse.
The response to Lincoln's call (April 1861) for volunteers was by and large received
enthusiastically in the German communities across the United States. In spring and summer
1861, several naturalized American citizens born as Germans, Poles or other central
Europeans on the continent raised regiments on behalf of the Union. All were former military
officers, revolutionary democrats and veterans of the unsuccessful revolutions (1848) and war
against the petty, but largely feudal and absolutist princes of the kingdom, principalities and
statelets that dotted the landscape of central Europe. These men, those who were not killed in
the first year of fighting, were to figure in the command of XI Corps. They included Henry
Bohlen, who organized the 75-PA1085 (and was killed in a skirmish at Freeman's Ford, 22
August 1862); Adolph Buschbeck, who largely formed the 27-PA; Leopold Gilsa, who raised
the 41-NY; John Koltes, who organized the 73-PA (and was killed at the Second Bull Run, 30
August 1862); Wladimir Krzyzanowski, who assisted in forming the 58-NY; Alexander
Schimmelpfennig, who helped organize the 74-PA; and Adolph Steinwehr, who assisted in
forming the 29-NY. The most famous of these men was Louis Blenker who very early on
raised the 8-NY. It was with Blenker as their head that Maj. Gen. George McClellan,
commanding the Union armies and in his capacity as commander of the Army of the Potomac,
brought the largely German speaking regiments together and organized them into a separate
division.1086
In March 1862, the War Department detached the three brigades making up Blenker's division
of the Army of the Potomac from McClellan's forces and instructed these predominately
German speaking soldiers to proceed to Petersburg, buried in the Alleghenies of western
Virginia. Here they were to join Frmont's command, thereby at once concentrating
1084"A Representation of the Army" (14 June 1647) in A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 404.
1085All regiments will be identified in the following manner: The numerical designation (29th, 73rd, etc.) will be given

as a number, and the state of origins will be identified by using the contemporary postal form of identification (e.g.,
Pennsylvania = PA, New York = NY, etc.). Hence, for example, the 8th New York will be given as 8-NY.
1086Official count (provided by the actuary of the United States Sanitary Commission) put the number of central
European-born soldiers in the Union armies at 176,817. According to Carl Wittke, some put that figure as high as
216,000. "Neither figure is accurate, and does not include those of German stock and language who came from
Austria, Switzerland, and other areas were German was spoken" (Refugees of the Revolution, 222). According to
Constantin Grebner, 188,000 Germans fought in the Union armies, which was 60,000 in excess of the 128,000
proportionality in the population demanded" ("We Were the Ninth," 184).

abolitionist and German speaking troops. McClellan, always anxious about being
undermanned relative to Confederate forces, objected bitterly to the War Department's
removal of a portion of his command. Had he been able to prevent it, it is likely other corps
would never have been able to treat those soldiers who were later grouped into XI Corps as
"foreign intruders" (though, equally likely the former would have found some other grounds for
ill treatment of the latter). In transferring Blenker's division to Frmont's command, Lincoln and
Stanton were attempting to simultaneously satisfy two constituencies, the radical Republicans
who wanted to see an abolitionist command in force able to operate against the Confederacy,
and the only partially assimilated central European communities, proud of their language and
customs, that looked forward to savoring the impact (on a nation of bigots) of German
speaking soldiers instrumental in victories over rebels.1087
At the outset of the war, the general northern sentiment toward massive, naturalized central
European enlistments was one of unreserved welcome. In New York, for example, long lines
of well-wishers turned out to send newly formed regiments off to Washington. The German
community in St. Louis in particular had played a crucial role in keeping Missouri in the Union.
But the westward march of Blenker's division, spread out from Alexandria to Manassas, would
represent a turning point in the history of the Civil War German speaking soldiery.1088
Blenker's division set out on or around 1 April. Minimally these soldiers would have to cross
through the passes in the Bull Run and Shenandoah Mountains to Winchester, and from there
the march would take them through the passes in the North Mountains (Little North, North or
Great North), the Branch Mountains to Moorfield and then onto Petersburg (in modern West
Virginia) situated on a plain near the South Branch of the Potomac River. It was roughly a 110
mile ten-day march in a west northwesterly direction. They, however, did not completely reach
Frmont's headquarters in Petersburg until nearly mid-May. So under normal conditions
roughly a ten day march had taken six weeks. What had happened? Most important, those
officials in the War Department responsible for administering the transfer had failed to provide
Blenker's men with adequate provisions. Lacking were shelter tents, rations, shoes and forage
for inadequate numbers of horses. Significantly, the division had also not been provided with a
satisfactory map. It was early spring, and here were Union soldiers trampling through the
melting snows, and cold and partially iced over streams, without sufficient rations or adequate
shelter. They got lost. So the soldiers were fatigued, hungry and coming down with all the
typical illnesses (pneumonia, dysentery, scurvy, skin disorders, etc.). Facing starvation, men
dropped out of formation because they were too weak to go further, or to forage for food, or
simply because they were demoralized. Upon coming on a settlement, the divisional
quartermasters had not been provided with funds to purchase food. They, accordingly, forcibly
requisitioned it from an unwilling secessionist citizenry. These upstanding, good folk screamed
about looters and thieves. Anti-Republican and pro-secessionist elements in Washington
jumped at the opportunity to take the story to the large city newspapers, which, in turn, printed
horror stories about the behavior of "German troops." Among them the New York Tribune,
1087For the War Department order transferring Blenker's division, War of the Rebellion. Officials Records. [hereafter

WR], Series 1, Vol. XII, Part 3, 52.

1088For well-wishers, see Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:234-235.
St. Louis had a large federal arsenal which the southern sympathizing, pro-Confederate Missouri governor, Clairborne
Jackson, intended to seize. As governor, Jackson had mobilized the state militia on behalf of the Confederacy. In turn,
Frank Blair - member of the famous Blair family, a Maryland transplant and son of Francis Preston Blair (member of
Andrew Jackson's cabinet, and one of the early Republican party founders) and brother of Montgomery Blair
(Lincoln's Postmaster General) - organized and armed four regiments of German Turner companies as Missouri
"Homeguards." This action was sanctioned and supported by Simon Cameron (Lincoln's first Secretary of War). See
Stephen Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 49-51. The Governors militia was never able to seize the arsenal.
Missouri was a state divided between a huge population of free-soil, small farmers and a small class of slaveholders
and their supporters. The whole of the state was highly polarized, and in June 1861 civil war broke out.

propagated charges that Blenker's regiments were pillaging the countryside, stripping it of
food and livestock, engaging in massive thief of private possessions without military
usefulness. The division, originally 9,000 men strong but now only 8,000, finally made it to
Petersburg, but only complaints from Frmont about a command that had not shown up
forced the War Department to send Brig. Gen. William Rosencrans with an escort to search
for the lost division. Gen. Blenker was, as a consequence of the alleged pillaging, relieved of
his command, recalled to Washington where he was court-martialed, found guilty and booted
out of the army.1089
If this incident had been isolated, the appearance at the time that the War Department - in
attempting to make logistically arrangements for two large armies in the East and West, in
consolidating the defense of Washington, in planning and coordinating two theatres of
warfare, etc. - had simply "forgotten" about Blenker's division may have come down to us as a
satisfactory explanation. But in the following month (June 1862), as Carl Schurz, perhaps the
most prominent member of the American German community, took command of a division
within Frmont's command, the situation had not materially improved. The difference was that
the bulk of the soldiers in this command, the Mountain Department, had similar experiences of
neglect. The Department's soldiery was ill-equipped, lacking in tents, knapsacks, uniforms and
shoes - often marching barefooted. It was ill-provisioned, lacking, for example, axes to fell
trees and regular pioneer companies to render large streams fordable. Its horses, both cavalry
and those used to pull supply wagons, munitions trains and ambulances, were poorly fed and
subsisted on a diet that merely malnourished them. Frmont had been unable to get the War
Department to meet the soldiery's legitimate needs, though he made regular efforts to get
assistance.1090
So was there a problem inside the War Department? Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was a
nativist, but there is little to indicate that malicious intent animated the failures to supply
Blenker's division and on an ongoing basis Frmont's command. Rather like the "benign
neglect" of a wholly other era (though not as conscious policy like that of the Nixon
Administration), this predominately "German" soldiery was "forgotten" because, as "German,"
it simply did not merit the attention that more pressing problems of command, logistics, etc., in
other theatres of the war did. Discriminatory policy did become conscious, but it only did so
1089For correspondence between Frmont and Rosencrans while the latter was attempting to locate Blenker's

division, WR, Series I, Vol. XII, Part I, 27-28; for Frmont's description of the situation of the troops upon arrival, Ibid,
p. 8; James Pula, A History of a German-Polish Civil War Brigade, 12-17, for a discussion of this ill-starred march;
Bruce Catton, Glory Road, 173-174 has a brief but informative and lively account of the march; for the newspaper
assault and Blenker's court-martial, Wittke, Ibid, 233, 234.
1090"Forgot" is Catton's term, Ibid, 173.
Carl Schurz was a German immigrant to the United States who fled the continent in 1852. He had participated in a
military capacity in the war of 1848-1849, and studied military theory under a Prussian officer, Alexander
Schimmelpfennig, who would later appear as a brigadier under his command. Schurz had settled in Wisconsin,
organized its large German population behind the emerging Republican party and, despite his misgivings about the
temperance current within the party and the nativist Know Nothings who also were attracted to the party (especially in
the East), had enthusiastically supported Frmont's 1856 candidacy for the Presidency. While Franz Sigel had played
a major role among the German community first in New York City in supporting the Republican party, and then in St.
Louis in organizing German militias into de facto Union regiments, Schurz, perhaps because he was assimilationist,
an excellent speaker and intellectually gifted, emerged as the leading pro-Republican German figure in the West. By
the outbreak of the war, he was indisputably the leading German figure in the United States. With Lincoln's capture of
the Presidency, Schurz was given an ambassadorship to Spain. He resigned it in early June 1862 because of his
desire to be directly involved in the military events of the war. He was appointed a brigadier general and assigned to
Frmont's command.
It should be noted that Schurz was in direct, albeit merely occasion, contact with Lincoln. Frmont could have and
probably did safely assume that was the case. For the nature of Schurz's contact with the President and a description
of the state of affairs in the Mountain Department upon his arrival there (9 June 1862), Schurz, Ibid, 2:393, 346,
respectively.

with the assumption, in mid-July 1862, by a notorious xenophobic, Henry Wager Halleck, of
the position of Lincoln's "general in chief." Thereafter, German speaking officers in particular
would find it difficult (without plenty of outside political support) to receive otherwise merited
promotions and would, on a choice between a "German" and an "American" officer, regularly
be passed over for larger commands. Halleck consciously sought to get as many "German"
officers out of command positions as he could, and this was particularly true of the Army of the
Potomac. Franz Sigel was especially targeted by Halleck.1091
Absorption in the Ill-Fated Army of Virginia
On 26 June, shortly after Schurz's arrival at Frmont's headquarters, the Mountain
Department, only established by Lincoln in the spring, was abolished. The forces under the
separate commands of Frmont, Banks and McDowell, largely operating in western Virginia particularly in the Shenandoah Valley, were consolidated with troops under Sturgis defending
Washington to form the "Army of Virginia." Command of the latter was given to Maj. Gen. John
Pope, a Westerner. Pope formed his army into three corps. Command of the I Corps was
given to Sigel after Frmont resigned (he refused to serve in a reduced capacity). Franz Sigel
was a highly popular German immigrant who had fought in the war of 1848-1849. Sigel,
holding the rank of major general, had left his Missouri command and came east where, on 1
June he had been assigned to a command of troops under Banks at Harpers Ferry. I Corps
consisted of three divisions of largely German speaking troops commanded, respectively, by
brigadier generals Robert Schenck (1st), Adolph Steinwehr (2nd) and Carl Schurz (3rd). The
2nd Brigade of Schenck's division was strictly made up of "Americans," four western
regiments from Ohio. In Schurz's divisions, two West Virginia regiments, one infantry and the
other cavalry, were also to be found. An independent brigade, made up of one Ohio and four
West Virginia regiments and under the command of Robert Milroy as well as a cavalry brigade
of Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio and New York ("German") regiments under Col. John
Beardsley, were also attached to Sigel's corps. The II Corps of Pope's army was commanded
by Nathaniel Banks and the III Corps by Irwin McDowell.1092
1091To get a flavor of Halleck's xenophobia, and not just nativism, sample the following: "[The] damned Dutch ...

constitute a very dangerous element in society as well as in the army. Some of these foreign troops are most
excellent men, while others are without discipline or subordination, and in the field are littffle better than armed
barbarians. Wherever they go they convert all Union men into bitter enemies. ... They [have in the past] robbed and
plundered wherever they went, friends and enemies alike. [Because of their commanders, and here Sigel, in
particular, is intended, most German speaking soldiers are] little better than an armed mob." Halleck, writing to
McClellan, while still stationed in St. Louis as commander of the Department of the West. Cited by Engle, Yankee
Dutchman, 95-96. For Sigel, who was shortly to enter a command with the Army of the Potomac, Schurz (Ibid, 2:404)
remarked, "General Halleck, then in chief command of the armies of the United States, seems to have persecuted
him with especial bitterness..."
1092For Sigel, see the remarkably hostile recent biography by Engle (Yankee Dutchman). For the Presidential order
("President's War Order 3," 11 March 1862) establishing the Mountain Department (in conjunction with the
Departments of the Mississippi and that of the Potomac), Balser (ed.), Collected Works, 5:155; and, for the order
("Order Constituting the Army of Virginia," 6 June 1862) establishing the Army of Virginia, Ibid, 187.
The order of battle of the short-lived Pope's Army of the Virginia at the time of the Second Bull Run is reprinted in
John Hennessy, Return to Bull Run, 551-556.
Robert Milroy, a Westerner from Indiana, was considered an eccentric among the officers of the Union army (Schurz,
Ibid, 2:388). He practiced a military democracy that was foreign to its traditions, and that at once looked back to
Cromwell's army during that critical phase of its history (1647) when radical Leveller influence was at its height and
forward to the democratization of the Portuguese army during the liberatory period (1974) known as the "revolution of
the roses." Milroy was not aloof from his men, even in the minimalist caste sense of distinguishing officers from
soldiers. He included his men in discussions of the unfolding campaigns and allowed his subordinate officers to freely
interpret the orders he gave. While the latter in particular amazed the Union army officers' corps, the capacity of
subordinates officers to freely yet faithfully execute orders, or, for the matter, common soldiery to understand
strategic, operational or tactical movements is a function of the diffusion of shared doctrine in the army. That Union

Formation of XI Corps
Shortly after the defeat at the Second Bull Run (30-31 August), the Army of Virginia was
dissolved. In mid-September, Sigel's Corps was enlarged (to some 15,000), reassigned to the
Army of the Potomac, and redesignated XI Corps. It did not take part in the battle of Antietam.
For the next two months, the XI Corps, along with XII Corps, was assigned to the defenses of
Washington. During this period, Sigel's command was stripped of approximately half of its
troops (credit Halleck), which were sent to fortify McClellan. The troops that remained around
Washington were largely the same German speaking soldiers and officers who had been
together since the days of the First Bull Run. On 7 November, Lincoln replaced McClellan with
Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Burnside immediately effected
a reorganization of that army. He divided it up into three Grand Divisions (a right, center and
left), each consisting of two corps. In early December, Burnside informed Sigel that he was
transferring his and Slocum's XII Corps south to function, under Sigel's command, as a
reserve Grand Division of the Army of the Potomac. This reserve did not participate in the 13
December 1862 battle of Fredericksburg. Instead, it was stationed on the north side of the
(Rappahannock) River from where the slaughter of Union soldiers by well-entrenched rebels
could be seen.1093
Thus, the troops of what came to be XI Corps had not participated in all three of the major
1862 engagements of the Army of the Potomac, neither the series of battles known as the
Seven Days, nor Antietam or Fredericksburg. Nonetheless, they had fought in significant
battles in the year previous to their reassignment to the Washington defenses. These were
three in number, Bull Run, Cross Keys and the Second Bull Run. Clearly, from their conduct in
each the fighting reputation that Halleck imputed to the "German soldiery" was not merited. At
(the first) Bull Run, German speaking regiments under Louis Blenker had fought well; at Cross
Keys, clearly, not of the same magnitude of battle as the two Bull Runs, Blenker's division
proved itself worthy and had the casualties to show for it; and, at the Second Bull Run, Sigel's
I Corps, its command competent but not outstanding, probably fought better than any of the
other troops engaged on the Union side.1094
Burnside's "mud march" in January 1863 atop the defeat at Fredericksburg left him
increasingly isolated. On 26 January, Lincoln replaced him with Joseph Hooker, one of
Burnside's Grand Divisional commanders. With Hooker's ascendancy, the West Point based
snobbery, arrogance and exclusivity in the officers' corps (re)asserted itself. Sigel, for one,
was resented mightily. Under Burnside, he held a command that, so it was felt and quietly
argued, only a regular army officer and a West Pointer should hold. Hooker promptly
disbanded the Grand Divisions (an action taken for reasons that had nothing to due with
army officers were amazed not only indicates that had not the slightest inkling of the value of shared doctrine, but also
reflected their rigorously hierarchical conceptions of military life and suggests that, no matter how radical their
commitments to emancipation (among those so committed), those commitments were to a merely formal concept of
liberation and democracy.
But, as if to demonstrate that the most advanced democratic practices could go hand in hand with nativist (and racist)
bigotry, Milroy condemned the men of Blenker's division for their desperation-driven behavior in the following terms:
"The Dutch brigade are composed of the most inferno robbers, plunders and thieves I have ever seen. ... our army is
disgraced by them." (Margaret Paulus (ed), Papers of General Robert Huston Milroy, I, 49, cited by Pula, Ibid, 17.) In
mid-nineteenth century America, democratic practices were always exclusivist, by, of, and for "white men."
1093Corps commands lost their independence and were subject to a grand divisional command. Each Grand Division
had an attached cavalry division. Generally, see Edward Stackpole, Drama on the Rappahannock. The
Fredericksburg Campaign.
1094At Cross Keys, Blenker's division took more than 70% of all the casualties, Stahel's (1st) brigades mostly New
York and all German speaking regiments, alone absorbing some 58%. For casualty figures at Cross Keys, WR, Ibid,
664-665.

undercutting German speaking officers), returning the Army of the Potomac to its corps-based
organization. Sigel's command, in turn, was reduced to that of XI Corps. After a leave of
absence, in mid-March Sigel resigned from his command citing his de facto reduction in
command, the result of Hooker's abolition of the Grand Divisions. (XI Corps was the smallest
corps in the Army of the Potomac.) A West Pointer, O.O. Howard, chronic complainer about
the size and status of his divisional command, was immediately appointed commanding
general of XI Corps.1095
Howard Assumes Command of XI Corps
Howard's appointment came as a surprise to the men and officers of XI Corps. He was not,
moreover, what the corps needed. Ironically, both Howard, and the German speakers among
his command had both long been committed to abolition. But that was where the similarities
ended. Howard was a Maine Yankee, Congregationalist, a straitlaced temperance man, who,
in observing his Christian duties, visited field hospitals, providing wounded soldiers with gifts
of fruit baskets and ... religious tracts accompanied by short sermons. The naturalized central
European soldiers among XI Corps were largely secular and anti-clerical men who enjoyed a
good brew. Howard, known to his contemporaries as the "Christian soldier," had, typically,
something of the New England Puritan in him, including the invasiveness of the religiously
moralizing proselytizer; the German speakers in his command were by and large freethinkers
and libertarians who found his queries offensive violations of their personal liberty. Howard
and "his" men did not get along.1096
Howard further complicated matters by making two significant command appointments. First,
he gave the (1st) division, formerly led by Robert Schenck who was wounded at the Second
Bull Run, to Charles Devens just nine days before the battle of Chancellorsville. Col. Nathaniel
McLean, who had succeeded Schenck and was militarily sound as well as well-liked, was
returned to his old brigadiership. McLean had legitimately expected a command of the division
and a promotion to match. He and his men were disappointed. Devens, on the other hand,
was, according to Schurz, "somewhat too austere and distant." That was gentle
understatement. Devens was noted for ideas of rigorous military discipline, and he was given
the division because the "Germans" under him, it was thought, badly needed to be disciplined.
The second change in personal made by Howard was the replacement of (2nd) brigade
commander Orlando Smith in Steinwehr's division by Francis Barlow. In the 1864-1865
Virginia campaigns, Barlow would cover himself with honors, but for now he was unproven.
1095Sigel "was always regarded as a foreign intruder who had no proper place in the Army of the Potomac and

whose reputation, won in the West, was to be discredited. Whenever he did anything that gave the slightest chance
for criticism, he could count upon being blamed without mercy..." Schurz, Ibid, 2:404.
1096For Howard's appointment as a surprise to XI Corps officers and men, see the letter (1 April) of Fredrick Winkler
to his wife, Louise Hitz (ed), Letters of Frederick C. Winkler, 41 [Hereafter cited as Winkler Letters. At the time,
Winkler was a staff officer at Schurz's divisional headquarters who handled court-martial cases for the entire corps.];
and, the remarks related by F.O. Fritsch, officer on Schimmelpfennig's staff in late winter 1863 (Joseph Tyler Butts, A
Gallant Captain in the Civil War, 32): "The Generals [viz., brigade and divisional commanders] turned out to salute the
new Commander [Howard] and then made very long faces. It was a surprise to everybody. ...Towards night the whole
camp knew of the change in command, and after the first surprise, the feeling was bad enough. All the men had some
affection for Sigel and had heard of the great show of piety of his successor, which had prejudiced them against him.
Riding around at night, I heard various exclamations in the tents: 'Boys, let us pray!' 'Tracts now, instead of
sauerkraut!'"
This secular attitude can be seen in even the more moderate revolutionary democrats such as Carl Schurz. In his
memoirs (Reminiscences, 2:389), he relates an old story of Lincoln's hesitations prior to finally issuing, after Antietam,
his preliminary Emancipation decree. He characterizes Lincoln as "singularly pathetic," in this his crowning moment
which forever committed him to historical fame, when Lincoln referred his decision to "the arbitratement of heaven"
and sought, as it were, a sign from "his Maker" in the form of a victory (or defeat) at the Union's army next battle
(Antietam).

Nonetheless, he was Howard's fair-eyed child, the man to whom he had handed over his
(brigade level) command at Fair Oaks (31 May 1862, during the Seven Days) when he
received an injury that cost him an arm. Barlow, moreover, held strong nativist convictions
that, as the Gettysburg fighting would tell (below), distanced himself from his men, underrated
their military capacities and overrated his still developing military skills. In replacing Smith,
Howard again replaced a meritorious officer who was popular with and respected by his
men.1097
Thus, as the Chancellorsville campaign approached, XI Corps lacked in crucial leadership
position well-regarded figures who could command the respect of their men.

1097Schurz, Ibid, 2:405-406; Hartwell Osburn, Trials and Triumphs. The Record of the Fifty-Fifth Ohio Volunteer

Infantry, 61, 67 (especially for the relation of Howard to Barlow).

Part II
The Battle of Chancellorsville
Tactical Account and Aftermath
Chancellorsville (I)
Hooker's Flanking Movement
Lacking that detailed working knowledge of the Union army corps held by commanders on the
ground and without the opportunity to inspect the terrain around Chancellorsville possessed
by the same officers, it is extremely difficult to imaginatively situate these troops without visual
aids (on the spot examination, maps, etc.). Yet a broad, even if vague, knowledge of the
locations of the various units, the directions that they fronted, and the terrain they occupied is
essential if understanding of the events surrounding the 2 May rout of XI Corps is to be
achieved. It should be noted in advance that all positions assumed by both armies in the
course of action were, unless troop positions in clearings are otherwise noted, in thickly
wooded terrain through which numerous gullies and ravines ran. From the Rapidan river east
to the western end of the various fields of battle, the extreme right of the Union army (where
Gilsa's brigade of XI Corps was positioned), to a point (Salem Church) 5 miles east of
Fredericksburg, tall oak and pine were intermingled with an extremely dense thorny thicket,
scrub oak and pine, brush and brambled undergrowth which some thought (especially,
Howard) "impenetrable." This area was known as the "Wilderness." The Wilderness was
formed as an elevated plateau from which many small streams dropped down to the Rapidan
and Rappahannock on the north, and to the sources from which the Po and the Ny Rivers
sprang on the south. Once a dense forest, its great trees had been cut to supply the furnaces
for smelting bog ores dug, for over a hundred years, from its surfaces. These actions had
rendered the soil barren. Scrub growth was the result.1098
While Hooker' 5 February 1863 order restoring the army's corps organization decentralized
the command of the army's infantry (replacing four independent commands with eight), it at
the same time consolidated and centralized command of the cavalry. In Burnside's grand
divisional arrangement, the three independent commands (excluding the reserve) had a
separate cavalry division attached to each command. Thus, each cavalry division operated
alongside or in conjunction with the two corps making up each grand division. Under Hooker
those three cavalry divisions were now under the unified command of Brig. Gen. George
Stoneman; however, from the beginning of his command, Hooker envisioned his newly
centralized cavalry would operated in a detached fashion. On 12 April, Hooker issued detailed
instructions to Stoneman concerning the nature of the detached service his cavalry corps was
to perform. The cavalry, that is, every unit but a single small (large brigade sized) division
which was to be left behind and attached to the Army of the Potomac as a whole, was to
"throw" itself "between "the enemy's position" "and Richmond, ... isolating him [the enemy]
from his supplies, checking his retreat, and inflicting on him ... injury." In the process, the
various cavalry units under Stoneman were to engage and destroy Fitzhugh Lee's brigade of
rebel cavalry and a small provost infantry guard at Gordonsville, and tear up and destroy
railroad bridges along the Aquia and Richmond railroad in the vicinity of Hanover Junction. An
quick examination of a map of central Virginia will show that Hooker had assigned his cavalry
to operate in an arc west, southwest and south of the main body of his army, at distances
ranging no closer than 10 miles and up to 30 miles from that army at any given time.
1098Two color maps in A.C. Hamlin's The Battle of Chancellorsville (following 182) provide the type of contrast that

suggests the nature of a dense woodland terrain spotted with farmed clearings. The description of the Wilderness is
largely taken from Osborn, Ibid, 62. W.R. Kiefer (History of the One Hundred and Fifty-Third Regiment Pennsylvania
Volunteer Infantry, 26) called this tangle of low growth a "solid interlacing of vines, undergrowth, interminable mass of
thicket [that] ... no battlefield in all the war equalled."

Effectively, then, the cavalry, or the numbers of cavalry troopers, required to perform
reconnaissance for and screen the movements of the army would not be available during the
Chancellorsville campaign. This detachment would cost Hooker and the army dearly.1099
On 27 April, the III, XI and XII Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac, shortly followed by I
and (the bulk of) V Corps, broke camp at Falmouth, Virginia (the army's winter encampment
opposite Fredericksburg) and moved west northwest along the Rappahannock River. Turning
left twenty-seven miles from Falmouth at Kelly's Ford, the vanguard of some 80,000 unions
soldiers successfully crossed the Rappahannock and proceeded to move east southeast,
where at Germanna Ford it crossed the Rapidan. After three days of marching, the Army of
the Potomac was spread out largely along the Plank Road for roughly 3 miles from a point
just greater than thirteen miles west of Fredericksburg to a point just east of Chancellorsville
(i.e., near a single brick dwelling from where this place takes its name), just less than ten
miles west of Fredericksburg, on the left flank of Lee's army.
It was on 30 April that the Union Army of the Potomac began to invest the Chancellorsville
area. Instead, however, of continuing to advance on the Confederate Army of Northern
Virginia, Hooker, his forces meeting slight resistance from pickets on 1 May, halted the
advance: He had his various corps commanders pull back and begin to prepare defensive
positions. (Ordering establishment of a defensive posture, he stated, "A suspension in the
attack to-day [1 May] will embolden the enemy to attack [us]"). Darius Couch (commanding II
Corps) thought Hooker a "whipped man." Slocum and Howard expressed concern over any
further pull back. Cough, again, watching two of his brigades under Hancock (commanding 1st
division, II Corps) commented, "The high expectations which had animated them only a few
hours ago had given place to disappointment." The men of II, V, XI and XII clearly felt
uncertain, frustrated and setback: Having gotten on the rebel left flank with an opportunity to
avenge previous defeats, they were told to withdrawn and settle in. This disappointment would
do little for their confidence in the commanding general.1100
Chancellorsville (II)
Tactical Situation of the XI Corps, 2 May, 8:00 am
So by 8 am, 2 May, the Union army occupied the following positions (see map 14): Covering
one line of retreat running (northeast to southwest) roughly two miles along the Mineral
Springs Road from Scott's Ford to Hooker's headquarters at the Chandler house, Meade's
15,800 man V Corps had taken up positions. Connecting with the right of V Corps at the
Chandler's house, two divisions (French's and Hancock's), nearly 13,100 men, of Couch's II
Corps were entrenched along a line running south southeasterly roughly 900 yards to the
Plank Road. The extreme right of V Corps and roughly half the length of the II Corps line
beginning at the Chandler house was in a clearing that made up the cultivated land of the
Chandler farm. Along the Plank Road from just east of Chancellorsville in a three-quarters
circle to the Old School house, fronting east, southeast, south, southwest and west along that
arc, were the 13,400 men of Slocum's XII Corps touching on its extreme right the III Corps
divisional left (below). On an imaginary straight line from east to west (measured, say, along
1099In the part of the order of 5 February 1863 pertaining to the cavalry, Hooker wrote, "The cavalry of the army will

be consolidated into one corps, under the command of Brigadier-General Stoneman, who will make the necessary
assignment for detached duty" [our emphasis]. Both parts of the order are conveniently reproduced in John Bigelow,
Jr., The Campaign of Chancellorsville, 39, 142-143.
1100Cough's remark about Hooker being a defeated man cited in Bigelow, Ibid, 259; for Slocum and Howard's
concern, Ibid, 258; for the confidence of the soldiery prior on the march to the investment of the Chancellorsville area,
Hitz (ed),Winkler Letters, 50 (1 May); and Cough's other comment concerning the attitude of the soldiers, James
Pula, For Liberty and Justice, 77; Hitz (ed), Winkler Letters, 59 (20 May) for misgivings by Howard. For the soldiery's
uncertainty, Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:412.

the Plank Road), XII Corps entrenchments would have been about a mile in length. About
60% of the eastern portion of XII Corps entrenchments were in the clearing that made up the
Chancellor's farm. In an arc, roughly a mile long, running in a very rough sense westerly and
connecting with the right center of XII Corps on its left and touching the extreme left of XI
Corps on its right were two brigades, roughly two-thirds its full strength of some 5,900 men,
that made up Birney's first division of Sickles III Corps. Birney's first division (minus
Gresham's 1st brigade) fronted south in a wooded area with a clearing to its right on which
Dowdall's Tavern stood (occupied by the XI Corps left). Finally, about a quarter mile east of (a
north-south line from) the Wilderness Church (to the Plank Road) running westerly along the
what shortly became the Turnpike for approximately 2200 yards were the roughly 12,900 men
of Howard's XI Corps.1101
Since it weighed so heavily on the fighting of the evening of 2 May, it should be pointed out
that at this time (morning, 2 May) the entirety of the XI Corps with the exception of perhaps as
many as 1,000 men in a line of battle (just two companies and two regiments, 54-NY and 153PA, of Gilsa's 1st brigade, 1st division) were fronting south. All four regiments of Gilsa's
brigade on the extreme right were in wooded areas along the Turnpike. Gilsa's brigade, small
that it was, had no reserve. Next in line to the left (east) of Gilsa's brigade was McLean's 2nd
brigade of Devens' 1st division. To the east of Devens' division was Schurz's 3rd division.
From right to left, three regiments of McLean's brigade and three of Schimmelpfenning's (3rd
division) brigade occupied a line.
The center of this line was at the Taylor home, a farmhouse that sat atop a rise in the ground.
1102

This rise was strategically decisive since it commanded the entire XI Corps line. The
regiments of these two brigades fronted (faced) south. Two regiments of McLean's brigade
and three regiments of the Krzyzanowski's brigade (3rd division) were positioned in the rear of
the Turnpike as reserves. McLean's regiments (75-OH, 25-OH) were in the woods,
Krzyzanowski's (26-WI, 58-NY, 82-IL) in the area cleared by the Hawkins' farm. An unattached
regiment (82-OH) was also deployed in the same clearing. The two brigades of the 2nd
(Steinwehr's) division were on the left (west) of the entire XI Corps line. Buschbeck's 1st
brigade had been deployed in a clearing created by the Dowdall's Tavern. Barlow's 2nd
brigade, the corps' reserve, was the only brigade not in a line of battle. It was positioned
1101The Turnpike (also known as Turnpike Road), built with federal largesse, was the main westerly road south of the

Rappahannock River and north of Richmond in central Virginia. It began by forking off from the Orange Plank Road at
a point 5 miles west of Fredericksburg and ran through Orange Co. Courthouse. Worth noting for the following
discussion, from that point at which the Turnpike began it ran west through the South, Blue Ridge, and Peaked
Mountains into Harrisburg and beyond. The Orange Plank Road (also known as the Plank Road) ran south of and
roughly parallel to the Turnpike from Fredericksburg to the Orange Co. However, east of Fredericksburg some 4
miles, it dipped south and moved west in an arc before rejoining the Turnpike at Chancellorsville. From the latter point
for approximately 3 miles to a point about two hundred yards beyond the Wilderness Church, the two roads were
one and designated as the Plank (Road). It was along this stretch of the Plank Road where over half of the Union
army forces were concentrated and where a good deal of the fighting took place.
1102For tactical deployments at this time (2 May, 8:00 am), see Map 14.
Kiefer (Ibid, 4) indicates that the 153-PA, a new regiment that joined XI Corps in October 1862, had about 700 men on
the line of battle. The average sized regiment in XI Corps was 450 (Bigelow, Ibid, 138, 286). An average regiment had
ten companies. We ascertain the size of Gilsas force fronted west by adding the strength of 153-PA (700), the
average strength of a regiment (450) - 54-NY, and the average strength of two companies (450/10 x 2), giving us
1,240 men. Note, however, this was not the fighting strength of Gilsa's extreme right, since not all these men would
have been "effectives," men armed and ready to fight. Thus, we estimate maybe 1,000 men were armed and ready to
fight. (Gilsa said he had only 1,400 effectives in his brigade on the evening of 2 May. WR, ser. 1, vol. 25, 636. We are
inclined to believe he had more like 1,700-1,800). At this point in the war, men from the regiments were assigned
essentially non-combatant roles such as stretcher-bearers and teamsters, and quartermasters and their staffs,
regimental bands (musicians), color-bearers and drummer boys were all counted in the total strength of Union
regiments. (For example, going into the Chancellorsville battle, the 153-PA had 12 drummer boys. Kiefer, Ibid, 108).

further east along and just north of the Turnpike (roughly four hundred years east of Dowdall's
Tavern). Situated alongside (i.e., just west) of it, atop a knoll covered with small pines, were
the nineteen guns that made up the corps' reserve artillery. Rifle pits had been constructed so
as to enhance the brigade's role as support for this artillery. Barlow's brigade formed the
extreme left of the XI Corps line and connected up with Birney's two brigades that made up
the right of the III Corps line.
Further troops, namely the 16,900 men of Reynolds' I Corps would soon be positioned south
of the Rappahannock (guarding Ely Ford Road, the other Union army line of retreat). But as of
the evening of 2 May when the first engagement of Chancellorsville began, the Union Army of
the Potomac had approximately 60,100 troops in the field immediately prepared to go into
battle.1103
Chancellorsville (III)
Hooker's Strategic Assumptions
Thus, Hooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, assumed the offensive and seized
the initiative by getting his troops across the Rappahannock (and Rapidan) in a grand turning
movement that put his forces on the left flank of the Confederate army. Yet this magnificent
achievement was immediately sacrificed: Hooker originally undertook this initiative only to take
up the defensive, that is, to compel Lee's army to assume the offensive against the Union
army on a fortified terrain of the latter's choice. If Lee took this bait in just the form intended,
the rebel army could be defeated, and its remnants left to retreat southerly toward Richmond.
Fredericksburg could be captured and an advance along the rail lines toward Richmond could
be undertaken. Retreat southwesterly towards Gordonsville could have been another (unlikely
realizable) option since Hooker hoped to block escape routes. If such a retreat was at any rate
undertaken, the massed Union army could pick off isolated rebel divisions or corps and
destroy the Army of Northern Virginia. Or so Hooker judged. But in surrendering this initiative,
and as long as he stayed on the defensive, he gave Lee an edge whose value could not be
measured, namely, unchecked freedom of movement. Lee could, if he chose, abandon the
field of battle or he could divide and concentrate his forces wherever deemed appropriate
along Hooker's defensive lines. And Hooker gave up something entirely else when he
abandoned the initiative, namely, the confidence of his soldiery.1104
1103All figures for troop strength are roughly correct. These figures, at the corps and army levels, are based upon

those provided by John Bigelow, Jr., The Campaign of Chancellorsville, 136, 138, 473. Hartwell Osburn (Trials and
Triumphs, 64) has a brief, excellent account of the position of the corps' reserve artillery.
The figure for II Corps (13,100) excludes the approximately 3,800 men of John Gibbon's 2nd division which, along
with the 23,600 men of Sedgwick's VI Corps, were stationed at the army's winter headquarters (Falmouth) on the
north side of the Rappahannock across from Fredericksburg as part of the deception that allowed the bulk of the
Union army to move northwest, cross the Rappahannock and get on the left of the Confederate army virtually
unnoticed.
Hamlin and Bigelow, along with the reports in the War of the Rebellion. Official Records, have been relied on for the
account of Chancellorsville. Augustus Choate Hamlin, retired Lieutenant Colonel and Medical Inspector in the United
States Army (and also a nephew of Lincoln's first Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin), was a nonpartisan in the internal
disputes of the Army of the Potomac. It appears he had no particular axe to grind in inter-corps rivalries. His
systematic researches, beginning some twenty-five years after the war had ended, put him in touch with veterans
North and South. Driven by the contradiction between official accounts and "accepted tradition" and the one side, and
accounts of participants (especially among XI Corps soldiery) on the other, he conducted a detailed study of the
battlefield (including, for example, measurements of all the distances given in the various commanders "reports"
appearing in WR). He visited the battlefield three times, and examined the positions of the different military units on
the field during the events of 2 May. His account as regards the behavior of XI Corps that evening can be taken as
definitive. Bigelow's work, on the other hand, forms, according to a leading contemporary historian of the United
States military (Russell Weigley, The American Way of War, 495 n. 42), one of the best tactical studies in the entire
literature of war.
1104For surrender of soldiery respect, See n. 17 above, and Bigelow, Ibid, 185-186, 200, 212, 216, 225, 235, 321.

There were enormous implications to those assumptions that Hooker had not adequately
considered. By far the most important one could have simply been stated in the form of a
question. "What if Lee's army turned and attacked but not on the ground of my [Hooker's]
choosing?" Hadn't Hooker, Butterfield, Slocum, Meade and Howard, etc., fought in the same
or different capacities against Lee (and Jackson) in the past? Clearly, Hooker understood Lee
was likely to turn and fight. But if the Army of Northern Virginia had not in the past retreated
under unfavorable conditions, it had also made every effort to turn the tables. Had not, e.g.,
Lee and Jackson at the second Bull Run, Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley as well as Lee in
the Seven Days, that is, in several past instances had not this army detached a part of itself
and engaged in turning movements to overcome numerical odds against itself? Why assume,
all relevant experience to the contrary, that Lee would not instruct his men to do the same at
Chancellorsville? Perhaps Union army leaders could concur on such a narrow view of the
battlefield possibilities because each simply imputed to Lee what Hooker, Butterfield, etc.,
would do under such conditions. They were all West Pointers, proud, vain men of limited
imagination, adverse to risk and lacking in audacity. They all had imbibed the rudimentary
defensive "doctrine" promulgated by the Thayers and the Hallecks, a "doctrine," if it can be
graced with such a designation, that well accorded with the geographical isolation of the
United States in an era when that isolation keep the nation out of continental wars. Moreover,
as suggested above, these elementary, undeveloped defensive concepts also accorded well
with an unarticulated, not fully conscious series of convictions. The first unformulated
conviction was that a de facto division of the country into two states was now de jure
established. The second conviction was that, outside the pressure - merely to be
circumvented - from civilian Washington, the real task of the Union army in the East was to
defend northern states. According, nothing like the fate of several "peoples" (Northerners,
black slaves and southern whites), a nation and a State hung in the balance; rather, and this
was the last (and logically prior) unarticulated conviction, the Civil War struggle ultimately
came down to a gentleman contest between military commanders seeking recognition, fame
and glory.1105
Chancellorsville (IV)
Confederate Response to Union Investment of Chancellorsville:
Jackson's Flanking Movement
Lee unerringly grasped the significance of the initiative - especially under conditions of
numerical inferiority. Having finally recognized that the bulk of the Union army was on his left
flank, he at once divided his forces. On 29 April, two days after the left wing of the Union army
"General Hooker had started out to surprise the enemy by a grand flank march taking us into the enemy's rear. We
had succeeded. We had surprised the enemy. But the fruits of that successful surprise could be reaped only if we
followed it up with quick and vigorous action. We could not expect a general like Lee to stay surprised. ... And as soon
as, on Friday, May 1st, our columns, advancing toward Fredericksburg, met the opposing enemy, Hooker recoiled and
ordered his army back into a defensive position, there to await Lee's attack. Thus the offensive campaign so brilliantly
opened was suddenly transformed into a defensive one." Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:411-412, 430 (citation, 411).
1105Maj. Gen. Dan Butterfield was Hooker's chief of staff.
Bigelow explains both Hooker's desertion of the advanced positions of 1 May and contraction of his forces on 3 May
in a rough circle encompassing his lines of retreat, as well as his eventual withdrawal back across the Rappahannock,
in psychological terms: Hooker's was so militarily unimaginative as to be incapable of recreating the layout and
structure of a battlefield in his own mind. Accordingly, Hooker, lacking such elementary military imagination,
contracted his lines so that he could in person survey the battlefield and changing positions of his corps. Ibid, 481482. Whether or no lack of imagination is taken in this fundamental, psychologically correct sense, for our analysis it
is secondary to the ideational problems of conceptual poverty (lack of theoretical doctrine) and conceptual blindness
(generated by a militarily defensive orientation) as well as personality characteristics (ambition, vanity), and the
relation (explicated above in chapter 3) of these characteristics to primary, social determinants (defense of caste
character of the eastern army leadership, tacit defense of the system of social relations resting on slavery).

broke camp at Falmouth, Lee advanced Jackson's corps to his left (west). That evening with
more information from his cavalry patrols about the advanced positions of V, XII and XI Corps,
Lee moved two brigades of Anderson's division (Longstreets corps) toward Chancellorsville.
On 30 April, Lee was satisfied that the bulk of the Union army was no longer situated across
the Rappahannock in front (north) of Fredericksburg. Leaving about 11,600 men at
Fredericksburg (Early's division of Jacksons corps consisting of the brigades of Gordon's
Georgians, Hokes's North Carolinians, Smith's Virginians and Hays' Louisianans, and Wilcox's
brigade of Alabamians of Andersons division and Barksdale's brigade of Mississippians of
McLaws divisions, both of Longstreets corps, respectively), Jackson's corps minus Early's
brigade was instructed to move up behind Anderson's division. Thus, as Hooker's forces were
assuming a defensive posture and entrenching, Lee concentrated some 48,500 troops just
east and south of Chancellorsville.
Late in the evening of 1 May, Lee met with J.E.B. Stuart, commanding the rebel army's four
brigades of cavalry, and Jackson. Stuart related that incredibly the Union army had no cavalry
at all on its right flank, that is, between Dowdall's Tavern and the near Rapidan fords
(Germanna and Ely Fords). Jackson perked up. He suggested a turning maneuver. After some
thought Lee agreed. He would divide his army again: Jackson was to lead his entire corps,
31,700 men strong, in a (southwesterly then northwesterly) arc around the Union center and
right. The idea was to get on the extreme right of the Army of the Potomac, and to come down
(the Turnpike) hard on that wing, crushing it and rolling up the line. While a dangerous
movement (since it would expose the length of the column to entrenched Union soldiers as
the corps marched around those soldiers), Jackson hoped to wreck, and then push the
remnants of the forward body of the Union army out of its defensive positions and compel it to
retreat back across Rappahannock. With Hooker's defensively positioned forces remained
mostly inactive, this maneuver, its outcome still in doubt, opened up the possibility that the
Confederate Army of Northern Virginia would seized the tactical initiative and dictate the
course of the pending battle.1106
Jackson's staff officers found him a reliable Virginia patriot who knew the winding dirt roads
south and west of Chancellorsville well. Sometime after 2 am on the morning of 2 May,
Jacksons corps arrayed in a long column began its march. A twenty-eight thousand man
column accompanied by ambulances, and ammunition and artillery wagons on narrow, dirt
country roads is anywhere and anytime a lengthy column. Excluding Archer's brigade
protecting the rear (including the wagons) of the column, Jackson's corps was spread out for
approximately five miles throughout the course of the roughly 10-11 mile march. During the
march the rebel corps, even though shielded by cavalry, was sure to be exposed to the view
of Union soldiers. There was one place, known as the Furnace (a rural ironworks containing a
large chamber designed and used to melt ores, e.g., for the manufacture of horseshoes,
plows, etc.) situated on high open ground on the north side of the Welford farm, about 2 miles
due south of the Union line along the Plank Road (just east of the XII Corps' extreme left),
where the rebel column was particularly visible.
The head of Jackson's corps began crossing the open ground about 8 am on 2 May (see map
14). By 9 am that morning, dispatches from the front had alerted Hooker to this movement.
According to Bigelow, Hooker seriously entertained the possibility that Lee's army was
attempting to flank his right. He dispatched instructions to Howard, commanding XI Corps on
the Union right, ordering him to make preparations for an enemy assault on his flank. (Howard
sent a dispatch, circa 11:30 am, back to Hooker stating, "I am taking measures to resist an
attack from the west.") Right then and there, Hooker could have made the Confederates pay
1106The military significance of the initiative is discussed in chapter 4, see "Officer Ambition, the Southern Model,

Risk and its Rationalization," above.

dearly: The rebel forces were already divided and could have been attacked and crushed in
detail. By pushing forward (south) XI Corps, Birney's division (III Corps) and western-fronted
units (Williams' 1st division, XII Corps) to attack Jackson's forces along their thin, unprotected
marching line, and depending upon how quickly and efficiently the attack was carried out, a
devastating assault on Jackson's forces could have been developed. Though outnumbered,
Union forces may have been able to wreck Jackson's corps for good. The remnants would
have scattered into the Wilderness. On the other hand, the rest of XII Corps could have
simultaneously made a demonstration in the front of the two divisions of Longstreets corps
commanded by Lee, while the balance of the Union army could have turned the Confederate
right, attacking on that flank, and crushed their sparse lines. In conjunction with the latter
advance, artillery positioned at Hazel Grove and Fairview (within mile, north, of XII Corps
lines fronting south), would have had a devastating preliminary effect. Following this assault,
the Union right could have joined its left and turned on the remnants of Jackson's corps. If
ever there was an opportunity to annihilate the Army of Northern Virginia, and bring the
Confederacy to its knees, Hooker was confronting it on the morning of 2 May. He never gave
it a thought. Committed to a defensive posture, with inadequate cavalry to do the requisite
reconnaissance in a timely fashion, he would make arrangements to fortify his lines and leave
it at that. By mid-afternoon, at any rate, the very thought of a Confederate flanking movement
would no longer occur to Hooker and his corps commanders as even a possibility.1107
1107Ibid, 276. The dispatch was submitted by Hooker to the Joint Committee in his 1864 testimony. See The Reports

of the Committees of the Senate of the United States [Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War,
hereafter Report], Part I (Vol. II), 126. Hooker himself was able to see the enemy column moving across his army's
front from his tent at his headquarters at the Chandler's house. The dispatch indicated that, "We have good reason to
suppose that the enemy is moving to our right." It noted that the XI Corps line was arranged so as to meet a frontal
assault from the south, and ordered Howard to "determine upon the position you will take in ... [the] event ... that he
should throw himself upon you flank." The dispatch also stated that Howard should "be prepared for him [Jackson's
corps] in whatever direction he advances" (Bigelow, 276-277). It appears Howard's preparations consisted in moving
up the reserve artillery and setting up two signal stations, one west of the corps' extreme right flank and the other (to
communicate with the one) nearby his Dodwall's Tavern headquarters.
The dispatch has a curious history: Written by one of Hooker's aides, Brig. Gen. J.H. Van Alen, it is not reprinted in
War of the Rebellion. Official Records. Bigelow had gotten his copy from a clerk on duty at Howard's headquarters, 30
June 1863, who had copied it from the original (which had also never been recorded in official letters book of the XI
Corps). In the immediate years following the battle(s) of Chancellorsville, including testimony before the Joint
Committee on the Conduct of the War, Howard, of course, denied ever having received any dispatches of such a
nature (Ibid, 277n). Schurz (Ibid, 2:416-417) tells us that he originally presented Howard with this dispatch, and
produces a copy [slightly different from that submitted by Hooker] of it to boot. He further related that, having read it to
him, Howard remained adamant about not making a major redeployment. The dispatch is reproduced below. (The
two, bracketed sentences do not appear in Bigelow's version. Every other word, word for word, is identical.)
HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,
CHANCELLORSVILLE, May 2nd, 1863, 9:30 am
MAJOR GENERALS SLOCUM AND HOWARD:
I am directed by the Major General commanding to say that the disposition you have made of your corps has been
with a view to a front attack of the enemy. If he should throw himself upon your flank, he wishes you to examine the
ground and determine upon the position you will take in that event, in order that you may be prepared for him in
whatever direction he advances. He suggests that you have heavy reserves well in hand to meet this contingency.
[The right of your line does not appear to be strong enough. No artificial defenses worth naming have been thrown up,
and there appears to be a scarcity of troops at that point, and not, in the general's opinion, as favorably posted as
might be.] We have good reason to suppose that the enemy is moving to our right. Please advance your pickets as
far as may be safe, in order to obtain timely information of their approach.
J.H. VAN ALEN,
Brig. Gen. and Aide-de-Camp.
For Howard's return dispatch to Hooker, Bigelow, Ibid, 279.

Chancellorsville (V)
Union Recognition of Rebel Movement (I):
Sickles Command Pulled from Defensive Line
Around 11 am, Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles, commanding III Corps, had been alerted to the
movements by his 3rd division commander, Brig. Gen. David Birney, positioned with his troops
at Hazel Grove. Sickles sent an aide to Hooker for instructions. He indicated either the rebels
were retreating toward Gordonsville or preparing for an attack on the Union right. He
requested permission to use his entire corps and as well as troops from XI and XII Corps to
attack the enemy column. Of course, Hooker had no cavalry west of Dowdall's Tavern doing
reconnaissance - cavalry which might have informed him of the meaning and significance of
this movement. By noon, far too late to seriously intervene in the movement of Jackson's
corps, Hooker had authorized Sickles to move cautiously and to harass the column and
assigned both Birney's division and Whipple's 3rd division (III Corps), which had moved the
previous evening along with Berry's 2nd division (III Corps) into the positions last occupied by
the left of XII Corps. The advance element of this force, the 3rd division under Col. Samuel
Hayman of Birney's brigade, did not reach the Furnace until between 12:30 pm and 1 pm.
Jackson had sent back a regiment of Georgians to protect his rear, while diverting his rearbound trains to a road further south (which entailed an even larger, longer arc around the
Union center and right). Lee also pushed out (southwesterly) Posey's and, behind it, Wright's
brigades (both 1st division, Longstreets corps) to detain and harass Birney's troops, thereby
protecting Jackson's rear. Meanwhile, Jacksons corps continued to move. By 2 pm, its
vanguard was within a mile of the Turnpike and, thus, of having turned the Union right. About
2:45 pm, Sickles dispatched Hooker that he could break the enemy column but such action
would entail heavy fighting, and, accordingly, he would wait until reinforcements from XI and
XII Corps joined. By 3:30 pm, the last regiment of Birney's division had moved out to join in
the movement south. Around 4 pm, Hooker's order to Howard to detach a brigade (Barlow's,
1st division) to assist Sickles was received. Howard with divisional commander Steinwehr
joined the brigade and moved out with it. Yet by 3:30 pm, the entirety of Jackson's artillery
train (less one caisson) had been saved, while the bulk of his corps forces were beginning to
come up on the Turnpike west of the Union extreme right.1108
What had Hooker achieved with Sickles harassment of the rear of the Jacksons corps
column? First, the departure of that force had created a gaping hole of over a mile in length in
the Union line between XI Corps' extreme left and XII Corps' extreme right. Now both of the
former's flanks were in the air. In fact, XI Corps as a whole, isolated and fronting south, was
anchored nowhere. Barlow's brigade, which spent the late afternoon and early evening more
or less lost over a mile south of the Welford farm, was 2,950 men strong and represented the
XI Corps reserve against any attack from the west. Second, the Union force under Sickles had
a few prisoners, most of the men of the 23-GA (Colquitt's brigade). The 23-GA had been
pushed out in the rear by Jackson as a clever ploy to distract those who wanted to believe so
that this regiment formed the rear guard for a Confederate retreat. Third, the capture of the
23-GA taken together with the pursuit of ambulances, ammunition trains and supply wagons,
somehow convinced the Army of the Potomac leadership that it was following up a rebel army
retreat. "Somehow." It was that crowd of mediocre generals, Hooker, Butterfield, Howard,
Slocum, Sickles, Birney, Devens, Barlow, etc., whose military training had left them cautious
and defensively minded (or whose political training among the non West Pointers, Sickles,
Barlow and Devens, had left them conniving lackeys in the presence of authority); who,
because they lacked audacity, could not (even when experience suggested otherwise)
1108We are following Bigelow's account, Ibid, 276-285.

conceive any enemy that had it; whose arrogance and vanity led to them project their own
conceptual understanding (a retreat) over events (Jacksons corps movement) that had an
obviously and wholly other implication and meaning.1109
Chancellorsville (VI)
Union Recognition of Rebel Movement (II): Sightings Galore
The reports of rebel movement to the south continued to come in. Around 10 am, officers of
McLean's brigade (2nd brigade, Devens' 1st division) saw massed troops moving south and
southwest and reported to the brigade commander. (In fact, pickets of the 55-OH under Capt.
Charles Robbins sent in reports of movement - in their front to the right - every half-hour
beginning at 11 am.) With the assistance of an old man living on the Tally farm, the officers
drew up a map suggesting how the rebels could reach XI Corps' flank by the routes they were
currently using. This was reported to McLean who reported it Devens who, in turn, reported to
it Howard. It was studiously ignored. Howard had a signal station set up at "Little Wilderness,"
i.e., in the area of Gilsa's line on the extreme right. A corresponding station at Dowdall's
Tavern (Howard's headquarters) approximately a mile back down the road was also set up.
The two stations remained in contact until about 6 pm when Jackson's corps' assault
destroyed them. Captain David Castle, handling the station on the extreme right, stated that
he saw the enemy "moving westerly on road running parallel with Plank road, and some 2
miles south of same." Between 11 am (the approximate time when the station was
established) and half past 5 pm (when the "main force of the enemy swept down upon us en
masse"), Castle "constantly [reported] all movements of the enemy as I could see them from
my position." Several small cavalry units making reconnaissances for Devens (commanding
1st division, XI Corps) reported rebel movement south of XI Corps during the afternoon. One
reported back to Devens, a report forwarded to Howard's headquarters, that it, having
witnessed the enemy "moving in great force upon our right flank," was shot upon. Gen.
Schimmelpfennig (commanding 1st brigade, 3rd division, XI Corps) had members of his staff
make similar reconnaissances west past Gilsa's position, and south of (below) Devens'
division on the Plank Road. During the morning, Capt. F.O. Fritsch, basing himself on
information provided by an elderly black man native to the area, had made a detailed
reconnaissance of the entire area south, southwest and west of XI Corps' deployment. He
reported the presence of hostile skirmishers in force 1-2 miles south. His afternoon
reconnaissance ended when his party was shot at by the lead elements of the Confederate
column west of Gilsa's position. Schimmelpfennig made full reports of Fritsch's activities to
Schurz (who was at Howard's headquarters) through one of Schurz's staff officers. These
reports were ignored. Early in the afternoon, Capt. Hubert Dilger, a brilliant artilleryman and
unsung XI Corps hero during the rout that was to follow that evening, scouted on his own
initiative the woods west of the corps' extreme right. He actually ran into Jackson's corps
1109Hooker had reviewed the XI Corps deployments with Howard during the day of 2 May. It was after this review

that, according to Capt. Fritsch, Howard, playing an active role in the spreading the rumor, began suggesting to his
staff and to the other officers in his command that Lee's army was retreating. Butts, Ibid, 41.
Bigelow indicates that XI Corps regiments averaged 450 men (Ibid, 138, 286). While Barlow's brigade had four
regiments, which would, on average, have made it about 1,800 men strong. Yet Bigelow states that XI Corps' effective
strength (soldiers and officers "equipped and present for duty") consisted in 12,977 men (Ibid, 136, 472), while clearly
and unequivocally noting that, excluding Barlow's brigade, XI Corps had "about 10,500 effectives" (Ibid, 286). It would
be consistent with Bigelow to suggest a brigade size of at least 2475 (viz., the result of subtracting 10,500 from
12,977). That, of course, would make Barlow's brigade much larger on average than the rest of the corps. A.C.
Hamelin (The Battle of Chancellorsville, 53), XI Corps historian, indicates that Barlow's brigade was, in fact, the
largest in the corps. Hamlin states Barlow's brigade consisted in 2,950 men (Ibid). Since Bigelow, who used Hamlin's
account extensively, never corrects this figure, we have followed Hamlin. Of course, this means the effectives who
bore the brunt of Jacksons assault numbered around 10,000.

column and was pursued by a cavalry force. Making his escape in a roundabout north by
northeasterly way, he arrived at Hooker's headquarters late in the afternoon. He reported his
encounter to a cavalry major, apparently a member of Hooker's staff, who told him to take his
fantastic story to his corps commander. With haste, Dilger did just that. He was greeted with
suspicion, disbelief and opprobrium (being implicitly reproached for scouting on the flank
without authorization). Around 1 pm, and again about 2 pm, Col. John Lee (commanding 55OH) received information from patrols and reported to Devens at his headquarters (Taylor
house) that rebel infantry and artillery were moving across the division's front to its right.
Devens simply dismissed him indicating that he hadn't received any information from corps
headquarters that would confirm Lee's account. At 3 pm, on authority from Howard, Major
Gustav Schleiter (74-PA) was sent out up the Plank Road to reconnoiter. He reported back to
Howard's staff in the latter's absence that enemy forces were massing for an attack. The
response was laughter, and a caution not to get excited since Howard had gone forward with
Barlow's brigade to effect with Birney's division a capture of rebel troops who, everybody knew
by now, were in retreat toward Gordonsville. Finally, as the battle actually began to unfold
shortly after 5:30 pm, Col. Lee made two rapid, desperate rides over to brigade (occupying the
same place as Deven's divisional) headquarters. He indicated that a flank assault was
developing and requested permission to turn the brigade to front west. The response from
McLean (since Devens seemed incapable of a response) was "not yet." A few minutes later he
returned with the same urgent request, and was dismissed by McLean with a wave of the
hand since Devens again, likely confused and without a clue as what to do, would not
respond.1110
Hamlin and Bigelow relate at least four more such incidents, but the point could not be clearer.
Devens, as divisional commander on the extreme right, and Howard, as corps commander,
were both more than adequately forewarned of the mounting danger to their right flank.
Neither man could think independently outside the hierarchical framework of command: If
corps headquarters did not suggest their was danger on the right, then for Devens there
simply did not appear to be one. Because both commanders were so doctrinally uninformed,
they lacked the theoretical mediations to assimilate new experience. Logically and
emotionally, maintenance of authority required dogmatic blindness to experience. Only a
traumatic shock would shake men of this sort, and the response though different in the future
would still be dogmatic (e.g., as a predictable consequence of the XI Corps rout at
Chancellorsville, Howard's decision on the first day at Gettysburg to stand and fight no matter
what would come of it. See below.)
If the army's commanding general and his staff were satisfied there was no danger on the
army's (XI Corps') right flank, then so was Howard. Here the implications of the lack of military
1110For McLean's officers' report and the story of the map, Hamlin, Ibid, 55, 145; for reports of 55-OH pickets,

Osborn, Ibid, 68; for the signal stations, "Report of Capt. David E. Castle," WR, Series I, V. 25, 231 (citations), and
Bigelow, Ibid, 280, 287; for the cavalry reconnaissances, "Report of Brig. Gen. Charles Devens," WR, Ibid, 633-634
(citation), and Bigelow, Ibid, 287; for Fritsch's reconnaissances under instructions from Schimmelpfennig, Butts, Ibid,
36-40, 41-44, Bigelow, Ibid, and "Report of Brig. Gen. Alexander Schimmelpfennig," WR, Ibid., 662-663 and "Report
of Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz," Ibid, 652-654; for Dilger's adventure and report, Hamlin, Ibid, 56-57, Osborn, Ibid, 69-70,
Bigelow, Ibid, 288-289, and Butts, Ibid, 54, who cites Dilger's own remarks ("God knows that I reported Jackson's
movements in time, but I was insulted by some impudent major at Hooker's headquarters when I reported that they
were massing on our flank ..."); for Col. Lee's reports to Devens earlier in the afternoon, Hamlin, Ibid, 58-59 (who was
in possession of Lee's papers after his death) and Bigelow, Ibid, 287-288. This account does not appear in Lee's
report published in the War of the Rebellion (Ibid, 642-643). Hamlin and Bigelow are in agreement that it is most likely
Devens who (perhaps by this time both chastised by Howard's headquarters and, with a mild reprimand in mind,
inured to reports coming in from the front) never forwarded this report to corps headquarters. For Col. Lee's final two
urgent reports, Hamlin, Ibid, 59, WR, Ibid, 642, Bigelow, Ibid, 296: and also, The Ladley Letters, 120-121 (4 May
1863).

doctrine, discussed above, become patently obvious: Without a body of trained officers who
have, in and through that training, achieved a shared understanding of, among other things,
how the army at every level (company, regiment, brigade, division, corps) function, relates and
responds on the battlefield, an understanding of its capacities, limitations and the technical
features of maneuver, combat, etc., without a shared theoretical, operational and battlefield
frame of reference, a set of standards for the conduct of military activity, the officers corps of
the Army of the Potomac could not achieve cohesion and more relevant here, commanders
could not function independently in the field within the framework of a prescribed (campaign,
battle, etc.) plan. Since uncertainty and, in battle, confusion were constitutive features of
large-scale modern warfare, subordinate Union commanders would always find themselves in
positions wherein they would have to, but would be unable to, make independent judgments
and take independent actions. Witness Howard and, particularly, Devens. However, not only
was independent initiative (within the framework of the campaign plan) not possible (since, for
among other reasons, Hooker did not share and review his plans with his corps commanders),
at every level the army leadership systematically discouraged it. In this light, Howard (along
with Slocum) was quintessentially a regular army officer.
Not only was Howard incapable of independent initiative, being paradigmatically a mediocrity,
he had internalized, no doubt in a self-compensatory way, the hierarchicalization of functions
and positions with a frenzy: On the one side, he completely depended upon the command
above him for direction; and, on the other side, he demanded absolute obedience from his
subordinates. In discussions with Schurz, Howard tenaciously clung to the conviction, all
evidence and sound reasoning to the contrary, that Lee's army was in retreat. How else could
Howard respond? Here he was a West Point man confronted with a militarily unprepared,
untrained officer whose appointment was political; an officer who, even though he spoke as if
he did, couldn't possibly understand the finer points of military strategy; an officer whose
persistence appeared to him, no doubt, to border on insubordination, and a "German" to boot.
(Howard, and Hooker as well, had little regard or respect for the "German" officer
subordinates. They preferred to ignore them.) As Bigelow points out, all the information about
Jackson's corps' movement had been obtained by "independent scouts," that is, by
reconnaissances not explicitly authorized by him. On his reading of regimental histories,
Bigelow further suggests that Howard mightily disapproved of these reconnaissances. In fact,
he was infuriated, stating (according to Doubleday), he "commanded the corps, and his
subordinates were usurping his functions." This kind of generalship was a disaster for the
common soldiers who made up the body of the army as the evening of 2 May would prove.1111
1111Among those incidents not recounted here, two are telling. Capt. Owen Rice (153-PA), commanding a picket line,

sent a communiqu back to Gilsa stating, "A large body of the enemy is massing in my front. For God's sake, make
disposition to receive him!" The time noted on this plea was 2:45 pm. Gilsa himself took the report to Howard and
was greeted and rebuffed with taunts, as well as what was Howard's favorite line to the effect that no force could
penetrate the undergrowth. (Incident with quoted dispatch, cited by Bigelow, Ibid, 288.) Col. C.W. Friend, on Devens'
staff and the latter's officer of the day, 2 May, reported to Devens the enemy was beginning to mass on the corps
right. Devens refused to validate the report, so Friend, both prior to and at 2 pm went to corps headquarters where he
censored for his assertion and ordered to suppress his concerns in order not to create a panic (first instance). On the
second occasion, he was called a coward, told the enemy was retreating and ordered back to his regiment. (Hamlin,
Ibid, 55, 145.)
Regarding Schurz's attempted persuasion of Howard: "I urged this view as earnestly as my respect for my
commanding officer would permit, but General Howard would not accept it. He clung to the belief which, he said, was
also entertained by General Hooker that Lee was not going to attack our right, but was actually in full retreat toward
Gordonsville. I was amazed at this belief. Was it at all reasonable to think that Lee, if he really intended to retreat,
would march his column along our front instead of away form it, which he might have done with far less danger of
being disturbed?" (Emphasis in original); and, "If the rebel army were really retreating, there would be no harm in a
change of front on our part: but that, if the enemy should attack us on our right, which I still anticipated, then would the
withdrawal of Barlow's brigade make a change of front all the more necessary." Reminiscences, V. II, 416, 420.

Chancellorsville (VII)
Tactical Situation of the XI Corps, 2 May, 5:30 pm
At the time of the Confederate corps attack on the Union extreme right, around 5:30 pm on the
evening of 2 May, the dispositions of XI Corps was as follows. On the extreme right, the two
brigades of Brig. Gen. Charles Devens, commanding the 1st division, were deployed; next in
line were the two brigades of Brig. Gen. Carl Schurz, commanding the 3rd division; and on the
left was a single brigade of Brig. Gen. Adolph Steinwehr, commanding the 2nd division (see
map 15).
The 1st brigade of Devens' division, consisting in effectives in about 1,700-1,800 men of the
54-NY, 153-PA, 41-NY and 45-NY, was commanded by Col. Leopold Gilsa; the 2nd brigade,
consisting in roughly 2,600 men of the 75-OH, 25-OH, 55-OH, 107-OH and 17-CT, was
commanded by Brig. Gen. Nathaniel McLean. The entirety of Gilsa's brigade was in the dense
woods. On the extreme right, two regiments (54-NY and 153-PA from right to left) and two
companies from another regiment, no more than 1,000 men, were placed at a right angle to
the Turnpike. The men stood about three feet apart, fronted (faced) west on the north(east) or
right side of the Turnpike, and were not entrenched. Instead, they stood behind a light abatis,
that is, slashings of small trees and bushes. (While it should be acknowledged that at this
point in the war the value and importance of entrenchments had yet to be fully grasped,
Hooker, basing himself on the ghastly Union experience at Fredericksburg, had instructed his
forces, with the exception of the XI Corps, all along the line to entrench.) At that point, where
the left of the 153-PA touched the Turnpike, two of the six guns of the 13-NY light battery artillery attached to the 1st division - were placed. Positioned about 1,000 yards out in front of
the 1st brigade on each side of the Turnpike were pickets, roughly a company of
sharpshooters on each side of the road.1112
Along the Turnpike, eight regiments rested in a roughly continuous straight line. The
furthermost west, its right connecting at a right angle to left of the 153-PA, was the 41-NY. In
order from right to left, the first five of these regiments were the 41-NY, 45-NY, 55-OH, 107-OH
and 17-CT. The last three, regiments of the 2nd brigade, were positioned on the north edge of
the clearing created by Tally farm, just south (by a matter of feet) of the Turnpike. The 75-OH
and 25-OH were deployed as reserves. Both regiments fronted south. The 75-OH was about
500 yards in the rear (north) of the 55-OH, and the 25-OH was about 150 yards in the rear of
the 107-OH. The other four guns belonging to the division were deployed just east of the end
of the line on the Turnpike in the vicinity of the Taylor house. The men of all five regiments
fronted south, the most probable direction from which both Hooker and Howard thought an
attack would come. It appears only the three regiments of McLean's brigade along the
Turnpike were entrenched. The entrenchments were shallowly dug (without log works in front)
unlike the better constructed trenches of, say, XII Corps. These arrangements had been
approved by Hooker and by Howard, since both had toured the line together with Devens
earlier in the morning (sometime between 8 am and 9 am), 2 May. Ironically, Hooker, though
not satisfied with the line, preferred to leave it the way it was (as opposed to more thoroughly
entrenching). This may have been a concession to Howard who felt digging entrenchments
and refusing his lines (against the possibility of a flank attack) would only further discourage
A telling incident of the command's disregard for German speaking general officers can be found in Butts, Ibid.
For the problem of doctrine, see chapter 4, above; for Bigelow on Howard's disapproval of independent
reconnaissances and Doubleday's remark, Bigelow, Ibid, 289, n. 1.
1112Regimental positions are presented in Hamlin, Ibid, Bigelow, Ibid, and, also Schurz's report, WR, Ibid; for the light
slashing utilized defensively by Gilsa's two regiments on the extreme right (as opposed to entrenchments), see the
accounts of various member of the 153-PA, Kiefer, History of the One Hundred and Fifty-third Regiment, 22, 40, 144,
149, 187; for the distance between men fronting west, see Maj. John Frueauff's (153-PA) account in Kiefer, Ibid, 128.

men who felt disappointed by the pull back from the advanced positions of 1 May. According
to Schurz, Hooker had, in fact, declared the line "quite strong." Howard did point out that
between his right and the Rapidan he had no force and, accordingly, there was at least the
possibility of being turned. Hooker promised him a division of cavalry (a promise he obviously
could not deliver on). Howard was, at any rate, convinced that the surrounding undergrowth
was impenetrable and, hence, a flank attack could and would not be undertaken. Howard
toured the line twice more, sometime shortly after 2 pm and again between 3 and 4 pm.1113
The men of the 1st division in the line along the Turnpike were tightly packed together, and, in
view of our reconstruction, they had to have been shoulder to shoulder. The fact that the men
were "hemmed in as they were on the old turnpike by embankments .... in front and thick
woods in the rear" making it "almost impossible to maneuver" (Schurz), and that under such
close quarters they were fronted south but needed to be facing west to resist the attack,
largely accounts both for their inability to hold a line of defense against the Confederate
assault and the subsequent confusion and even disarray that occurred once the rebels had
assaulted their lines and threatened to overrun their positions. The corps command had
refused requests, then pleas, to turn fronts, so that once the attack was underway, every
feature of this situation militated against a successful defense. Those features included the
position in which the Union soldiery fronted, the lack of room for maneuver, the overwhelming
numbers these soldiers confronted, the rapidity and intensity of the attack, the tightly packed
character of their line, and even the rifles in use.1114
East of the Taylor house, the regiments making up the two brigades of Schurz's 3rd division
were deployed. Three regiments of the 1st brigade (from west to east, 74-PA, 61-OH and 68NY), commanded by Col. Alexander Schimmelpfennig, were positioned in the same line as,
and connected to, the five regiments of the 1st division. All three were just to the south of the
1113For Howard's and Hooker's troop deployment reviews, "Report of Brig. Gen. Charles Devens," WR, Ibid, 633-634;

for Howard's concern about the detrimental effects of entrenchments, Bigelow, Ibid, 258; for Hooker's remark, Schurz,
Reminiscences, 2:414; for the discussion of being turned on the right, Osborn, Trials and Triumphs, 69.
1114Lt. Oscar Ladley (75-OH) wrote home, "I will give you a diagram [reproduced in the text of his letter] to show you
how our lines were. The road running East - West is the one we were on (our Corps fronting South). The House is
McLeans & Devens Head Quarters. We were expecting the enemy from the south and had rifle pits all along the road,
but they did not come that way. they came in from the west on our right flank" Ladley Letters, 122 (emphasis in
original).
Citation in our text above is from Schurz, WR, Ibid, 652. Also note the following similar remark from his
Reminiscences (Vol. II, 414): "It was almost impossible to maneuver some of our regiments, hemmed in as they were
on the old turnpike by embankments and rifle pits in front and thick woods in the rear, drawn out in long deployed
lines, giving just room enough for the stacks of arms and a narrow passage; this turnpike road being at the same time
the only line of communication we had between the different parts of our front."
For Gilsa two regiments (41-NY and 45-NY), let us use the figure of 700-800 effectives (half of the 1,400 men he
indicated he had in his brigade, WR, Ibid, 636, or the balance of the 1,700-1,800 we estimated for effective brigade
strength. See n. 18, above). Using Bigelow's regimental average of 450 men, we calculate McLean's three regiments
in the same line would have, on average, 1,350 men. We get, then, 1,950-2,050 men along the Turnpike in the five
1st and 2nd brigade regiments (700-800 for Gilsa + 1,350 for McLean - 100 for the two companies withdrawn from the
line). Say, then, 2,000 men. Careful measurement of the scaled map provided by Bigelow (Ibid, Map 18 (5 pm, 2
May), facing 292) suggests the five regiments occupied about 1200 yards along this line. That is the equivalent of one
man occupying on average every 21.6 inches of the available line. In full battle gear (with knapsacks disposed behind
the trench) a small man is no less than 16" wide at the shoulders and a large man no more than 26" wide. On
average, and these calculations are merely based on averages, men packed shoulder to shoulder would occupy a
space of 21" in width, that is, for all practical purposes the entirety of the average space available to each man.
A typical rifled musket in use in the Union army at this time was the .58 caliber Mississippi rifle model 1841. It was
proven at the battle of Buena Vista (during the Mexican war) and rebuilt by the Union army for the .58 mini ball. It had
an overall length of 48" and a barrel that was 33" long (Guns '89, 208). Fronting south, men shoulder to shoulder (or
even 2' apart) turning right (west) to fire will not be able to fire since they will hit each with their rifle barrels. The
newest models (M1861 and M1863 Springfield) were virtually identical in lengths (Gladstone, United States Colored
Troops, 72).

Turnpike and, unlike the other five 1st division regiments, in a wooded area (between the Tally
farm to the west and the Hawkin's farm to their immediate east). Just east of the 68-NY, the
point at which the (Orange) Plank Road leaves the Turnpike in a southwesterly direction, the
six guns of Dilger's battery, 3rd division artillery, were placed on the north side of the road. So
positioned, Dilger's artillerists could enfilade either the Turnpike or Plank Road.
Schimmelpfennigs other two regiments were placed in reserve and fronted south. The 82-IL
was roughly 500 yards in the rear of the 74-PA, and the 157-NY approximately 350 yards in
the rear of the 61-OH, while the right of the 157-NY was about 250 yards east of the left of the
82-IL. None of these regiments appear to have been entrenched.1115
The soldiers of the 2nd brigade, commanded by Col. Wladimir Krzyzanowski, were organized
in four regiments, the 58-NY, 119-NY, 75-PA and 26-WI. The right of the 119-NY rested about
200 yards down the Plank Road (past the 68-NY) on the south side in the woods. The 75-PA
was on picket duty spread out from east to west on the southern most edge of the Hawkin's
farm along Wilderness run, the pickets' center point about mile south of Dilger's
emplacement. The other two regiments, the 58-NY and 26-WI, had been moved since the
morning on Schurz's own initiative and at the time on the initial Confederate assault were
fronting west. The left of the 58-NY was approximately 700 yards north of the Turnpike along a
dirt road to the Ely's Ford Road (roughly on a line with the 74-PA), while the left of the 26-WI
was another 150-200 yards north along the same road. An unattached regiment, the 82-OH,
acted as a reserve. It also fronted west (again, on Schurz's initiative), north of the 157-NY and
about 500 yards in the rear of the 58-NY. In the face of the rebel attack, these troops (58-NY,
26-WI), and not Gilsa two regiments turned at a right angle to the Turnpike, formed the
extreme right of XI Corps.
Buschbeck's brigade, the 2nd of Schurz's 3rd division, consisted in four regiments. Three of
the four, from right (west) to left the 27-PA, 73-PA and 154-NY were weakly entrenched,
fronting south, in the rifle-pits some 300 yards south of the Plank Road and Howard's
headquarters at Dowdall's Tavern. On the extreme right of these entrenchments, Capt.
Michael Wiedrich's 1-NY light battery, 6 pieces, rested. Wiedrich's right nearly connected with
the 119-NY on the Plank Road. The 2nd brigade (2nd division), Barlow's brigade, the largest
effective force in the corps consisted, as we noted above, of about 2,950 men, was not
present. Not returning to Hazel Grove until about 9 pm, the brigade did not participate in any
of the fighting that wrecked XI Corps. Instead, Barlow and his brigade were off a mile or more
south of the Welford Furnace, lost, on Sickles' wild goose chase.1116
Chancellorsville (VIII)
Disposition of Jackson's Corps Just Prior to the Attack
As rebel forces came up the Brock Road in the mid-afternoon of 2 May, Jackson immediately
began to deploy them (see map 15). The Confederate corps was formed in three divisional
lines each about a mile in length and each bisecting the Turnpike facing directly opposite the
extreme right of the Union XI Corps. The first in line was D.H. Hill's (2nd) division consisting
from left (north) to right Iverson's brigade of North Carolinians (5, 12 and 20-NC); Rodes'
brigade of Alabamians (3, 5, 6, 12 and 26-AL), commanded by E.A. O'Neal, whose right
1115There is a distinctive difference in the positioning of these two regiments on the maps of Bigelow and Hamlin. For

Bigelow (Ibid), the two regiments are deployed en enchelon. The 82-IL was roughly 500 yards, while the 157-NY
approximately 170 yards, in the rear of the 61-OH. Hamlin's maps are considerably smaller and more difficult to scale.
Nonetheless, we have followed Hamlin (Ibid, Map 3, 5:30 pm - 2 May, following 182) inasmuch as his regimental
placement in this case best accords with Schurz's account (WR, Ibid, 651, and diagram no. 3, Ibid, 653, whereon the
two regiments are both placed approximately 250 yards in the rear of the 74-PA and 61-OH, respectively).
1116For Barlow, Bigelow, Ibid, 305, 312, 320.

touched the north side of the Turnpike; Doles' brigade of Georgians (4, 12, 21 and 44-GA)
whose left touched the south side of the Turnpike; and Colquitt's brigade of Georgians (6, 19,
27 and 28-GA). (The 23-GA had spent most of the day on detached duty protecting the rear of
the column as it marched west.) Two pieces of Stuart's artillery were positioned on the
Turnpike between Rodes' and Doles' brigades. A line of skirmishers was thrown out to the
front of this first line about 400 yards and ordered to thwart any contract with the enemy prior
to the attack.
The second in line was Trimble's (4th) division commanded by Colston. Depending on the
authority, this second line stood 100 to 200 yards in the rear of the first. It, consisting in Jones'
brigade of Virginians (21, 42, 44, 48 and 50-VA), formed in support of both Iverson and Rodes
(and thus in a line in which the left of the brigade rested roughly behind the center of Iverson's
and the right roughly behind the center of Rodes' brigade); and Colston's brigade,
commanded by E.T.H. Warren, made up of 1-NC and 3-NC and three regiments of Virginians
(10, 23 and 37-VA). The brigade was placed across the Turnpike in support of Rodes' right
and Doles' left. Deployed to the center and right and in support of Colquitt's brigade in the first
line was Ramseur's brigade of North Carolinians (2, 4, 14 and 30-NC) of Hill's 2nd division.
Paxton's brigade of Virginians was deployed south and in front of the entire rebel formation in
two lines along the Plank Road. Four pieces of Stuart's artillery were positioned on the
Turnpike between the second and third lines.
The third line was to be made up of A.P. Hill's (1st) division, but on the extreme left the 4th
division brigade of Nichols' Louisianans (1, 2, 10, 14 and 15-LA) mistakenly placed itself
beyond (north of) the left (Iverson's brigade) of the first line; Heth's brigade of Virginians (40,
47, 55 and 22-VA), which Jackson had originally ordered to form on the left of the second line,
came up late and was placed in the third line in support of the left and center of Jones'
brigade; Pender's brigade of North Carolinians (13, 16, 22, 34 and 38-NC) was placed in
support of Jones' right and Warren's left, with its right resting on the Turnpike; and Lane's
brigade of North Carolinians ( 7, 18, 28, 33 and 37-NC) was deployed along the Turnpike in
the back of the third line in a column in route. To the right of the Turnpike and in the rear of
Warren's brigade twenty pieces of Stuart's artillery were deployed. Skirmishers were placed to
either side of Lane's brigade to prevent straggling. The 23-NC was detached from Colquitt's
brigade in the first line and placed to the extreme left of the first and second lines and formed
in a column of flankers in route. A regiment of cavalry (2-VA) was stationed to the left of the
entire formation (directly north of the 23-NC) to cover the flank. All totaled, this formation was
composed of 31,700 men with 112 pieces of artillery.1117
Chancellorsville (IX)
Attack of Jackson's Corps (I)
Among the soldiery, pickets, skirmishers and reconnaissance parties had good grounds for
believing all was not right on the XI Corps flank. These men, including their officers who
attempted to get (1st) divisional and corps headquarters to redeploy fronting west, were, it will
be recalled, reprimanded and ordered not to spread panic among the troops, i.e., not to
generalize their understanding of a danger on the right. Thus, among the new regimental
soldiery (and the men of the 153-PA, 119-NY and 26-WI had never been in battle), the
massed rebel assault may have come largely as a shock. Shock is an important practical
1117Total effectives included twenty-eight thousand (28,000) infantry, fourteen hundred fifty (1,450) cavalry troopers,

and twenty-two hundred fifty (2,250) artillerists. Bigelow, Ibid, 273.

McGowan's, Thomas' and Archer's brigade (the latter which had been send back earlier in the day to guard the
column's rear composed of a train of wagons) were all still marching up from the rear. The entire Confederate II Corps
formation is nicely laid out by Bigelow, Ibid, 291-292.

concept: XI Corps officers had no time to prepare their troops for the surprise and fright
consequent upon witnessing an enormous mass of troops bearing down on their positions.
The immense and threatening, oncoming and engulfing enemy presence refused, even after
return volley, to slow down. Instead, it rapidly bore down on the soldiers of XI Corps. This lack
of preparation for the shock, and, the immediate intuition that nothing one does will stop this
enemy assault, contributed to the eventual disarray of XI Corps.1118
As events unfolded, veterans, those who had fought against Jackson's corps in the past,
distrusted the confident air of enemy retreat being sounded by army and corps leaders. They
had gathered from the pickets, as well as from remarks by officers disgruntled with the corps
leadership, that there was trouble brewing on the right. Among these men, there was a
grimness that hung in the air.1119
At approximately 5 pm, Jackson gave his commanders the order to begin the attack. For the
first fifteen minutes or so, the rebel formations moved forward in silence through the heavy
brush, directing themselves by following the road. Jackson, in fact, had instructed his
divisional commanders (and they their brigade commanders and down the line) to always use
the road as a guide in order to keep the lines properly arranged. He also indicated he wanted
immediate, unhesitating assistance for a forward line from the portion of the line in its rear
should the commanding officer of the forward line request such. By holding at right angles to
the Turnpike, Jackson, who had earlier in the afternoon surveyed the Union extreme right from
a highpoint southeast of XI Corps, figured to engulf the Union forces on both flanks.1120
By 5:15 pm the leading edges of the rebel attack where beginning to make contact with XI
Corps pickets perhaps a 1,000 yards to the west of Gilsa's small brigade. Shots were fired
and the silence ended. Bugles rang out and the rebel yell bellowed forth from the men in the
first line.
Many of the men among those fronted west in Gilsa's brigade were alerted to an attack. All ten
companies of the 153-PA had been in a line of battle, though aligned more like close
skirmishers, since about two in the afternoon. Among the men of those regiments fronting
south, however, many men had just sat down to dinner around their campfires. Their first
indication of the impending attack was the appearance of a deer. An occasional deer would
bound into a wooded army encampment and it would usually end up as part of a meal. But
this was different: It was panicked, and was followed by another. Then a flock of turkeys
flopping their wings came running from the west, followed by frightened rabbits and songbirds.
Next shells exploded overhead and among the men of the 153-PA, 45-NY and 55-OH. By the
time the sound of gunfire reached the men's ears, the pickets driven back by Jackson's
advance forces began to cross the lines of the soldiers on the extreme right. (Coming in, some
of these men were shot at by their own forces.) Breathing down their backs, men of O'Neal's
and Doles' brigades came crashing through the woods, clothing torn and bleeding from the
barbed catbriers. According to Gilsa, his men of the two regiments fronting west got off three
shots before flanked from the right. (A number of the men of the 153-PA, told by their officers
to shoot laying flat on the ground and reload by rolling over on their backs, indicated their
companies got off five shots.) The two guns on the Turnpike fired several rounds, but, seeing
1118For the significance of shock in battle, see the concluding discussion of the section entitled "Officer Ambition, the

Southern Model, Risk and its Rationalization" in chapter 4, above.

1119For the contrasting attitudes of XI Corps just before the rebel assault, Ernst Furguson, Chancellorsville 1863, 172,
Catton, Ibid, 183-184, Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:420-421. Contrast the efforts of the corps leadership to suppress
knowledge of rebel movement in the interest of averting panic with W.R. Kiefer (History of the One Hundred and FiftyThird Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 22) who states that men in his regiment, all combat inexperienced,
were aware of the impending attack by 4:30 pm. According to Kiefer, pickets from the 45-NY had come in with reports
of the enemy massing in their front.
1120For Jackson's instructions, Bigelow, Ibid, 293.

the wave beginning to roll over them, the artillerists limbered up to retreat. Before they could
do so, their horses were shot down and the pieces captured. Simultaneously the two
regiments facing south tried to change front but did not have time. They were enveloped by a
withering fire from front (south) and right (west), and from their rear (north, by Confederate
soldiers already firing from the right of Gilsa's other two regiments). The guns of some
companies still remained stacked. At any rate, the soldiers of these two regiments never got
off a shot. Men were killed and wounded as the regiments began to break up. Remnants of
the line quickly retreated, but still about 300 men managed to cross over to the north side of
the Turnpike and form in and among the rear of the 153-PA. Pellets from canister rained down
- coming from the rebel artillery on the Turnpike. Doles', O'Neal's and (the right wing of)
Iverson's brigades, about 4,400 men strong, constituted, metaphorically speaking, a tidal
wave that literally rolled over the 1,700-1,800 effectives in Gilsa' brigade. Led perhaps by the
non-combatants, the teamsters, musicians, drummer boys, etc., the immediate effect of the
initial assault was to compel among those who survived it (with the exception of the 153-PA
which held its ground until ordered to retreat) to beat a hastily, unorganized retreat. Gilsa
himself, shouting commands from his horse in both German and English, gave the orders to
withdraw as the previous two officers he sent forward to do so were shot down.1121
Seven hundred yards in the rear of Gilsa's position originally held by 153-PA and 54-NY, Col.
Robert Reily ordered the 75-OH to wheel and front west. The 75-OH at Reily's command
began to advance through the woods to the aide of Gilsa's right. Three hundred yards
forward, Reily drew his men up in a line and, before they could get fully established, they met
up with men retreating from the 153-PA and 54-NY. Some of the latter fell in with and behind
this line, others went crashing through it in disarray. The line reformed, was able to get off
three shots before it itself was flanked, then enveloped. (It was about this time that Col. John
Lee, commander of the 55-OH, unsuccessfully attempted to get Devens to order a change of
front.) It took the rebel wave fifteen minutes to roll over Gilsa's brigade. Now, the 75-OH and
its supporters too, like those of Gilsa's in advance of it, were wrecked: In ten more short
minutes, 150 men were either killed or wounded. Col. Reily was hit and killed. The survivors,
forced to retreat, did so in orderly fashion.1122
A new line formed up in front of the Taylor house (Devens' headquarters) southeast and five
hundred yards in the rear of the 75-OH's old line (prior to their advance toward Gilsa). The line
was formed around the 25-OH which McLean, upon seeing the fleeing men from Gilsa's left
coming down the Turnpike, had ordered to turn west. At the same time, McLean's other three
regiments, the 55-OH, 107-OH and 17-CT, could not see the enemy for the woods and in the
interim were hit by bomb shrapnel, grape and canister and (being fronted south) enfiladed by
musket mostly from their right (west) and the rear (north). This continued for several minutes
as the men lay low in their trenches. Men, severely wounded or killed, were being hit in the
back. Unable to get a shot off, with artillery and musket fire pouring down and in on men, yet
no enemy to fire on, Lee got the companies making up his regiment's (55-OH's) right wing to
withdraw and form behind the 25-OH. Caught up in the mass of men (41 and 45-NY) coming
down the Turnpike, the rest of his companies fled. The 107-OH too had been unable for the
dense woods and the direction it fronted to fire. The right wing of the 17-CT got off several
volleys, but the rest of the regiment, exposed to the same cross and enfilading fire and unable
to see the rebels (in their rear), retreated down the road to Dowdall's Tavern (Howard's
headquarters about 1,100 yards east). As the remnants of other regiments fled by the balance
1121This description is largely derived from Kiefer, Ibid, 128, 149, 190, 245, 245, 256, 257; Furguson, Ibid, 172-174;

Gilsa's account, WR, Ibid, 636; Hamlin, Ibid, 65-66; and Bigelow, Ibid, 296.
1122Hamlin, Ibid, 66; "Report of Capt. Benjamin Morgan," WR, Ibid, 643. Morgan succeeded Reily after the latter was
killed.

(right wing) of the regiment, it too was caught in the retreat. Through the line formed by the
25-OH came the soldiery fleeing in advance of the rebels from the dense woods on the right of
the Turnpike. The 25-OH with elements of these fleeing troops and companies of the 55-OH
reformed in the midst of this disarray and stood their ground as the Confederate line in heavy
columns advanced upon it. The fire upon this line was murderous, and as the enemy columns
- the first line backed up by the resistance it had met and compressed into the second coming
up behind it - advanced through the woods to within 150 yards, they became visible. The men
in the front of this line (25-OH) got off three volleys, with those in its rear (largely companies of
the 55-OH) firing two volleys, before they broke and began a retreat in the face of rebels an
average of 40 yards in their front. Approximately thirty-five to forty minutes after the assault
had begun and overwhelmed by a force that had now massed around 8,800 men, this entire
had line given way.1123
As the line gave way, the regiment (25-OH) and its supports shattered, a large part of it was
rallied at Howard's headquarters. Still the regiments of the 1st division were wrecked. Bodies
of the killed or wounded were strewn along the Turnpike. Some men, having fled into the
woods, were missing; others were captured; and, still others had fled in disarray east down
the Turnpike. None of the regiments of Gilsa's and McLean's brigade were able to reform as
such for the duration of the evening's battle (though regiments, such as the 153-PA, were
rallied later in the night and during the early hours of 3 May).1124
Jackson had gained his first objective, the high ground of the Tally farm. A new line of defense
was now formed by Schurz's division.1125
Chancellorsville (X)
Schurz's Response (I)
Earlier during the morning of 2 May, Schurz had discussed with Howard a tactical
redeployment of the forces of the 3rd division. He sought the XI Corps commander's approval
to change fronts on the open ground of the Hawkins' farm. He pointed out the dangers (being
rolled up and thrown into "utter confusion") that a failure to do so would entail. He strongly
recommended realigning his regiments on an axis along a north-south line in the vicinity of the
Wilderness Church. Running from south of the Plank Road to the woods on the north end of
the Hawkins' farm, Schurz would have fronted his division west with both flanks refused.
Artillery would be positioned on high ground in the rear and on the left. The effect would to
have a great deal of open ground (the western half of the farm) which could be swept by rifle
and cannon fire. Perhaps, the greatest benefit to derived from such a change of front would
have been the tactical flexibility such a change would have afforded. (In the event, with most
of the regiments fronting south along the Turnpike and several entrenched in or near the
woods, it was extraordinary difficult to effect that change. The 3rd division would pay dearly for
its immobility.) Permission to undertake this change of front was denied by Howard.1126
1123For these events, Furguson, Ibid, 176; Hamlin, Ibid, 67; Bigelow, Ibid, 296-297; Osborn, Ibid, 71; and, especially,

the regimental commanders' reports, Maj. Allen Brady (17-CT), Maj. Jeremiah Williams (25-OH), Col. John Lee (55OH) and Lieut. Col. Charles Mueller (107-OH), WR, Ibid, 639-640, 640-641, 642-643 and 644-645, respectively.
1124Kiefer, Ibid, 129, 160.
1125Jackson's intention was to "advance far enough to establish connection with Lee, say to the vicinity of the Old

School-House, [and from here] a portion of his force [would] ... be directed upon Chandler's so as to take the
elevation of Fairview and the whole position of Chancellorsville well in the rear, [thus] ... favor[ing] his purpose of
severing Hooker's communications with the fords of the Rapidan and Rappahannock and driving his routed army
upon the latter river." Bigelow, Ibid, 293.
1126.".. I entertained and expressed in our informal conversations the opinion that we should form upon the open
ground we then occupied, with our front at right angles with the Plank road, lining the church grove and the border of
the woods east of the open plain with infantry, placing strong chelons behind both wings, and distributing the artillery

Schurz had managed to reposition the 26-WI, 58-NY and 82-OH prior to the initial assault. He
also had a shallow rifle pit (running north-south) traced out and had redeployed three artillery
(reserve) batteries on the east side (facing west) of Hawkins' farm. (Perhaps Howard
subsequently approved this change of front just to get Schurz out of his hair.) As the rebel
wave began to overtake the 25-OH, Schurz, unlike Devens who appeared uncertain and
confused, ordered on his own initiative a change of front of his entire division. The unattached
82-OH got up near the line just to the rear of the two other regiments previously fronted west.
Since these three regiments were all that constituted the XI Corps' right wing as it confronted
the rebel attack, they were also all that stood in the way of the two lines of roughly 3
Confederate brigades (15 regiments) north of the Turnpike. Without real resistance then and
there at that moment, the rebel left would have rapidly sweep in behind the main body of XI
Corps, cut off the corps' line of retreat, captured the corps' artillery and supply wagons,
inflicted countless deaths and injuries and took thousands of prisoners. At Schurz's order,
Krzyzanowski took personal charge of his old regiment, the 58-NY, and the new men of the
26-WI. He thrust out a line of pickets that was soon forced back in by heavy volleys and
cannon fire. The men of the 26-WI and 58-NY, flanked both right and left, likely got off over
forty rounds (in some cases perhaps using up available ammunition) and actually managed to
hold off the rebel assault in this part of the field of battle. Flanked and enfiladed from the right,
their losses were terrible. The 26-WI alone lost 204 men. Yet they held their ground for nearly
twenty minutes before being forced back in, nonetheless, good order, and likely saved a good
portion of XI Corps from annihilation.1127
As these two regiments along with the 82-OH were forced to fall back, they attempted to form
a continuous line with the rest of the division. At this time, Schurz was still attempting to
reposition the division. From right (north) to left, the line he hoped to form would have
consisted of the 26-WI, 58-NY, 82-OH, 82-IL, 157-NY, 119-NY, which was brought up from the
Plank Road, and the 68-NY. The latter was to face west on the south side of the Plank Road,
while the 119-NY, next in line, was to straddle this road. From left to right the entire line,
viewed in the abstract, was about 1,000 yards long. Before the line had been completely
reformed, the mass of fleeing men from Devens' 1st division, along with guns, caissons and
ambulances, horses and mules that had escaped with them, came pouring through the
regiments forming closest to the Plank Road. In the disorganized flight Schurz's other two
regiments earlier deployed in the line (fronting south) along the Turnpike, the 74-PA and 61OH, were swept up. Elements of these two regiments, and men from Devens' division that
could be rallied, formed up behind the line Schurz was attempting to create. With the flow of
refugees now continuous, Schurz still lacked a stable line when the rebel assault hit the
balance of his division.1128

along the front on ground most favorable for its action, especially on the eminence on the right and left of Dowdall's
Tavern. In this position, sweeping the open plains before us with our artillery and musketry, and checking the enemy
with occasional offensive returns, we might have been able to maintain ourselves even against superior forces at
least long enough to give General Hooker time to take measures according to the exigencies of the moment." "Report
of Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz," WR, Ibid, 652, and Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:414-415. Schurz had, in fact, requested,
argued and pleaded with Howard to make a westerly redeployment four times during he course of the day. Ibid, 414,
416-417, 420.
1127For the fight by Krzyzanowski's two regiments, Pula, For Liberty and Justice, 81-85.
1128For the minor changes in deployment effected by Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:418. For the manner in which 3rd

division was hit when attempting to refront west, Butts, Ibid, 48-49.

Chancellorsville (XI)
Attack of Jackson's Corps (II), Schurz's Response (II)
The extreme left of the Confederate line of attack, roughly two of Iverson's regiments
(including the 23-NC) and two belonging to Jones, say 2,250 men, were now in an arc shaped
line contiguous with but largely in advance of the rest of the assaulting force. North of the
Turnpike alone, some 8,000 men in a line of battle now confronted the roughly 3,000 men
Schurz had more or less (stress on the latter) assembled. At the same time as the 26-WI and
58 NY fell back, the unformed divisional line began to gave way on the left. The Confederates
had massed much of their troops, Doles', O'Neil's right and Warren's brigades, on the
Turnpike and were coming down the road hard on the 68-NY and 119-NY. The latter, a new
regiment, stood its ground for twenty minutes, maybe more, and while not being able to fire
immediately for lack of a visible target (the rebels were just coming out of the woods onto the
Hawkins' farm), men of the 119-NY got off twenty to thirty rounds. Similarly, the 68-NY of
Schimmelpfennig's brigade held well. Schimmelpfennig frantically strove to get his other
regiments (especially the 82-IL) into Schurz's line. But overwhelming numbers alone (not to
mention the bravery and enthusiasm of the Confederate troops) soon pushed these troops
back. The rebels were then able to enfilade the regiments, 157-NY, 82-IL and 82-OH, which
were attempting to form up in the center of the line. By this time, Schurz was compelled to
order the various regimental commanders to fall back to the woods bordering the east end of
the Hawkins' farm. The Official Records shows the 3rd division lost 129 men killed and 461
wounded (as well as 290 captured or missing) during the course of the battle of
Chancellorsville. Nearly all those losses occurred during this stretch of 2 May fighting.1129
It was just prior to Schurz's order to fall back, while some of the rearguard remnants of the
shattered regiments to the west were still fleeing east, that Howard rode up with Steinwehr
and several staff officers. All fruitlessly attempted to stem the tied of retreating soldiers.1130
The fight put up by the 3rd division had slowed down the rapid advance of Jackson's corps.
This slowdown allowed the bulk of 3rd Confederate line of assault, largely 1st division forces,
to catch up and take positions immediately in the rear of the first two lines which by now had
become indistinguishable. This infusion represented about 4,800 fresh troops, bringing the
total actual rebel assault force to close to 14,000 men (leaving aside roughly 500 men as
casualties), with Lane's brigade (about 2,000 men) as a column in route back along the
1129At this point in the battle, Bigelow (Ibid, 300) states the Union right had about 5,000 men, about 3,000 of which

were facing west. If Bigelow is correct, and assuming Buschbeck brigade had 1,500 men ("Report of Brig. Gen.
Adolph Steinwehr," WR, Ibid, 646), the remainder, some 500 men, had to have come from the men, rallied by
Schurz's or Steinwehr's officers, who were fleeing east on the Plank Road. For Schimmelpfennig's efforts, Butts, Ibid,
48-51.
The 75-PA, belonging to Krzyzanowski's 2nd brigade and on picket duty about miles south of the Plank Road was
overwhelmed by the forces of the Confederate right-wing as it was finally coming up to the field of battle. Hamlin, Ibid,
72.
For accounts of the 3rd division in the 2 May battle, see the reports first and foremost of Schurz, and those of
Schimmelpfennig, Col. Edward Salmon (82-OH), Lieut. Col. Adolph Hartung (74-PA), Krzyzanowski, and Lieut. Col.
John Lockman (119-NY), WR, Ibid, 647-658 662-663, 663-664, 664-666, 666-668 and 668, respectively; also Hamlin,
Ibid, 69-71. For losses, WR, Ibid, 183. Bigelow (Ibid, 505) indicates all but one XI Corps casualty was incurred on the
evening of 2 May.
1130An amusing anecdote about Howard's arrival on the battlefield is related by Furguson (Ibid, 181-182). While one
Ohio captain, an officer, had Howard "on his horse, in the roadway, as cool as if on parade, ... urging and insisting and
entreating the flying men to go slower," another, this time an enlisted soldier, an "American" in Schurz's division,
recalled Howard screaming, "Halt! Halt! I'm ruined, I'm ruined! I'll shoot if you don't stop. I'm ruined, I'm ruined!" To be
sure, different class perspectives are embedded in these recollections. But there was also a difference, entwined with
that of class, in how men in varying positions in the army's hierarchical organization perceived and understood
Howard. By the time the rout began to unfold, there was nothing Howard, disliked and now demonstrably incompetent
and untrustworthy, could do to impede it.

Turnpike to prevent straggling, and the entirety of the Confederate right-wing (which to this
point had not even gotten into the battle), some 7,300 men in all, rapidly closing on the field of
battle about 400 yards in the rear.1131
While Schurz's division had been frantically endeavoring to front west in a line, Wiedrich's
and, especially, Dilger's artillery also played a major role in slowing the Confederate advance
down. Dilger had gone up the road in the area of the Tally farm to gauge the strength of the
attack. Immediately realizing its magnitude, he returned to his position and brought his entire
battery of six guns off the Plank Road (clearing himself and his men of the possibility of being
swept away by the tide of refugees fleeing down the Turnpike). Allowing for the road to be
cleared of fugitives beyond the Tally home, from this position Dilger's had his six guns begin
firing at the rebel forces about a 1,000 yards west on the Turnpike. Dilger's battery, attached
to the 3rd division, was soon joined by one of the corps reserves, commanded by Capt.
Wallace Hill. Another reserve battery, Wheeler's, opened fire after the 26-WI and 58-NY had
pulled back from the rear of entrenchments north of Howard's headquarters. This battery took
aim at and shelled the rebel left flank as it issued from the woods onto the north end of the
Hawkins' farm. Dilger maintained his position for over a half hour. As the rebels closed in on
him, using the undergrowth to shield themselves, Dilger switched to canister pouring it on the
approaching troops. Hill, meanwhile, having only long range shot, was obliged to pull back. As
Dilger's position became untenable and he was compelled to abandon it (along with one gun),
Wiedrich's battery, attached to Steinwehr's (2nd) division, began firing. Dilger made his
escape, one so narrow rebels soldiers were close enough to order him to surrender. Upon
overtaking his battery at the Dowdall's Tavern entrenchments, and finding no room for his four
remaining guns, he ordered these guns with the men of his battery to the rear. Keeping a
single gun, and having two companies of the 61-OH formed around him, he stood his ground
here at the last line of XI Corps resistance, and when that line broke up, Dilger and his guard
retreated down the Plank Road firing his single piece as they went.1132
As Schurz was pulling his battered regiments back to the eastern edge of the Hawkin's farm,
Steinwehr and Buschbeck were attempting to get the latter's regiments out of their
entrenchments to change directions and front west. Under increasingly heavy fire, including
artillery, all of which was multiplied as the Confederate assault grew in strength, a new line,
known to us as Buschbeck's line, was formed. From the left, south of and resting on the Plank
Road, it consisted of three of the four regiments of Buschbeck's brigade, the 54-NY, 27-PA
and 73-PA. Just north of and resting on the Plank Road was the remaining 2nd division
regiment, the 29-NY, then, in order left to right (north), the remnants of Devens' division which
Schurz, Buschbeck and their officers had rallied, and what remained of the 82-IL, 82-OH, 58NY and 26-OH. The 157-NY was deployed in the rear of the 82-IL. It was about 6:30 pm when
this final line took shape, so it had taken Jackson an hour to come less than a 1 mile down
the Turnpike onto the Plank Road and through the Wilderness woods - no doubt, a sure
1131For a judgment on Schurz's effectiveness (other than Schurz's), Osborn, Trials and Triumphs, 72.

The Confederate right wing consisted in Colquitt's and Ramseur's brigades, Paxton's and McGowan's, and four
regiments of Stuart's cavalry. This wing had not played any role in the battle to date because Colquitt, whose brigade,
recall, was initially in the first line, grievously erred in mistaking a determined group of pickets (from the 55-OH led by
Capt. Charles Robbins) and a squadron of cavalry for a wing of the Union army advancing from Welford's Furnace.
He ordered his brigade to turn and face south. This maneuver held up Ramseur's brigade, which was in Colquitt's
rear as his support, as well as the Paxton's detached on the Plank Road, the four regiments of cavalry in his vicinity,
and McGowan's brigade which had been bringing the rear of the entire II Corps column. See Osborn, Ibid, 68 and
Hamlin, Ibid, 68, 145-146. The position of the Confederate right wing at this time is given in Bigelow, Ibid, map 20
(facing 304) and Hamlin, Ibid, map 6 (following 182).
1132The account of Dilger, a man (like many literally thousands of others among the XI Corps) whose courage,
steadfastness and effectiveness under murderous fire would have borne relating in the face of the national outbreak
of abuse that unfolded in the days that followed, is drawn from Hamlin, Ibid, 70-73 and Butts, Ibid, 52.

indication that there had been no XI Corps resistance. Buschbeck's line, a mere thousand
yards in length, held no more than 4,500 men and officers. It was no match for the 14,000
rebels (excluding Lane's brigade and the 7,300 men of the right wing) that now confronted it.
Still the line, along a series of shallow entrenchments that Barlow's brigade had dug before its
departure, held for twenty minutes before an orderly retreat of all XI Corps was undertaken.
The residue regiments retreated, firing as they went, relatively unmolested. They reformed
again, or attempted to, in the vicinity of the western flank of what had once been XII Corps
positions (before being drawn out to support Sickles). Buschbeck's regiments, covered by
Dilger (accompanied by Schurz and the two companies of the 61-OH), halted about a mile
east at the log and earthen fortified trenches ("Log Works") constructed by Williams' (1st)
division of XII Corps on the night of 1-2 May. Using these well-constructed entrenchments
Buschbeck intended to further impede the rebel advance, but was ordered to move on by one
of Hooker's staff officers. The organized remnant of Schurz's 3rd division, having come
through the woods, was slower arriving at the Log Works than Buschbeck's troops who had
come down the Plank Road. Finding no one there, he ordered his men to proceed
northeasterly along the Bullock road. Schurz's troops moved up this road mile where they
halted and turned to reform and fight. Buschbeck's brigade reached the area in front of a
narrow bank of swamp that ran north-south in an open field known as Fairview on the
Chancellor's farm. On the Fairview heights just in his rear, Capt. Best (XII Corps) was
deploying his ten pieces along with the four pieces Dilger had sent back. (Dilger arrived there
shortly and rejoined his battery). Here, he stopped his troops and fronted west. South of
Buschbeck on his left, Williams' 1st division (XII Corps) would soon take up position. To
Buschbeck's right (north) and rear, between and behind his brigade and Schurz's division on
the Bullock Road, Berry's 3rd division (II Corps) was moving up. By 7:45 pm, the entire Union
right consisted of about 1,000 men under Buschbeck, together with some 150 men of
McLean's brigade under Col John Lee, another 150 men of the 33-MA who had been on
detached picket duty, and perhaps 700-1,200 other XI Corps men - a regimental potpourri of
the 17-CT, 74-PA, 61-OH and other men of the 1st and 2nd divisions who had nonetheless
rallied. Connecting on their extreme right, 1,200-1,500 men remaining from Schurz's division
faced (south)west on the Bullock Road. Until William's on Buschbeck's left and Berry on his
right began to establish themselves around 8 pm, these roughly 3,200 to 4,000 men were all
that stood in the way of a further Confederate II Corps advance on Hooker's headquarters,
just 2,000 yards in front of the rebel forward most forces. And that 2,000 yards was open,
since Schurz's forces guarding the rear road to Hooker's headquarters, were the single, sole
deployment, that stood in the way. Hooker's "superb generalship" by way of "reinforcing" the
scattered XI Corps would have saved him nothing.1133
The rebel attack had, however, just about played itself out. Within 300-400 yards of the
(nearly) abandoned Log Works, Rodes and Colston, responsible for the 1st and 2nd divisions
of Jacksons corps respectively, persuaded Jackson to call a halt in order to reform lines that
had become entangled and indistinguishable. Rodes and Colston then argued that their men,
1133For the effectiveness of Buschbeck's stand, Osborn, Ibid. Hamlin (Ibid, 74) say between 4,000 and 5,000 men

were formed into Buschbeck's line, while Bigelow (Ibid, 304) estimates it as 4,000; for the line of retreat of
Buschbeck's and Schurz's troops, Hamlin, Ibid, 77, 148-149, and Bigelow, Ibid, 308. Men rallied and officers gathered
them together all during the early morning hours of 3 May. For example, F.O. Fritsch relates that between 3 am and 6
am he assembled about 500 men of Schimmelpfennig's brigade between Best's battery on Fairview Heights and a
rally point of east of Chancellor's. Butts, Ibid, 55-56.
For the halt of Buschbeck's, Schurz's and the balance of the XI Corps troops, as well as their numbers, Hamlin, Ibid,
77-78, also Bigelow sketch 3, Ibid, facing 312.
The New York Times, in a lengthy 5 May 1863 account of the battle, declared, "that he [Jackson] partially
succeeded ... was ... owing ... to the superb generalship of Hooker, who promptly threw reinforcements on our right to
stop the enemy advance'" (emphasis in original). See section XIII, below.

suffering now from the long march without food during the day, from the rigors of the assault
(the run, climbs up and down though gullies and ravines, the catbriers) and from Yankee
resistance, were exhausted and could go no further. Against his better judgment, Jackson
consented. To reform, the lines of his corps were not only straightened out and different units
disentangled, but the lines themselves were reorganized and repositioned. Trimble's (4th)
division, commanded by Colston and originally forming the second line, was disentangled
from the first line. D.H. Hill's (1st) division, commanded by Rodes and forming the first line at
the onset of the attack, was moved to the rear (third line). Fresh troops from Heth's (2nd)
division, including Archer's and McGowan's brigades, were brought up into the first line. It was
Lane's brigade, now just south of the Plank Road in the first line, that occupied a portion of the
Log Works around 8 pm. It was here that the advanced force of the rebel corps stopped for
the evening, because Jackson, now preparing for a night attack, was wounded by his own
troops on a reconnaissance out front and was no longer in command.1134
Chancellorsville (XII)
Dereliction of Duty in the Union Army
The disarray of XI Corps' 1st division on the right flank of the Army of the Potomac was not the
only place of confusion during the evening of 2 May. There were several other incidents after
darkness had settled in and during the next day's battle. Sickles' III Corps and Slocum's XII
Corps appeared to be involved, one or the other, or both of them.
At 6:10 pm, Sickles received a dispatch from an aide of Howard indicating that XI Corps was
under attack from the Union army right. Busied in following up the rebel "retreat" toward
Gordonsville, he refused to believe it. A few minutes later, another aide, this one from
Hooker's staff, rode up with the same message. Sickles instructed his attached cavalry officer,
Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, to dispatch a regiment (8-PA commanded by Major Pennock
Huey) to assist Howard. (Huey's troopers were of no assistance since they ran right smack
into the main Confederate body on the Plank Road and, in taking heavy casualties, were
scattered in their escape.) Birney's 1st division and Wipple's 3rd division (III Corps) were
ordered to pull back to Hazel Grove, and Williams' 1st division (XII Corps) was directed to
return to the Log Works, though these instructions from their respective corps commanders,
Sickles and Slocum, did not reach either until approximately 7 pm. This movement, by the
way, cut Barlow, who appears to have been curiously forgotten, off from any connection with
the force that had been assembled under Sickles earlier in the day.1135
Sickles was now uncertain of his next move. He sent a staff member to Hooker for
instructions. This officer, one Lt. Col. Hart, returned around 9 pm with orders to hold Hazel
Grove. The aide was send back to Hooker to relate to him that a part of Whipple's munitions
train, containing some 70,000 rounds and caissons for his artillery and cannon, rested in
woods (occupied by rebels) to the north, between the Grove and the Plank Road. To regain
his armaments, as well as reassume his position along the Turnpike, Sickles suggested to
Hooker a night attack. According to Sickles, Hooker's orders were relayed to him by Lt. Col.
Hart. But neither Berry and Williams (XII Corps divisional commanders on the line northwest
of Hazel Grove), nor their (corps) commander (Slocum) ever received the orders. The orders,
again according to Sickles, called for him to retake the old III Corps positions on the Plank
Road. This action, undertaken by Birney's 2nd and 3rd brigades, generated a great deal of
1134Bigelow, Ibid, plan 3 (facing 344), for the realignment of Jacksons corps troops during the late evening of 2 May -

early morning 3 May; for Jackson's objective in contradistinction to the stop for realignment , Hamlin, Ibid, 79-80.
1135For Sickles' unwillingness to accept that a large rebel force had attacked the Union right (since he was engaged
in pursuing a retreat of the same toward Gordonsville), Bigelow, Ibid, 301; for instructions to the various commands
under Sickles to withdraw, Ibid, 305, 307.

confusion as one of the regiment (3-WI) of Ruger's brigade, in the left of Williams' divisional
line, opened fire on others. The 3-MI, 5-MI and 1-NY in Col. Samuel Hayman's 3rd brigade
(Birney's division) all absorbed losses as a result. The 3-WI had itself been fired into by the
13-NJ, a XII Corps regiment (Ruger's brigade) in the rear of the Wisconsin regiment. The 13NJ, in turn, fled, while the confusion in the ranks of Birney's two brigades produced a panicked
retreat back to Hazel Grove. Casualties there were, yet Sickles, no doubt feeling justified,
regained his munitions train and was able to connect with Slocum on the latter's left. As the
munitions train, rations-carrying mules, caissons, artillery and the last of the designated
regiments of Sickles corps to leave Hazel Grove were departing - about 8:30 am the next
morning (3 May), a portion of the right wing of the reformed Confederate line came sweeping
down toward the Grove (see Map 16). Another panic ensued. Among the regiments in retreat,
the 114-PA came scrambling through the front line with less than half its number in rebel
forces in pursuit. Efforts to halt this panic were fruitless.1136
As the fighting on the early morning (about 6 am) of 3 May opened with an advance of Lane's
brigade in the first line of Jacksons corps, incidents of panics, unauthorized retreats and
withdrawals among Union soldiers and officers multiplied. The 3-MD, a new regiment (2nd
brigade, 1st division) holding the center for XII Corps, hastily gave way. The fight deserted by
the Maryland regiment was declined by the 115- PA. To the right, Pender's brigade moved
against the extreme left held on the Plank Road by the 1-MA of Berry's 2nd division (III
Corps). As Pender's forces crossed near the road, Col. Robert McAllister refused to bring his
regiment, the 11-NJ, to the Massachusetts regiment's aid. To the left, south of the Plank Road,
Knipe's (1st) brigade (William's division, XII Corps) was crippled as Lt. Col. James Betts of the
46-PA marched this regiment and companies of the 5-CT and 128-PA off without orders or
authority to the crossing at United States Ford where Provost-Marshal-General Marsena
Patrick placed them under arrest. Maj. Gen. Hiram Berry, commanding III Corps' 2nd division,
was shot and killed early that morning. His command fell upon Brig. Gen. Joseph Carr;
however, 2nd brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Joseph Revere assumed this was his
responsibility. He, under this self-legitimizing assumption, marched his brigade as well as a
portion of the 1st (brigade), nine full regiments in all, off the field to United States Ford. Revere
later declared his action was motivated by the need to reorganize his troops, resupply them
with ammunition and rations, and to stop stragglers! About 9 am, in the rear with Hancock's
division (II Corps), Hooker's artillery chief, Charles Morgan, went to United States Ford to
bring up some of the guns Hooker had so foolishly sent to the rear. Capt. Puttkammer's 11-NY
battery (3 division, III Corps), under its commander's order, refused to come forward. After 9
am, on the left among III Corps forces Col. Louis Francine, commanding the 7-NJ (3rd
brigade, 2nd division), left the field after being advised by the brigade surgeon to personally
do so. He also split the brigade taking more than half the soldiers, 400 men, with him. About
9:15 in the same area of the battlefield, Lt. Col. Charles Merrill, commanding the 17-ME, took
a portion of his regiment off the field to the River after Hayman's brigade to which Merrill's
troops were assigned withdrew to reform. In an altogether different area, at Fredericksburg
shortly after 10 am on the same morning (3 May), about 100 soldiers of the 20-NY of Thomas
Neil's 3rd brigade (2nd division, VI Corps) refused to make the assault on the Marye's Heights
on the grounds that their terms of enlistment had expired.1137
1136For the loss munitions and suggestion of a night attack, Ibid, 313 and Sickles own account, WR, Ibid, 389. For

the confused fighting and loses, Bigelow, Ibid, 325-327 and Hamlin, Ibid, 152-154; for the 114-PA, Bigelow, Ibid, 357,
Catton, Glory Road, 194 and "Report of Brig. Gen. Joseph Knipe [1st brigade, 1st division, XII Corps], WR, Ibid, 687688.
1137For these flights, Bigelow, Ibid, 349 (3-MD, 115-PA), 350 (11-NY), 351 n. 2 (46-PA, 5-CT, 128-PA), 355 (Revere's
action), 359 (11-NY battery), 361 (7-NY, 17-ME), 392, n. 1 and 414 (20-NY).

With the exceptions of Puttkammer and the 20-NY, none of the troops described in the
foregoing panics and retreats were "German." Yet the unauthorized withdrawals led, in our
view, to the effective collapse of the Union right opposite Jackson's corps on 3 May. General
Revere was court-martialed and acquitted of charges of "misbehavior before the enemy and
neglect of duty" before a tribunal conducted by Hooker. On the other hand, he was found
guilty of behavior that prejudiced "good order and military discipline." He was dismissed, but
Lincoln, having originally approved the dismissal, revoked the sentence and allowed Revere
to tenure his resignation. As Bigelow comments, Lincoln simply could not let the sentence
stand without similarly ordering the court-martial of the numerous other cases of indiscipline
and unauthorized retreat. German speaking soldiers as naturalized Americans of central
European descent and as soldiers (as opposed to officers) were, however, treated differently:
The hundred or so men in the 20-NY were court-martialed, found guilty and sentence to hard
labor for the duration of the war with forfeiture of all wages and other compensation due them.
There, moreover, was no appeal from this sentence. Hooker's faux pas likely doomed the
Army; Howard's doomed XI Corps, and Devens' the 1st division of the corps. III Corps'
offenses, and those of XII Corps' particularly, were just as egregious as those of XI Corps'. Yet
it was the latter, especially its German speaking soldiery, on which the entirety of blame was
heaped for the defeat at Chancellorsville.1138
Chancellorsville (XIII)
Newspaper Accounts Malign XI Corps
On 5 May, major big city newspapers began to carry detailed accounts of the Chancellorsville
battle(s). We shall reproduce a portion of one, that of the New York Times, because it
instructively suggested who would be held responsible for the Chancellorsville outcome, and
how the recent battlefield events were to be understood in the North.
That he [Jackson] partially succeeded in turning our flank was not owing to the conduct of the
Eleventh Army Corps, which was disgraceful, but to the superb generalship of Hooker, who
promptly threw reinforcements on our right to stop the enemy advance.
[There were, accordingly, two options open to the rebels, to] abandon their positions and ...
make good their retreat to Gordonsville - the only way left them, as Fredericksburg has been
abandoned, and their lines of communication with Richmond in ... all probability by this time cut
- or they will remain here and give us battle.
[The enemy will be compelled, thereby,] to fight us on ground of our choosing.
[Jackson's corps] made a desperate dash on our right flank ... This corps [XI] ... consists in
great part of German troops. Without waiting for a single volley from the rebels, this corps
disgracefully abandoned their position from behind their breastworks, and commenced coming,
panic stricken, down the road toward headquarters. Our right was thus completely turned, and
the rebels in the fair way of doubling us up. ...
It was a terribly animated scene ... through the dusk of nightfall a rushing whirlwind of men and
artillery swept over the plain. The shattered, fleeing columns of men were rushing down and
over us at headquarters.
It was a critical situation, and brought out the superb resources of Hooker. [Relates Hooker's
alleged redeployments on the right at this hour, about 7 pm, 2 May, and concludes]
The successful check of the advancing sea is in no small degree owing to the indomitable
energy of the gallant commander.
Winkler made a cynical remark to his wife that well encapsulated the fear-of-a-fight-based-caution revealed by the
actual practice of the bulk of the Army of the Potomac's officers' corps: Winkler speculated that the army would have
been unbeatable if arrangements for an attack on the night of 3-4 May had been made and made with "the same care
and assiduity that arrangements for our retreat were made, and every general and officer had made it his task by
cheerful words and cheerful mien to inspire his men with confidence..." Hitz (ed), Winkler Letters, 56 (17 May).
1138For Revere, Ibid, 355, n. 2, and for the 20-NY, Ibid, 392, n. 1.

While this is going on, the panic-stricken Dutchmen are sweeping past us, and round by
headquarters into the road leading to United States Ford. Many members of the Staff of Gen.
Hooker and other general officers place themselves in the road, and with draw sabres smote
and slashed the cowardly retreating rascals. It was all in vain, however. The road for two or
three miles down toward United States Ford is now crowded with their shattered fragments ...
As to the loss sustained by this corps, either in killed or captured it could not have been great they ran too fast for that...
What makes this retreat not only disgraceful, but well-nigh disastrous, is that it completely foiled
a splendid maneuver, which Gen. Sickles with his corps was engaged in executing. He had
gone in on a branch road leading off from the main pike, pierced the enemy's centre, penetrated
it for a mile, cut them in two, and would have secured the key to victory, when the turning of
Howard's position compelled him to make good his retreat. ...1139

The article, signed by one L.L. Crounse, was obviously written from Hooker's headquarters
and might as well have been dictated by Hooker himself, or, which is most likely, by one (or
more) of his staff officers. It was just as obviously penned later in the evening of 2 May, that is,
prior to the moment at which the realization that all Hooker's iron had melted away became
inescapable. The article is characterized by a polarization, by a false antithesis between the
craven, unmanly behavior of the "Dutchmen" of XI Corps and the commanding general's
genius (with a deep bow to Sickles for good measure). This article, moreover, did not differ in
any respect from any other article published elsewhere in regard to its characterization of the
behavior of XI Corps' German speaking soldiers and its assignment to them of responsibility
for the defeat at Chancellorsville.1140
Chancellorsville (XIV)
Command Failures
[Hooker]
Hooker, in fact, made a series of decisions - none of which demonstrated a superior grasp of
unfolding events, nor quick and resolute selection and implementation of a proper course of
1139New York Times, 3 May 1863, 1, 8.
1140"Every newspaper that fell into our hands told the world a frightful story of the unexampled misconduct of the

Eleventh Corps; how the 'cowardly Dutchmen' of the corps had thrown down their arms and fled at the first fire of the
enemy; how my division, represented as first attacked, had led in the disgraceful flight without firing a shot; how these
cowardly 'Dutch' like a herd of frightened sheep, had overrun the whole battlefield and come near stampeding other
brigades or divisions; how large crowds of 'Eleventh Corps Dutchmen' ran to United States Ford, tried to get away
across the bridges, and were driven back by the provost guard stationed there; and how, in short, the whole failure of
the Army of the Potomac was owing to the scandalous poltroonery of the Eleventh Corps. I was thunderstruck. We
procured whatever newspapers we could obtain - papers from New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston,
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee - the same story everywhere." Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:432-433. See
the similar response by Winkler, Hitz (ed), Winkler Letters, 54-55 (14 May). Winkler also cited a New York Herald
article that, "gives a sketch of what is pretended to be our position at Chancellorsville, but it is all wrong. The roads
are wrongs [sic], the woods are wrong, and the position of our troops is grossly wrong. If our position had been as
there represented, we have been better off; in fact, it would have been stronger, it presents our front instead of our
right flank to the enemy. This sketch is just like the correspondence we read, the predication of an eye witness." Ibid,
58-59 (20 May).
"... [After] reading the account of the disgraceful manner in which the Germans acted who composed a part of
Eleventh Corps. But they spoke in high terms of McLeans Brigade and [Sidney] Burbanks. They stated those stood
manfully against Jacksons whole force and fought them until they were overpowered by numbers and then fell back in
good order fighting as they went. The papers did blame any but the Germans." Ladley Letters, 125 (13 May 1863 mother to Ladley).
"Every paper that has anything in it about the 11th Corps speakes in the highest terms of McLean's and Burbank's
Brigades."
"The papers blame the Dutch but praise the Ohio boys. ... But the Ohio boys are not blamed at all." Ibid, 125-126, 133
(14 May 1863 - brother to Ladley, and 24 May 1863 - brother to Ladley).

action, which if persistently and animatedly pursued would have added up to domination of the
situation - that were fateful inasmuch as they decided the outcome of the battle.
First, prior even to the movement around Lee's army, he had separated from his army for
detached duty the one reliable and swift force, his cavalry, capable not only of detecting
Jackson's flanking movement but of providing him with prompt information in adequate time to
effect counter measures. Second, on 1 May he gave up the initiative by going on the
defensive and allowing Lee, with his much smaller forces, to dictate the place and tempo of
battle. Third, on the morning of 2 May, he give up an opportunity to favorably force a battle by
instructing Sickles to cautiously move south of Hazel Grove with inadequate numbers of
troops. Fourth, early in the afternoon of 2 May he stripped Howard of Barlow's brigade, the
largest in XI Corps, its only effective reserve. Fifth, late in the afternoon of 2 May, far too late
in the day, he abandoned an earlier insight into the nature of the rebel movement on the right
and committed troops to the chase of Jackson's artillery train, thereby isolating the right wing
of his army by opening an enormous gap in his defensive line. This much we have already
seen.
Hooker also committed further errors of judgment, which cumulatively sealed the fate of the
Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville. Sixth, on the morning of 3 May Hooker ordered the
removal of the remaining two regiments, and, in particular, the artillery, from Hazel Grove.
Confederate forces immediately seized these heights, and used this newly achieved position
to enfilade, with devastating consequences, the forward line of his army fronting west on the
Plank Road. Seventh, Hooker had de facto demoted General Henry Hunt, Union chief of
artillery, by stripping him of his command of troops and over artillery, reducing him to a purely
administrative functionary. Thus, on that pre-dawn of the same morning (3 May) with no
experienced soldier to post and position artillery on the battlefield, Hooker himself send a
whopping total of forty guns to the rear (United States Ford), some apparently for no reason
and others to be refitted. Consequently, while the Army of the Potomac had 246 artillery
pieces between Fairview and United States Ford on 3 May, during the course of the fighting
on that day the Union line on the actual field of battle had less guns than the Confederates,
whose artillery number 132 pieces. During the course of that day, pieces of artillery were
recalled, and that evening Hunt was reinstalled in the position he held prior to the campaign.
Eighth, Hooker indecisively and irresponsibility relied on the much smaller VI Corps to do what
he himself would not with three times the forces (75,500 to 24,000) do, namely, assume the
offensive against the Confederate army, then, having presented (VI Corps commander)
Sedgwick with contradictory directives, that in part secured the latter's failure, he pettily,
meanly and weakly shifted the blame to Sedgwick for his failures. Ninth and last, Hooker,
being done in and demoralized by the consequences of his own misjudgments, ordered a final
retreat back across the Rappahannock just as Lee, in the supreme irony in the campaign, was
about to oblige him by attacking the Union army, some 75,000 strong situated on a ground of
its own choosing, with an army of 25,500 men.1141

1141Just before his death, Thomas Jackson commented on Hooker's campaign design: "It was in the main a good

conception, an excellent plan. But he should not have sent away his cavalry; that was his great blunder. It was that
which enabled me to turn him without his being aware of it, and to take him in the rear." Cited by F.G.R. Henderson,
Stonewarll Jackson and the American Civil War, II, 468.
For Hooker's abandonment of crucial Hazel Grove, Bigelow, Ibid, 345, 348; for Hooker's treatment of Hunt, and
mishandling of artillery and its consequences, Ibid, 45, 343, 359, 368, 403; for Sedgwick and the craven instructions
to have VI Corps to bail him (Hooker) out, Ibid, 402, 407, 420, 473, 477; and for the recrossing the Rappahannock as
Lee was getting set to order an attack. Ibid, 442.

[Howard]
What of Howard? Howard blamed his troops. In his report, while noting that both 3rd division
brigades, Schimmelpfennig's and Krzyzanowski's respectively, held well, he pointed to "a blind
panic and great confusion" "at the center and near the Plank road." He specifically cited three
reasons for "this disaster to my corps." First, the density of the woods which prevented his
patrols, reconnaissances [and] ... scouts" from determining the "exact whereabouts" of the
enemy. This was an outright lie. Second, the disaster was accounted for in terms of "the panic
produced by the enemy's reverse fire, regiments and artillery" that were "thrown suddenly
upon those in position." Here Howard, to escape his own culpability, stripped deployment of its
context. The men were fronted south, hemmed in and unable to change direction under fire.
Howard was forewarned of this consequence, as well as the real possibility of attack from the
west. He ignored the latter and failed to take account of the former. But not a word of any of
this. Third, Howard states, correctly, that the absence of Barlow's brigade left him without an
effective reserve. He says nothing of his failure to contest the order to remove this, his largest
brigade, since he was fully, foolishly and stubbornly committed, against sound evidence,
analysis and logic to the contrary, to the action that resulted in pulling Barlow's brigade from
its XI Corps deployment. Howard knew, or should have known, that this brigade, his reserve,
was his only line of defense against a flank attack, that it was well positioned, that it protected
his reserve artillery, which itself had it not been rendered useless by Barlow's absence might
have (in conjunction with that brigade) delayed the Confederate flank assault until darkness
(and therewith, perhaps permanently).1142
Howard, as commanding officer no less, would accept no responsibility for the "disaster" of 2
May. He left his men out to hang in the wind and dry. The abuse, the burden of falsely
assessed culpability, the ordeal that these men might suffer as a consequences, all were no
account to this godly man, the Christian soldier. The rationalizations must have been, at least
at first, difficult, the latent guilt intense. Yet the affect of a received tradition would over time
work wonders. Maybe Howard even came to believe his assessment. We wonder if he
suffered at all: Twenty-three years later, as Schurz noted, in an article on XI Corps at
Chancellorsville for Century Magazine's "War Series," he still suggested his troops and not
their commander, bore responsibility.1143
[Sickles, et aliia: Elements of a Cover-up]
What of the other commanders on the field of battle that (and the following) day? In retrospect,
Sickles' persistent requests for more, then more troops, those of Howard and Slocum, were a
recipe for disaster. Moreover, the performance of his troops, e.g., 114-PA, and particularly his
officers, especially Brig. Gen. Joseph Revere, Col. Robert McAllister (11-NJ), Col. Louis
Francine (7-NJ) and Lt. Col. Charles Merrill (17-ME), was minimally reprehensible and
bordered on dereliction of duty. The same could and should have been said for officers and
regiments under Slocum's command, Col. James Betts (46-PA) and the 115 PA, 5-CT and
128-PA.
1142Hartwell Osborn (Trials and Triumphs, 67-68) wrote: "This removal of Barlow's brigade by request of Sickles and

by order of Hooker was one of the worst blunders of that fateful day. It not only deprived the Eleventh Corps of a
strong brigade, well commanded, located, and fortified in a position to meet an attack form the west and north, but it
made the whole force of reserve artillery comparatively useless. Had all the guns of this splendid artillery enjoyed ...
infantry support ... they would, in all probability, have held the enemy in check till night. This at least has been the
conviction of many officers of the Eleventh Corps."
1143For Howard, WR, Ibid, 630, and Schurz's analysis (similar to ours), Ibid, 439; for the Century Magazine article,
Ibid, 439-440. Thereafter, Howard lost the confidence of even those men and officers who were at first willing to give
him a try, Hitz (ed), Winkler Letters, 52 (11 May).

Had their behavior been recognized for what it was, these men, as well as other specific
individuals under their respective commands - Devens and Birney (field officers under Howard
and Sickles) and Butterfield and Warren (staff officers under Hooker), would all have been be
greeted with reproach, scorn and a range of limitations all the way to foreclosure on career
advance. So a cover-up was inaugurated.
Sickles and his officers worked up fantastic reports of their exploits. Alfred Pleasanton,
brigadier general of cavalry, collaborated these reports with a truly incredible, long since
discredited account - one often reproduced in the early literature on the war, of action he
directed at Hazel Grove that saved the whole Army of the Potomac. Later at the Joint
Committee on the Conduct of the War in February-March 1864 hearings, these men, hiding
their own failures, and others, such as Sickles, Ablion and Doubleday, with axes to grind
(against Meade at Gettysburg), all testified that Hooker was not responsible for the defeat at
Chancellorsville. In testimony at the same hearings, Hooker himself claimed only the XI Corps
had been dishonored while he shifted culpability for the defeat to Sedgwick. Warren merciless
and mendaciously assailed the XI Corps. The Committee, in turn, blamed (the "Germans" in)
XI Corps. Benjamin Wade, writing an introductory summary to the report, noted four causes of
the defeat at Chancellorsville. He listed the "stampede of the 11th corps on the 1st [sic] of
May" as first among those causes. Hooker, on the other hand, was thereby exonerated.
Hooker, opportunist that he was, had, it might be recalled, the savvy to make a sudden
conversion and become an "abolitionist general" after Lincoln announced his intent to issue
his Emancipation decree (22 September 1862). Thus, he had had the foresight to save
himself (and his career) from the wrath of radical Republicans in the event that such a
situation as this one actually came to pass.1144
Chancellorsville (XV)
XI Corps Defenses Itself
[Transcendent Reason for Scapegoating XI Corps]
Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz, as the highest ranking "German" inside the "German corps" and the
de facto leader among the German speaking troops of XI Corps, also submitted a report. In it,
he related the 2 May events on the Union right from the standpoint of an officer who saw what
was coming and who tried to get his commander to make the deployments needed to stem a
Confederate assault. In merely ideally reproducing the events as they unfolded (Schurz
illustrated the report with not just the occasional single diagram, but with three), his report was
1144For Pleasonton's fairy tale, WR, Ibid, 774-775, his debunking and the history of its reproduction in Civil War

literature, Hamlin, Ibid, 85-91, also Catton, Ibid, 189; at the time, Brig. Gen. Gouveneur K. Warren was chief of
topographical engineers attached to Hooker's staff.
For Benjamin Wade's summation, Report, Part I, XLIX. In testimony, Hooker stated, "I said that Chancellorsville has
been called a disaster. ... In my opinion there is nothing to regret in regard to Chancellorsville ... The troops lost no
honor, except in one corps..." In response to a question by Sen. Ben Wade ("In your judgment ... what would have
been the result at Chancellorsville had the 11th corps not broken, but stood their ground reasonably well?"), Hooker
said, "I never entertained a doubt on that subject. I not only expected a victory, but I expected to get that [Lee's] whole
army." In the next breath, however, he assigned the defeat to Sedgwick. Wade asked if anything prevented Sedgwick
from carrying out Hooker's orders, and Hooker responded "nothing." He elaborated, his "impression was that Lee
would have been compelled to move out on the same road that Jackson had moved on, and pass over to my right ...
When I gave the order to General Sedgwick I expected that Lee would be whipped by manoeuvre. ..." Hooker went
on to ascribe to Sedgwick a delay in implementing his order to attack - on the Union left just west of Fredericksburg, a
delay - that allowed the rebels to concentrate, attack and cost the Union forces a victory. Ibid, 144, 145, 146.
For Warren's testimony, Ibid, 43-50. Warren admitted that XI Corps was attacked "by a very superior force[,]" yet
suggested, "There was no resistance made to speak of by their infantry at all." "Having allowed the corps
ambulances, ammunition and pack-mule trains and beef cattle to come up on the line, horse, mule and cow started
the panic as the fighting began." Ibid, 45.
For the other related appearances before the Committee, Ibid.

critical of Howard, and removed the onus of blame from XI Corps soldiery, particularly the
"German regiments." Schurz knew this. So did everyone who read it. It was suppressed. He
wrote letters to Hooker and to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, to have it published.
Hooker refused, stating that, he "hope[d] soon to be able to transmit all the reports of the
recent battles," but noted until then he could not "approve of the publication of an isolated
report." Stanton, and the Lincoln Administration of which his War Department was the military
arm, could ill-afford the popular and political consequences of another failed campaign.
Perhaps, the Republican party-controlled government, the party willing to conduct the war to
the last man and last dollar, might begin to totter if another one of its generals, as well as
leading corps commanders, were tried and proved incompetent in the court of public opinion.
(The first and second Bull Runs, the Seven Days, an indecisive Antietam, then Fredericksburg
and now Chancellorsville. So much blood spilt. Meaninglessly? Needlessly?? If the rebels
couldn't be beaten, if the rebellion was still alive, someone had to pay. ...) Stanton referred
Schurz's request to Halleck, Lincoln's "general-in-chief." Halleck, like Stanton a nativist, hid his
distaste for the "Dutch," and simultaneously derailed publication of Schurz's report in his
typically bureaucratic (and procedurally correct) manner: "Publication of partial reports not
approved till the general commanding has time to make his report" (emphasis added). Hooker
never filed a report. As long as the commanding general's report did not appear, the
falsifications, mystification and cover-up that came to form the received and accepted tradition
would stand without challenge. Responsibility for the "collapse" of XI Corps on the right, 2
May, was never formally assessed. So much blood spilt, so many dead or crippled.
Meaninglessly? Needlessly?? If the rebels couldn't be beaten, if the rebellion was still alive,
someone had to pay: Popular abuse and vilification of XI Corps' "Dutchmen" continued
unabated.1145
[Issue Buried]
With the publication of the War of the Rebellion. Official Records, Schurz's report was finally
publicly available (although more than two-thirds of the XI Corps reports disappeared and
have never been published). Commencement of publication began in 1880. Though Series 1,
Volume 25, Part I, containing the reports on Chancellorsville, was not published until 1889. By
the time of its issuance, the class and ethnic structure of American society had undergone
marked transformation. Racism, of course, remained: It had been secured through the political
settlement (1876) that had returned "home rule" to a regional, no longer national, southern
ruling class, one that in the following years undertook to legislatively institutionalize racial
apartheid and legal segregation. Ethnic bigotry too remained woven into the fabric of
American society. But it was not longer the "Dutch," but the "I-tal-ens" as well as nonAnglo,
southeastern European peoples who offended nativists. German communities in the United
States had been largely assimilated into the middle strata or as skilled elements in the
American working classes (a change that Schurz himself, ironically, played no small role in
bringing about). Prior to the publication of the reports on Chancellorsville, moreover, most of
the principals involved were dead. Stanton died in 1869, Halleck in 1872, Hooker in 1879 and
Warren in 1882. Among the beneficiaries of the suppression of Schurz's - among other reports, Lincoln was assassinated in 1864, Slocum died in 1892 and Butterfield in 1901.
Among the non-West Point, politically appointed generals all, expect Birney, had extended
political careers after the war. Sickles, a conspirator if you will, had the political clout to deflect
any criticism that might come his way. He died in 1914, Devens in 1891 and Barlow in 1896.
Among those directly implicated in the cover-up only Howard lived long enough, dying in
1145For Schurz's report and his letters requesting its publication and the responses, WR, Ibid, 647-661.

1909, to have to confront his own perfidy. Until the end of his life he repeated his view - the
rudiments which he had spelt out in his 1863 report.1146
And what about (the German speaking element of) XI Corps?
Chancellorsville (XVI)
Assessing Actual Responsibility of XI Corps
Of the 12,977 effectives in XI Corps at the outset of the battle, there were, according to the
official tallies, 2,412 men killed, wounded, captured or missing during the campaign. Bigelow
maintains that only one of these casualties was incurred after (none before) 2 May. If Barlow's
brigade consisted in 2,950 men all absent from the fight on 2 May; if we allow (and likely
understate in so doing) roughly 90 men as staff officers and escort attached to Howard as
corps commander; and if 4,000-5,000 men either stayed with the regiments commanded by
Schurz and Buschbeck or were rallied by them at the final line (established just after 8:30 pm
along a north-south line from the Bullock Road to a point somewhat below the Turnpike); then
the remaining, roughly speaking, 2,500-3,500 were, so it would seem, the wild-eyed, panicstricken cowardly "Dutchmen" who threw their arms down and fled east on the Plank Road,
past the Chancellor's house (Hooker's headquarters), onto the Mineral Springs Road and then
onto United State Ford where, seeking the safety of the other side of the Rappahannock, they
were stopped and put under arrest by Gen. Patrick's provost marshals.1147
The first noteworthy point is that the confusion, and panic if that what it was, that followed the
initial rebel contact with the extreme right of XI Corps was "brought on by the non-combatants
- a considerable [unarmed] army composed of attendants, servants, the ambulance corps
[including teamsters, musicians, drummer-boys and stretcher-bearers], with vehicles, animals,
etc. - all looking for places of safety from the flying missiles."1148
The second point to note is that an indeterminate number of German speaking men who had
actually fled down the Plank Road were rallied, not by Schurz or Buschbeck, but in their rear
by commanders in regiments belonging to other corps. 1149 These men obviously never made
it to the river.
The third point is after the battle armament tallies showed Gilsa's brigade was missing only
seventeen muskets while Schimmelpfennig's missing only fifteen. This was less than the
mean in cases of fierce, large-scale fighting.1150
The fourth point is that men who fled and continued to flee past the Buschbeck line were not
exclusively "German." Quite possibly very few were. The XI Corps was not "German" since
only about one-third the troops were German born. That, however, hardly disturbed those who
1146For disappearance of XI Corps reports, Hamlin, Ibid, 164.

Commanding a corps in Grant's army in the 1864 Virginia campaign, Birney, weak from fatigue and exposure clearly
rooted in the rigors of that campaign, contracted a malarial infection and died 18 November 1864.
For Howard, see his Autobiography published in 1907, where at the end of his life he stubbornly resisted accepting
any responsibility but instead simply restated his long-held view.
1147For casualties, WR, Ibid, 185; for the single causality after 2 May, Bigelow, Ibid, "Appendix 12," 505.
1148Kiefer, History of the One Hundred and Fifty-third Regiment, 30. Non-combatants composed a significant number

of persons present in any Union army encampment. Grant (Memoirs, 512-514), for example, utilizes this argument,
albeit in a different context, to suggest that rebel strength in 1864-1865 Virginia campaign was not at all inferior, given
the different of counting combat effectives, to that of Meade's army.
But, if cattle were involved, then to the extent they were involved in and contributed to the flight, the men of XI Corps
and their officers, especially their commanding officer, were culpable from bringing these animals (for purposes of
slaughter) up to the front line.
1149As in the case of a part of Albright's (2nd) brigade (II Corps), Bigelow (citing the W.P. Seville's History of the First
Regiment Delaware Volunteers), Ibid, 302-303.
1150Schurz, Reminiscences, 2:437.

aimed their calamitous remarks at the "Dutch," i.e., a nativist slur such as "kraut," "wop" or
"limey" (all used in later eras) referring to all German speakers including Austrians, Swiss and
"native" born Americans with German sounding names as well as central Europeans who
were crudely and, because we are dealing with nativists, viciously confused with Germans.
(For example, Wladimir Krzyzanowski was Polish. The 58-NY, which Krzyzanowski raised,
originally had large numbers of men of Polish, Hungarian, Czech as well as German birth.
Unlike Swisserdeutsch, neither Polish, Magyar and Czech are German tongues.) This type of
abstraction is, of course, characteristic of bigotry. At any rate, recall also that, among the socalled "German" regiments, only a part of the 41-NY and 45-NY, regiments that had been
unable to fire a single volley, did not cross the Turnpike and fall in behind Gilsa's other two
regiments (the 153-PA and 54-NY). While it was the "Americans," largely made of "Ohio boys"
of McLean's brigade, namely the left wings of the 55-OH and the 17-CT, who did not fire but
were compelled to turn and run. Similarly, the 3rd division regiments shallowly entrenched on
the Turnpike, the 74-PA and 61-OH, could not fire either. But of the latter five regiments, only a
few companies on the right of the 107-OH were reformed behind the 25-OH which had been
fronted west. Large numbers of the 74-PA and 61-OH, on the other hand, were rallied behind
Schurz's first line. It was Schurz's and Buschbeck's lines, moreover, largely German speaking
regiments lead by "foreign" officers, along with a German artillery officer, who put up stiff
resistance against overwhelming odds. If we wish to, and this author really has no desire to do
so, submit to examination the quality of "bravery" or "cowardice" of men who, because of the
failings and frailties of their commanding officers, are placed in a position where they have a
choice of fleeing (and perhaps fighting again), surrendering (that is, throwing themselves on
the mercies of the enemy), or dying (that is, being shot to death, likely from the backside),
then is the man (more likely a German speaker) who, under these conditions, rallies behind a
regiment in his rear "brave" while that man (more likely American) who, under the same
conditions, continues to flee "cowardly"? It appears only the adamant detractors - and they
were legion - of the "German" element in XI Corps had - and on this they spoke as with one
voice - an answer, an answer contrary to what logic and experience might lead one to
otherwise expect.1151
The fifth point to note is that the men who fled past Hooker's headquarters, the very same
men, "cowardly retreating rascals" who "Gen. Hooker and other general officers" attempted to
halt "by smot[ing] and slash[ing] ... vain[ly] ... with draw sabres," were not men of the XI Corps.
The men, along with ammunitions trains, other wagons and mules, who came by way of Hazel
Grove and Fairview from the Vista to the Chancellor house and beyond to United States Ford
1151These four nationalities (German, Polish, Czech and Hungarian) are cited because men of the 58-NY with these

national origins (men with names such as Swaboda, Rhrig, Pfau; Grochowski, Zbitowsky; Simonek; Rezac) fell
heroically either wounded or dead at Gettysburg. Pula, Ibid, 102. James Pula states the 58-NY had men who, by
birth, were "Germans, Poles, Danes, Frenchmen, Italians, Hungarians and Russians" (History of a Polish-German
Civil War Brigade, 6,) as well as (Swiss,) Swedes, Scots, English and men from Belgium (Pula, Liberty and Justice,
21). Hardly your everyday German speakers.
Hartwell Osborn (Trials and Triumphs, 61) states that 4,500, about 35%, of the corps were Germans (with all foreignborn bringing the total to 60%). Schurz (Ibid), probably with the same source in mind says Germans made up a little
more than 1/3 of the corps. Hamlin (Ibid, 27), on the other hand, maintains that 60% of the corps was "formed of
American citizens by birth" (emphasis added). There need be no contradiction here. At any rate, the question can only
be adequately decided by knowledge of how many corps soldiers (and officers) were American born and German
speaking or American born with a (n) (unAnglicized) German name. For example, in Schimmelpfennig's brigade (3rd
division), the 68-NY and 82-IL were German, 61-OH was Irish, 74-PA was "Pennsylvania German" (i.e., American
born German speakers) and 157-NY was "American." (John Tyler Butts, A Gallant Captain in the Civil War, 30).
Similarly, the 153-PA was Pennsylvania German. (Such is our assessment based on review of biographical
information provided in W.R. Kiefer, History of the One Hundred and Fifty-Third Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer
Infantry.) Depending on the size of each of these regiments, their ethnic composition could well be roughly consistent
with both Osborn-Schurz and Hamlin.

were men primarily of the III Corps with others of XII Corps who had been swept up in the
other, truly panicked flight of the evening of 2 May. This has been firmly established by
Hamlin.1152
The last point concerns the alleged attempt by the "Dutchmen" of the XI Corps to retreat to
safety by crossing the river at United States Ford. Note, first, that Brig. Gen. Thomas
Meagher, commanding the Irish Brigade (II Corps), indicated, at a monster rally of GermanAmericans held in early June at New York City's Cooper Institute, that he and his men had
been guarding the lines of retreat during the 2 May fighting and on those roads among the
fugitives he stopped very few were German speakers. At the same rally, Provost-MarshalGeneral Marsena Patrick flatly stated the none of the fleeing men who made it to the
Rappahannock and attempted to cross the river were assigned to XI Corps.1153
The notion of German speakers is important, for while any number of foreign born Americans
spoke a Germanic or German sounding tongue, not all of them were German. (That is, not
all of the German sounding speakers belonged to the statelets, kingdoms and principalities
which, after 1871, formed modern Germany.) This distinction, while to someone of European
heritage was no different from a native born American differentiating between a Southerner
and an easterner on the basis of speech, of course, was a little too sophisticated for nativist
bigots of which the United States, then as now, had plenty. Thus, it comes as no surprise that
it was precisely those bigots, particularly in III Corps, who most vilified the XI Corps
"Dutchmen." Aside from the commanding general of the army (and the sycophants, hangerons and mediocrities among his entourage), III Corps had the most to hid. It was, after all, the
III Corps' commander whose insistence on ever more troops - to pursue what objectively was
a singular blunder - led to the isolation of XI Corps on the right; and, it was III Corps
regiments, along with their mules and trains, that produced the stampede past Hooker's
headquarters about which so much ink in the newspapers of the country was spilt. Thus, for
example, regularly cited in the literature on Chancellorsville is the following by an officer of III
Corps: "The officers of other corps made themselves speechless by striving to rally the 'flying
Dutchman'," who was no longer an illusion, but a despicable reality; and the cavalry with their
sabers, generals and staffs with revolvers and artillerists with whips and rammers, vainly
attempted to stop the disgraceful flight, which was finally checked by the Rappahannock. 'Var
ish de potoons?' 'Der wash too many mens for us.' 'I ish going to mine company,' they
continually exclaimed ... The Germans sought to escape the censure which the whole army
justly bestowed upon them..." This, again, refers to the incident at Hooker's headquarters,
which, as we have seen, was a stampede led first and foremost by men of III Corps. The
unseemly character of these remarks are all out of proportion to the confusion and uncertainty
that engulfed the events of the evening of 2 May. The author, it appears, enjoyed the
humiliation that his denigration of German speakers administered. Yet the abuse, vilification
and haughty moralistic air of superiority animating these remarks simply do not lend
themselves to ordinary analysis. That is because these remarks, like so many others made by
1152Ibid, 89-90, 98-100, 149-150. It bears repeating that this stampede did not consist in XI Corps men. All the

evidence contradicts assertions to the contrary - the time at which the panic occurred (long after which XI Corps
remnants had rallied in or passed through the Fairview area), the contents of the stampede (munitions trains and
mules, ambulances besides men) large parts of which XI Corps officers had sent to the rear before the rout in
anticipation of what was coming, and the route of the stampede (which, if XI Corps fugitives had traced out, would
have taken them again toward not away from the enemy and only circuitously toward the line of retreat toward United
States Ford). Yet this mythologizing, which is so satisfying to all who latently or otherwise, harbor nativist prejudices,
is repeated in many modern accounts, for example, the second volume of Catton's popular history, Glory Road, 187,
or, most recently (1992), by Furguson, Chancellorsville 1863, 184.
1153For Meagher, Catton, Ibid, 214, and Hamlin, Ibid, 154; for Patrick, Hamlin, Ibid, and Schurz, Ibid., 2:437. It
appears the source for all these statements was a reprint, which we have been unable to locate, of the speeches
made at the rally and entitled The Battle of Chancellorsville and the Eleventh Army Corps.

soldiers and officers of the Army of the Potomac and appearing in the newspapers across the
country, constituted a crude ideologicalization in which the roles played by soldiers and
officers of various regiments, and the structure of the actual course of events on 2 May as it
has been retrospectively reconstructed, are inverted. In this light, these remarks form a
projection of the action of those equally, perhaps more, culpable, an effort to attack those who
could be assaulted with impunity and hold them as a sacrifice to the bloody altar of public
opprobrium, reproach and shame, thereby effecting a purge of guilt and self-hatred for
regimental and corps shortcomings.1154
So, again, we ask what about (the German speaking element of) XI Corps?
If among the 2,500-3,500 men who cannot be determinately accounted for, there were many
who had fled as far as the Chancellor's house, and among them some German speakers,
then consider the following.
First, there was a history of mistreatment by civilian and military leaders housed in the War
Department. Recall the ill-fated march of Blenker's division in March 1862 and again of the
treatment of the Germany speaking soldiery after Hooker took command in late January 1863.
Second, there was the treatment by the soldiery and officers of the Army of the Potomac since
the time when XI Corps (along with XII Corps) were (re)incorporated into this military body as
a Grand Reserve Division back in December 1862. The "Dutch" were neither welcomed nor
accorded recognition. They were verbally assaulted, the brunt of ubiquitous nativist jokes. This
treatment went on unabated.
Third, following Sigel's resignation there was the appointment of Howard over Schurz and the
replacements of McLean by Devens and Orlando Smith by Barlow as well as the refusal by
Hooker or Halleck to confirm the promotion of German speaking XI Corps officers.1155
Fourth, there was the fact that the "Dutch" were held in contempt because they largely
enlisted out of opposition to slavery on emancipatory grounds, while the vast overwhelming
number of soldiers enlisted out of nationalistic motivation.
So if on each and all of these accounts, the sense of justice of some of the German speaking
men of XI Corps, men who made their stand on principle, was offended, and if among them
were those whose terms of enlistment were very shortly coming (or had come) due, should
anyone be surprised, or quite frankly dismayed, if some among them had become
disillusioned. If some did decide to pack it in because they were not going to die alongside
men, ordinary, common men - forming the sinews of this country, who despised them and
whose priorities were skewed, who could blame them? The fact is that most likely very few
did. For, had there been a mass, panicked retreat as suggested by their detractors, we should
have also expected - particularly during the following month in the face of the campaign of
slander aimed at the "Dutch" - mass desertions. This never occurred.
Nonetheless, a military assessment must ultimately be made from a different perspective.
Bigelow suggests just such an assessment. He notes a difference in the nature of response.
German speakers of XI Corps allegedly fled in panic from the battlefield, while "Americans,"
men, and particularly officers, of III Corps and XII Corps made unauthorized withdrawals in
1154Citation from H.N. Blake, Three Years in the Army of the Potomac (1865), cited by Bigelow, Ibid, 311. Blake was a

captain in the 11-MA of III Corps. Further, typical example of abuse is cited by Fritsch, Butts, Ibid, 58.
With regard to the generalization of abuse, Schurz (Ibid, 2:433) recalled that, "We sought to get at the talk of officers
and men in other corps of the army - the verdict of condemnation and contempt seemed to be universal. Wherever,
during the night from the 2d to the 3d of May, any confusion had occurred - and there had been much - or any
regiment been broken and thrown into disorder - it was all the Eleventh Corps. Only two prominent general, Couch
and Doubleday, were heard from as expressing the opinion that there might be another side to the story. All the rest,
as far as we could learn, vied with one another in abusive and insulting gibes."
1155German speaking officers felt it was simply "impossible" to achieve promotion. See John Tyler Butts, A Gallant
Captain in the Civil War, 66.

which they deliberately retreated. He further suggests that the sight of whole regiments
marching off the field of battle may be every bit as demoralizing as the sight of troops of a
"foreign contingent" in panicked flight. This assessment is conceived from the strictly military
perspective of whether or not a man is "lost to the firing line." But what is of even greater
military, because it is not strictly military but also political, import is objective difference in
outcome. The attack on the XI Corps was so vicious, humiliating and brutal, openly making a
bigoted appeal to the solidarity of an imagined, exclusivist national community, because it had
above all else to be convincing. The XI Corps retreat did not result in the loss at
Chancellorsville, but it could have been reasonably argued that the 3 May "orderly,"
unauthorized withdrawals of III Corps and XII Corps effectively did. Whether sustainable or no,
that argument could not be aired.1156
Chancellorsville (XVII)
The Army of the Potomac: Defeat and Bigotry
Hooker's order to retreat back across the Rappahannock amounted to a militarily unnecessary
acceptance of defeat at Chancellorsville by an army that could not understand how, when half
of it did not even get into action, it had been beaten. Criticisms by experienced veteran
soldiers and low ranking field officers were privately voiced (e.g., in letters home). But, short of
a generalized rebellion (which never even gave the slightest signs of developing), ranking
officers (i.e., army, corps, divisional and brigade commanders) of the Army of the Potomac
were virtually unassailable by that army's soldiery and dissident officers. This retreat, coming
atop a commutative history of defeats (two battles at Bull Run, the Seven Days,
Fredericksburg and now Chancellorsville), constituted a severe shock that was lived and
experienced as an emotional-psychological disaster. Rationally, responsibility had to be
assessed in order to correct the ongoing failures. Yet the hierarchical structure of the army
itself conjoined to the invulnerable position of the Army's leadership, largely protected by the
alliance of radical Republicans in Congress and the party of property politically represented
above all else by the Lincoln Administration, made it nearly impossible to properly assess
responsibility. Given, however, a national history recently punctuated by a powerful nativist
outburst among a number of social classes and groups who were found among the soldiery
and, in fact, who in the civilian population were among the strongest supporters of the war,
blame could be imputed: The retreat fixed a pattern deep in the psyche of the popular classes
of the nation, and the soldiers and officers of the Army of the Potomac. Since XI Corps was
directly involved in the initial and crucial battle at Chancellorsville in which the right wing of the
Army was turned and maybe a third of that corps consisted of German speaking immigrants, it
is not surprising that from this event an automatized compulsion, already fully formed, to
blame the "Dutch" (as an historically transitory, leading instance of unAmerican, because nonAmerican foreign born) for all the Army leadership's failures was confirmed.1157
1156Ibid, 479-480.

Outside his own assertions of panicked retreat (302, 310), Bigelow largely cites sources that are hardly credible, such
as Hooker's testimony before the Joint Committee (see supra); the "scared sheep ... aghast and terror-stricken" that,
"God grant, may never be again be seen in the Federal army of the United States" (310) of III Corps artillerist Capt.
Osborn Hartman's report; and, the "flying Dutchman" (311-312) of III Corps officer H.N. Blake's account. If we allow
ourselves to get underneath the obfuscatory abuse constitutive of the received and accepted tradition, it is precisely
that pervasive character of a panicked retreat among German speakers of XI Corps that becomes dubious.
1157For views that the army had not been beaten (primarily because Hooker hadn't gotten but half his effectives into
the battle), Catton, Ibid, 215 and, for a civilian view, Ladley Letters, 124-125 ("There is no one here thinks the Army of
the Potomac was whipped" 13 May 1863, mother to Ladley). The impact of retreat on the common soldiery (at an
earlier point when Hooker on 3 May ordered the defense shrunk back in a semi-circle around United States Ford) is
vividly recreated in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, chapter 16.

Part III
Nativism and Bigotry in America
Bigotry and the German Community in the United States
Since it was now, officially speaking, de rigueur to be "abolitionist" (witness for example
Hooker), since, accordingly, one watched one's tongue when speaking of "niggers" especially
around abolitionist politicos or military officers, the German soldiery would come in for all the
animosity and hostility formerly reserved for blacks. Originally a corruption of the German
"Deutsch" (meaning, in German, "German"), "Dutch" was an ethnic slur aimed specifically at
all partially assimilated central European and, in particular, German speaking immigrants.
The greatest wave of pre-Civil War German migration to the United States unfolded in the
decade from 1846 to 1855. These immigrants, some one and a quarter million of them,
doubled the German population of the United States. German immigrants were made up
predominately of farmers (roughly half), and included a significant number of skilled artisans.
Their decisions to leave their homelands were inseparably politically and economically
motivated: Societal tendencies and developments - price inflation, crop failures in the
countryside, and massive unemployment generated by the capitalist introduction of laborsaving machinery in the cities - exacerbated an already deeply experienced sense (based on
the successful suppression of revolutionary movements) that little would change in their
lifetimes. They felt compelled to seek refuge and a new start in America. Perhaps more
importantly, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all German immigrants were radical
intellectuals who fled German lands as a consequence of either actual or anticipated political
persecution. These were men and women, among whom there was a small but articulate
working class communist current, who had in some capacity struggled against the absolutist
and still largely "feudal" regimes of the German principalities of central Europe, and who had
fled in the repressive aftermath of the defeated revolutions of 1848. Thus, they earned the
name of "forty-eighters."1158
German radicals found America materially and practically oppressive: Most if not all among
them were highly educated men and women with a classical Bildung, including philosophers,
philologists and historians, and economists and legal scholars, who were compelled to bury
their talents and at best find work as translators, tutors and journalists but also as cigar
makers, soap-makers, handymen, bartenders, street-sweepers, laborers, etc. The failure of
radical intellectuals to find employment corresponding to their formation and training was not
For the following examples of criticisms of the army leadership (from a representative low-ranking officer), see the
Ladley Letters:
16 May 1863 (to mother and sisters): "I can't see how the Gens. allowed us to be surprised so completely. We could
see the rebels moving to our right all fore noon. And all the men could see them plain, but there was no attention paid
to them. They were allowed to move to our right without molestation, and when they got every thing fixed they came
down on us like an avalanche. We had no suport. Their line was formed perpendicular to ours, and to resist them we
would have to change fronts to meet them, which after the attack was made impossible, and we were ordered to fall
back a distance of a mile and a half or two miles, under their fire all the time, to the 3rd Corps who would change front
as they had time to do it" (128).
19 May 1863 (to mother and sisters): "Some body is to blame for the repulse and I can't blame the men for it nor the
commanders of Brigades or Divisions, but it will rest with some one higher in authority. The papers state that the 11th
Corps by falling back caused the whole Army to change their position, from the carefully selected ground, and fight
and manoeuver in a dense wood. In the position we occupied it was all most [sic] all woods, and I can't see how we
could make it any worse. Our position was very poor and we had no artillery, it was all parked near Hookers Hd. Qrs
except two pieces that was on our extreme right, and they were taken from the dutch before they fired a shot and
turned upon us. Inclosed I will send a diagram of our position [reproduced in text]. It looked to me as if our corps was
sent out where it was on purpose to give them a dare which they accepted [emphasis added]. It would have been all
very well if they come in a certain direction, but they were too sharp for that, so they took the position they wished and
came on" (129).
1158Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 25, 43-44 (popular motives for emigration); 44, 49, 61 (different groups, and
calculation of numerical strength of radical element, among German immigrants); 167-173 (communist current).

merely objective, that is, a failure rooted in their transplantation to a society and social
formation that was attuned exclusively to the economic opportunities for exploitation and
capitalization of a continent vast in natural resources in order to create money-wealth, a
society in which culture was nearly synonymous with religion. They were also confronted with
the hostility of an older, established generation of German-Americans who attempted to block
their ascendancy within German communities, and, in particular, with the nativist subjectivity
of Americans of all social groups.1159
The United States was, in fact, undergoing rapid if nascent industrial capitalist transformation
of its own symbolized by most adequately by the new but diffused presence of the railroad
and telegraph lines that covered the landscape of nation (outside the South). This
transformation was upsetting customary ideas, practices and socio-economic positions in
society, and corresponding to the emergence of new powerful classes in the North and West
(industrialists and capitalist farmers, and proletarians), the entire (second) party system in the
United States was crumbling. At the top, a narrow stratum concentrated politically in the
disintegrating Whig party hatred immigrants, especially the Irish, who were attracted in large
numbers to the big city machines of the urban Democracy; more broadly, prominent individual
members of ruling class social groups clothed their fears of social revolution in attacks on
"abstractions," "extravagant notions of freedom," ideas of "a division of property" bred in the
Old World, etc. The reference here was, of course, to the radical German intelligentsia.
Nativist currents among the working classes charged that immigrants were driving down
wages and stealing jobs from Americans. Poorer farmers feared the immigrant squatter who
would import the "cheap system of European tillage" and "stake out the best portions of the
public domain." The German immigrant tendency to defend a certainly superior, "high" cultural
heritage intensified this nativist reaction and dialectically made the newcomers more selfdefensively assertive. Nativist reaction flowered in the development of secret organizations of
Know Nothings who demanded restrictions on immigration, lengthening of naturalization
period, elimination of Congressional sponsored land grants to immigrants, and the exclusion
of the same from public offices. Nativism crystallized in 1854 with formation, fed by Know
Nothing organizations, of an effectively national political party, the American party (which in
1856 was able to field a Presidential candidate, Milliard Fillmore). The wave of anti-immigrant
sentiment crested in 1855 with major riots in Cincinnati, Columbus and Louisville, cities in
which the German presence was strong. Typically, this violent ethnic bigotry helped overcome
divisions in German communities across the United States. (In the aforementioned cities
where anti-German riots broke out, the respective German communities displayed solid selforganization and were able to repel the nativist assault.) But differences between established
American citizens and specifically German immigrants did not end here.1160
The political vanguard among German immigrants also found America intellectually and
culturally oppressive. They took the Enlightenment doctrine of universal liberty politically
codified in the American Declaration of Independence and French declaration of the Rights of
Man deadly seriously, yet found America a nation of rank religious hypocrisy. (For example, at
the height of the immigration German speakers confronted an indigenous, socially
generalized, puritanically religious-driven movement that aimed at legally enforcing
temperance, an aim which German speakers of all social classes, born of a culture in which
1159Ibid, 59-70 (practical fate of the radical intelligentsia as a group); 73-74, 198-201 (split within German

communities).
1160Ibid, 183-187 (anti-German nativist reaction); 187 (riots); 183 (citations).
Against the background of the capitalist transformation-induced undermining of settled communities, Know Nothings,
by and large militantly Protestant, feared equally Irish ("Catholic papists") and German ("atheistic radicals"). Their
demands also included incorporation of Protestant bible reading in public schools. Ibid, 185.

beer drinking was customary, found a gross infringement on personal liberty and a violation of
the spirit of the Bill of Rights.) These groups were overwhelmingly composed of rationalists,
materialists and freethinkers all of whom were more or less intellectually shaped by left
Hegelianism (Feuerbach, Bauer, etc.). Both because of these philosophical predilections and
because the church in Germany had supported the princes and helped suppress the
revolutionary upsurge, radical intellectuals were strongly anti-clerical. They offered themselves
(through organizations, lectures, literary efforts, newspapers and journals), bearers of
Enlightenment rationalism, as an alternative to the custom, daily comportment and legality of a
land that had the character of a "primeval forest of churches and dogma." The most radical
among them agitated for not only emancipation but enfranchisement of blacks and women,
and for reform of the American political system along lines of a parliamentary system under
ministerial responsibility, reforms that included the abolition of the Presidency and formation of
a popularly elected, single lawmaking body that combined the executive and legislature.
Though holding uncompromising anti-slavery convictions, the German radical intelligentsia
consciously opposed itself to the religiously motivated, Puritan consciences of the
overwhelming majority of the existing American abolitionist community. The slavery issue
became particularly significant for them, for as the temporal distance from European concerns
increased, the sharpness of issues that once drove them dulled - particularly against the
backdrop of constant, enervating struggle to make a living. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act
reawakened in many radicals the fervor, now supplanted by a commitment to anti-slavery
agitation and activity, that had once driven them to seek the total reform of existing old
European society.1161
The Logic of Bigotry
Embeddness in the Structure of Divided (Class) Societies
The accusatory imputation (by other social groups or classes) of fault or wrong to one, usually
societally lowly, social group strictly on the basis of its alleged social group characteristics may
be the most ubiquitous and generalized feature of divided societies. This form of accusation is
an act so characteristic of that psychology of social groups in class stratified societies that it
does not appear restricted to specific groups. In divided societies that are relatively stable,
that is, not in the throes of social upheaval, it achieves its typical shapes. At the top (among
ruling class social groups), this act is most likely to be conscious, a diversion aimed at turning
attention from responsibility incurred as the price of political and cultural hegemony. At the
bottom (among oppressed groups), this form of accusation is most damaging: It has a double
form, self-deprecation and internalization of the oppressor as a model for social group
aspirations. In the myriad social groups and classes in the middle (and here in this discussion,
we include all socially stable proletarian strata), accusatory imputation of fault or wrong
achieves its most characteristic form, functioning as a precognitive psychological mechanism
in and through which the middling group's existential commitment to existing society is
unquestioned or the debilitating effects of its inability to achieve social accommodation are not
experienced. Instead, a social group "beneath" the middling group is blamed for the outbreak
of social disorder, and the anxiety or frustration that would flow from an adequate attribution of
responsibility for this disorder immediately takes form as anger and hostility directed toward
the blamed group. It is only social groups who, in part, have achieved an identity constituted
through their status as cultural "outsiders" that have the strength to withstand this false
criticism. They experience the imputation consciously (and do not unknowingly live it as a
psychological mechanism), and will often fight back. It is usually questionable, though,
1161Wittke, Ibid, 122-124 (rationalist, Enlightenment and anticlericalism); 163-164 (political reforms); 192-193 (slavery

and renewed commitment to social change); 126 (citation).

whether they have the social power to withstand the political and social repression that might
also follow. In hierarchical, stratified societies, the extent to which ruling class social groups
hold sway over other classes and strata can be mediately grasped by the extent to which
accusatory imputation shapes the psychological life of subordinate social groups.
It is only in modern, liberal bourgeois societies where the ideal of tolerance has come into
being. Rooted in the English Puritan efforts to build a cohesive army with a unified command
out of diverse, religiously sectarian tendencies, toleration became a practical need in the
struggle to defeat the Royalist forces of an Anglican cum papist king. Secularized by British
political culture of the 18th century, and by the French and Scottish Enlightenments, tolerance
became a political ideal that, so it has been proclaimed, characterized liberal polities. In liberal
bourgeois societies where this ideal has become practical, that is, in which it has taken roots
among some layers of the population, and in which all social groups and classes by and large
pay at least lip service to it, it is possible for a partially assimilated social group to demand
social justice, that is, adherence to the ideal in social practice.
Bigotry and Emancipation
Among the army ranks and officers, and in the North at large, scapegoating the "Dutch" was
easy enough: The German communities across the United States, especially those in which
revolutionary exiles played a large role, clung tenaciously to their language and customs.
Because they would not easily assimilate, they were, from an American popular perspective,
culturally arrogant and gave offense to customary practices. Moreover, against the fortyeighters, who were well represented oftentimes as recognized leaders inside the German
immigrant communities, there was a particularly strong dislike that went to the core of the
problem: Against this double background distinct (unassimilated communities and their
rationalist, anticlerical politics), they volunteered and fought not just to preserve the Union but
to extend freedom to all. There is, of course, more than a little irony here, since in an objective
historical sense the German speaking soldiery of the Union armies, openly embracing
emancipation from the very beginning of the war, constituted a political vanguard, and among
XI Corps where they numbered most heavily, the abolitionist flower of the Army of the
Potomac. Yet among a largely free-soil and Protestant, staunchly Unionist and anti-black
soldiery and officers' corps still reluctantly attempting to come to grips with Lincoln's
Emancipation decree, this was hardly how German speaking soldiers were received.
Resentment and hostility toward these soldiers originated in their refusal to accept the defining
feature of the American community, viz., its exclusivist, white egalitarian, nature. (This refusal,
moreover, formed a decisive, conscious motive for seeking to preserve distinctively German
communities). Here, again, was the core of the problem: Numerous German speakers who
volunteered for service in the Union armies had on the European continent gone to war,
suffered privation and (some had) been imprisoned for precisely what so many native-born
Anglo-Americans took for granted and wished to restrict to "whites" only. "German" soldiers
wanted to hold their "American" counterparts to the universalist claims articulated, say, in
basic documents such as the Declaration of Independence, in the mountains of pamphlet and
book-sized literature describing America that for decades had found its way abroad, in the
political speeches of public personages since the early days of the Republic, etc. In social
practice, the self-styles "natives" ignored those claims in favor of herrenfolk democracy, an
existential commitment to a "white man's government" and a customary morality which
defended both. Pointing out the contradiction created tension and resentment. That
resentment was fed by having been wrong on emancipation all along. That resentment and
the hostility it generated would not be quickly or facilely transcended. It went deep, and, thus,
scapegoating came easy. In the case of the defeat at Chancellorsville, a hardly latent

tendency toward scapegoating the "Dutch" was socially generalized and turned into a national
orgy of abuse by the major metropolitan newspapers.1162
In the following month, the men of XI Corps moved with the rest of the army north. The
"German" elements of the corps carried with it barely suppressed sentiments of anger and
bitterness: Based on the alleged panic of XI Corps, responsibility for the defeat at
Chancellorsville had stigmatized the corps, i.e., its German speaking soldiery, and hung
abound its neck as a millstone as the Gettysburg campaign unfolded nearly two months later.

1162The New York Times referred to Schurz and his men as "Dutch cowards"; The Chicago Times, as late as 1870,

spoke of the "Dutch Panique" of the "lager beer devotees" at Chancellorsville, and the Louisville Journal, as if to
(albeit denigratingly) anticipate our argument, characterized the naturalized central European soldiers as a "rabble of
liberty shouters" [emphasis added]. Wittke, Ibid, 236. On the other hand, note the remarks of F.O. Fritsch to Hubert
Dilger on the morrow of the rout at Chancellorsville. "Don't you think ... that foreign-born soldiers, who believe in the
institutions of this country, who have offered their services to save this glorious Union and to abolish slavery, who
stand these tremendous hardships - march thirty and forty miles on bad roads in the wilderness, trying to keep their
souls and bodies together by swallowing hardtack and dirty bacon - and who are willing to fight and die for their
adopted Fatherland, are as much Americans as soldiers born in this country? Do you not think that they are more
entitled to be called Americans than all those natives who have remained at home and become rich, while we are
serving for greenbacks worth thirty-five cents on the dollar; serving in fact for nothing, since the pay hardly enables us
to buy the necessities of life." The treatment of these men was shameful, nay, criminal.

Part IV
The Battle of Gettysburg
Tactical Account, Assessment and Aftermath.
Gettysburg (I)
Tactical Disposition of XI Corps
In mid-June 1863, Lee ordered the entire Army of Northern Virginia (some 65,000 men), and
additionally some 12,000 cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart, to cross into first Maryland then
Pennsylvania. Lee's purpose was to, so the defensist mythology (recently Connelly and
Jones) concerning Lee would have it, engage in a provisioning and northern expectations
deflating "raid." (In fact, Lee, offensively inclined by temperament, sought battle. No amount of
"raiding" would lower northern expectations to such a point that the "Yankee masses" would,
finding the war hopeless, demand peace negotiations. Only another humiliating defeat in a
major confrontation would generate that consciousness. Such would have, so Lee anticipated,
compelled Lincoln to enter negotiations and thereby garnered British and French recognition
and, with that, southern independence.)1163
By 28 June 1863, Lee's three corps had fanned out from west of the South Mountains nearly
to Harrisburg the latter menaced by Richard Ewell's corps. A scouting report suggested to
Lee the Army of the Potomac was rapidly on the move: It appeared the Union army had
crossed into Maryland and was closing in on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border along a line
from Baltimore to a small town in east south central Pennsylvania, Gettysburg. Lee ordered
his most eastern corps back - retracing its movements - and further ordered a concentration
near Cashtown (about 7 miles west northwest of Gettysburg). On the morning of 1 July, Harry
Heth's division of A.P. Hill's corps made contact with two Union cavalry brigades under the
command of John Buford, along the Chambersburg Pike (running south southeast from
Cashtown to Gettysburg). During that morning, Buford's troops defended a series of land
formations west of Gettysburg - in order from east to west, McPherson's Ridge, Willoughby's
Run and Herr Ridge - all running roughly north-south as they crossed the Chambersburg Pike.
By late morning, William Pender's division of Confederate Hill's corps had joined the fighting
west of town. Before noon, John Reynolds' I Corps (Army of the Potomac) had come up from
the southeast and entered the fray. By 1 pm, the Union infantry had established a north-south
line west of Gettysburg (and immediately east of McPherson's Ridge) on high ground known
as Seminary Ridge. Reynolds had been assigned command of the left wing of the Union army
by its new commander, George Meade. The offensively-minded Reynolds had instructed O.O.
Howard's XI Corps which was also roughly southeast of Gettysburg to move forward as
rapidly as possible to engage the enemy in support of Union soldiers already on the
battlefield. By the time the advanced division of XI Corps reached the field (no later than 1:30
pm), and as the I Corps was establishing its position, Reynolds while on horseback was shot
in the head and immediately fell dead. Command of the troops in the field of battle passed to
Howard.
Leadership of the causality weakened XI Corps (numbering 9,841 men for the 30 June
muster) now fell to Carl Schurz, commander of the corps' 3rd division. Having consulted with
Howard, he took two divisions and positioned them north of the town. (Howard kept
Steinwehr's division and the corps reserve artillery as a reserve on Cemetery Hill which was
his fall-back position and the ground he intended at all costs to hold.) Schurz placed his
remaining roughly 6,000 troops about 1,000 yards north of the town in a line facing north and
running west to east at a right angle to the furthest right (north) position of troops from the I
Corps. This positioning was designed at once to guard against a rebel flanking movement
1163For the defensist interpretation of Lee's offensive operations, see Connelly and Jones, The Politics of Command;

for our perspective on Lees essentially offensive, any Napoleonic, orientation, see chapter 6, above.

against the I Corps right, and to fortify Union forces against an attack from the north (and
northeast since Schurz ordered Barlow to refuse his right) as scouting reports indicated that
Confederate troops were approaching Gettysburg from the north (Rodes division of Ewell's
corps) along the Carlisle Road (and from the northeast - Jubal Early's division of the same
corps - along the Harrisburg road running southwesterly into Gettysburg).1164
The XI Corps forces were overwhelmed late in the afternoon of 1 July primarily by an attack
from the northeast by Early's division. We shall reconstruct this part of the battle shortly, but
here it should just be noted that the further-sallied reputation of German speaking soldiers
among XI Corps was based upon (i) the response to this attack and (ii) the retreat through the
town (of Gettysburg) that followed.1165
By 3 pm on the afternoon of 1 July, the Union XI Corps formed a line fronting more or less
north about 2,500 yards north of Gettysburg (see Map 17). The line ran from a hillock,
Blocher's Knoll but today known as Barlow's Knoll, near that point where the Harrisburg Road
crossed Rock Creek across to the Carlisle Road (running due north from Gettysburg) west to
the Mummasburg Road. At nearly a right-angle to the extreme right of I Corps due northwest
of town near the Mummasburg Road, Schurz (re)positioned Amsberg's (1st) brigade (of the
3rd division), consisting from the left of the 157-NY, 45-NY, 74-PA and 61-OH infantry
regiments. To the 1st brigade's right, Col. Wladimir Krzyzanowski's 2nd brigade, consisting
from the left of the 82-OH, 75-PA, 119-NY, 58-NY and 26-WI infantry regiments, was
(re)positioned. The last two regiments were directly north of Gettysburg, the former to the left
(west) and the latter to the right (east) of the Carlisle Road. To the right of these two brigades
(making up Schimmelpfennig's 3rd division) were the two brigades of the 1st division
commanded by Francis C. Barlow. From the left, Adelbert Ames 2nd brigade, consisting of the
107-OH, 25-OH and 17-CT regiments, occupied the western slope of the slightly elevated
knoll. To Ames right (the far right of the XI Corps line), Leopold Gilsa's 1st brigade was
positioned on the northern and eastern slope of the knoll nearly abutting the Harrisburg Road.
It consisted from the left of the 153-PA, 68-NY and 54-NY regiments (while the 41-NY was on
detached duty). The right of Schutz's line was supported by a battery of regular army artillery
(4th United States, Battery G) commanded by Lt. Bayard Wilkerson.
Gettysburg (II)
Confederate Assault on Northern Perimeter (XI Corps), 1 July.
The first point to note is that XI Corps, its largely German speaking 3rd division in particular,
took heavy casualties at Chancellorsville. Here, at Gettysburg, comparably small 3rd division
brigades, were now even smaller. In this respect, second, Gilsa's brigade was missing a
regiment, the 41-NY, which had been stationed on Cemetery Hill. Third, the position of XI
Corps at 3 pm was not the original position Schurz had ordered. When originally formed by 2
pm, Schimmelpfennig's division was a good deal further west and further south. It was
Howard's and Schurz's intention to have the extreme left (1st brigade) of the 3rd division link
up with the extreme right of I Corps (William Robinson's 1st brigade) and extend this line
northward. However, this was already impossible by the time Schimmelpfennig's division
1164Troop strength cited by Pula, For Liberty and Justice, 93 and A. Wilson Greene, "From Chancellorsville to

Cemetery Hill," 76; for troop placement, Carl Schurz`, Reminiscences, 3:35-37.
1165The following sources have been used for this reconstruction: "Report of Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz," WR, Ser. 1, V.
27, Part 1, 727-730; Greene, "From Chancellorsville to Cemetery Hill"; Hassler, Crisis at the Crossroads; and Pfanz,
Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill.
Note that with the death of Reynolds, Howard, as we stated, took command of the left wing of the Union army as it
existed on the battlefield (I Corps, XI Corps and Buford's two brigades of cavalry). Schurz assumed temporary
command of XI Corps, Alexander Schimmelpfennig temporary command of Schurz's 3rd division (XI Corps), and
George Arnsberg assumed temporary command of Schimmelpfenning 1st brigade (3rd division, XI Corps).

reached the field as reinforced Confederates of Rodes' division had occupied a formation
known as Oak Hill and thereby prevented any such linkage. The rebel occupation, with two
batteries of artillery, had forced Schurz to form his initial line at a right angle (facing northwest)
to the extreme right (north) of I Corps. When Barlow's 1st division (XI Corps) came up the
Emmittsburg Road through Gettysburg, its 1st brigade under Gilsa was placed to the
immediate right of Schimmelpfennigs extreme right, and Barlow was instructed to "refuse" his
line, that is, to stagger en chelon the 2nd brigade (Ames) behind it, in order to meet an
anticipated threat from the northeast (Early's Confederate division). The extreme right of the
XI Corps line, then, was originally positioned along the Harrisburg Road some 1,000 yards
northeast of town at the county's poorhouse known then and now as the Almshouse.
Supported by Wilkerson's battery, it also received assistance from I Corps rifled artillery on
East Cemetery Hill some 2,500 yards south, southeast of the Almshouse. Further, Buford's
2nd cavalry brigade, commanded by Thomas Devin, once relieved, took up a position on the
right and in the rear of Schurz's second line. Fourth, Devin's cavalry, mistaken for rebels in the
1st division's rear, had been fired upon by batteries on Cemetery Hill. While the firing had
been stopped before any of Devin's men had been hit, the cavalry brigade would be forced to
retire just prior to the Confederate attack, thereby removing support from the rightwing of
Schurz's line.
By 3 pm, then, Schurz had been forced to reconstruct his line of defense since Barlow had
never refused the line that his division was to form with the 3rd division. Instead, he advanced
both of his brigades north northeasterly, occupying with Gilsa's undermanned and small
brigade, some 1,400 men strong, the knoll (near the Harrisburg Road some 1,500 yards
beyond the Almshouse) that now bears his name. Shortly after 2 pm, Schurz road his horse
west to personally examine what to him was plainly increased fighting (denoted by the
increased volume of artillery fire) on his extreme left. When he returned he found that Barlow
had not refused his line, and that, moreover, he had pushed his division forward. It is likely
that Barlow thought he could from the vantage point of this hillock turn the rightwing of the four
Georgian regiments making up George Doles brigade (Rodes division, Ewell's corps), and
take the Confederates in the flank and the rear. Barlow had, in effect, been sucker-punched
into exposing the entire XI Corps line, since Gilsa's brigade facing north and northwest was
now "in the air" (unsupported and occupying poor ground). Having already anticipated an
attack on his extreme right, and now realizing his entire uneven line could be easily rolled up
should Confederates advance in strength from a massed position along the Harrisburg Road,
Schurz ordered Schimmelpfennig's division forward to connect with the left of Barlow's two
brigades. This movement completely disconnected the already tenuous (if not nonexistent)
linkage of the extreme left of XI Corps with the extreme right of I Corps. Schurz's defense of
his line, while perhaps compelled under conditions of fire by Barlow's unauthorized advance,
also lengthened the XI Corps line and left it thin, hence doubly uncovered. Schurz, like
Howard, had foreknowledge of rebel movement from the northeast toward Gettysburg; yet in
ordering the 3rd division forward to conform to Barlow's advance position, the Union position
north of Gettysburg became dangerously exposed. (One can only speculate what would have
happened had Barlow followed orders in the first place.)
Schurz commented in his report on the first day of the battle that the "simultaneous
appearance of the enemy's battalions on so long a line" led him to "believe that they had been
lying in position for some time behind the wood in our front, fully prepared for us" has the ring
of truth to it. In fact, Early's division had been "fully prepared." On the extreme right, directly
north of Gilsa's brigade - hidden in the tall, unharvested wheat field just across (southwest of)
Rock Creek, were five of John B. Gordon's six Georgian regiments (from the right, 60, 31, 13,
61, 38-GA). To their left were Harry Hay's five Louisiana regiments (from the right, 5, 6, 9, 7,

8-LA) with the 9-LA straddling the Harrisburg Road. On the extreme left of Early's front were
the three North Carolina regiments of Isaac Avery (from the right, 6, 21, 57-NC). In the rear
along and to the left of the Harrisburg Road were William Smith's three regiments of Virginians
(52, 39, 31-VA). Smith's brigade was supplemented by Gordon's other regiment (26-GA) on
the right (north) side of the road. These four regiments were held in reserve and protected
several artillery batteries set up on slightly higher ground in the rear among which were
seventeen pieces devoted to enfilading Gilsa's brigade on Barlow's (Blocher's) Knoll.
Just before the Confederates of Early's division launched their attack, Gordon's five
regiments swung further right and Doles Georgians nudged left in order to link up one brigade
with the other (thus, proving the truth of Schurz's suspicion). Just as Early gave orders to
attack, Barlow, apparently unaware of the storm about to break on his right, ordered Gilsa to
swing his brigade around to the left. Barlow was subjectively certain he could thereby
envelope Doles' brigade by coming in at it from the rear. It was approximately 3:30 pm when
Early ordered the attack. Moving due south, Gordon's brigade of some 1,500 men crossed
perhaps a 100-200 yards front and hit Gilsa's small brigade obliquely (since the latter were
now beginning to move northwest). Simultaneously, Doles 1,400 men, having been engaged
with Amsberg's brigade (as Schimmelpfennig following Schurz's orders moved his division
forward to connect with Barlow and thereby engaged Doles skirmishers), began (after shifting
left) a straightforward rush (from the north due south), undertaking an assault largely on the
left half and center of Barlow's line. Meanwhile, Hays' and Avery's brigades avoided direct
contact, instead advancing rapidly to the right and rear of Barlow's two brigades. At the same
time, artillery from Early's rear enfiladed first Gilsa's right and, as the Georgians closed, the
rest of Barlow's line, while the artillery batteries of Thomas Carter (attached to Rode's division)
poured fire on the same line from the left (west) at Oak Hill. The Confederate assault took
Barlow's right by surprise, which itself on the surface appears surprising since Schurz was
very anxious about the possibility of having his right turned. Yet it must be remembered that
Gilsa's (and Ames') brigades were positioned northwest and preparing to turn Doles
Georgians when they were hit in the flank. Whatever Schurz had anticipated, it obviously had
not been communicated to the men on the ground by Barlow.1166
The fighting between Gordon's Georgians and Gilsa's brigade was brief and savage, and
while flanked and overwhelmed, these Union troops stubbornly clung to their ground. But with
two much larger Confederate brigades threatening the rear of the XI Corps' extreme right, with
an assault from the north taking that right by surprise, and with the single battery of Union
artillery on the knoll engaged in furious fire but being cut up, Gilsa's regiments, having taken
heavy losses, began a retreat southwesterly back toward the town. Some of these men were
pushed back and left into Ames brigade creating confusion. Yet there was no panic and, in
fact, (taunting jibes by rebel soldiers fully aware of the sensitivity of Yankees to their "Dutch"
regiments aside) by almost all accounts the fighting everywhere along the line was fierce. This
movement left Ames brigade exposed and, though fighting furiously, these regiments were
rolled up. Barlow's two brigades, now commanded by Ames (since Barlow had been seriously
wounded at the outset of the assault), attempted to reform at the Almshouse in the rear. But
this now left Schimmelpfennig's division seriously compromised.1167
In retreating and attempting to reform around the Almshouse, the men under Ames
(succeeding Barlow) might have expected to find some relief from the massive pressure of the
1166For these developments, "The Report of Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz," Ibid, 729 (citation).
1167For the character of fighting by German troops under Gilsa, Greene, "Ibid," 80: "Gilsa fought stubbornly, but with

the disadvantage of having his right flank, which was in the air, enveloped in a devastating manner. His efforts to
change front to the right were futile, but he struggled on. At times the swaying lines were barely fifty paces apart, and
the musketry volleys were continuous. The fight at a few points was a furious hand-to-hand one."

attack, but the full force of the Confederate attack was soon felt: Gordon was pressing them in
front, and now Hays' Louisianans and Avery's North Carolinians caught Ames' two brigades in
their flank. This concerted, continuous attack made it impossible for Ames' brigades, now
reduced by death, wounding and capture - accordingly even smaller, to hold their ground.
They continued to retreat back the last 750 yards toward the northeast end of Gettysburg.
While Hays' and Avery's troops pressed the attack, Gordon, sensing the prospects of
assaulting Schimmelpfennig's line from the rear, halted his Georgians near the Almshouse.
The collapse of Barlow's division on his right left exposed Krzyzanowski's and Amsberg's
brigades upon whom Doles' regiments had now turned. Schimmelpfennig ordered a fighting
retreat and attempted to reform his lines at a crossroads some 500 yards south (closer to the
town). The 3rd division was still in great danger of having its right turned, as Gordon's
Georgians stood posed to attack Schimmelpfennigs right flank. All the while, Confederate
artillery from both Oak Hill and on the Harrisburg Road poured it on. Casualties were heavy
and Schimmelpfennig's two brigades were compelled to retreat down the Carlisle and
Mummasburg roads into town. This, of course, left the right flank of Robinson's I Corps
brigade (facing west) exposed to attack in the rear by Doles' Georgians.
Gettysburg (III)
Retreat, not Panic
By no later than 4 pm, Schurz's line had largely been routed. Once in town, XI Corps troops
who had retreated back down the Harrisburg Road were pressed hard by all the elements of
Early's division involved in the initial assault. Col. Charles Coster, commanding the 1st brigade
of XI Corps' 2nd division stationed on Cemetery Hill, had brought up his three of four
regiments (134-NY, 154-NY and 27-PA) - after aides from Schurz relayed several insistent
messages to Howard requesting reinforcement. Coster placed his men on the northeast
outskirts of the town near a rail depot and a brick kiln just as Hays' and Avery's brigades were
entering Gettysburg in hot pursuit. Coster's regiments provided cover for Ames' 1st division
retreating from the Almshouse, but only at enormous cost. Hardly able to place his troops
before the assaulting forces were upon them, Coster's regiments not only did not have the
best of ground available for a defense, but were simultaneously hit in the front and on the right
flank. The enfilading from the right was generating a severe toll in casualties, and Coster
ordered his men to withdraw into the streets of Gettysburg just behind the remnants of Ames'
division.
The retreat was soon complicated by ensnarlment with troops from the rightwing of I Corps
who had also retreated into town from the northwest along the Chambersburg Pike and the
unfinished railway grade immediately north and parallel to the Pike, which like the Harrisburg
Road, emptied into the town square (known as the "Diamond"). The streets of Gettysburg
were crowded with artillery pieces on their limbers, supply and ambulance wagons, and with
far more men than they were ever designed to handle. This entanglement only intensified the
confusion. But this confusion did not result in the panic alleged in northern newspapers.
Confusion was exacerbated by the absence of a designated retreat route that, conjoined to
the numerous alleys and dead-end streets in the center of town, stymied an orderly
withdrawal. Memories of officers on the field indicated that those soldiers aware of the rallying
point at Cemetery Hill walked, did not run, back, defeated for the day, perhaps ashamed
(since Gettysburg was a Union town), but comporting themselves in a manner that did not
indicate great fright. It should be further noted that, while there were stragglers among whom
were many men who hid in town where they could (e.g., in cellars, water barrels, etc.), or fled
south of Gettysburg and hid in fields, these men were not aware that there was to be a rallying

point at Cemetery Hill. They had not been told so by their officers, and, thus, they felt the
defeat north of Gettysburg was not merely temporary.1168
Gettysburg (IV)
Aftermath (I)
The right wing of XI Corps Union forces (Barlow's division) was outnumbered about two-toone by Early's Confederates (his division plus Doles' brigade). Even had it not been, it would
not take a sophisticated military tactician to grasp that all the advantages of terrain, positioning
and surprise favored rebel forces. A good battlefield map of Gettysburg on which the
placement of the opposing regiments can be laid out makes the danger of Confederate
flanking movement of the Union line immediately and doubtlessly clear. Yet XI Corps was
once again blamed. No one appeared to notice that the great sacrifices of the soldiers of XI
Corps, and not merely those of the I Corps (and Buford's cavalry brigades), made it possible
to hold the high ground until further help arrived. (That high ground, Cemetery Hill, was
Hooker's fabled, sacrosanct ground of one's choosing, ground from which the battle would be
successfully waged in the coming two days.) This was the only military criterion with which the
performance of XI Corps could be evaluated.1169
Here, at Gettysburg in contradistinction to Chancellorsville, it was a matter of an incomplete
victory, since Lee's army was allowed to escape the North with only minor harassment. Thus,
in the immediate aftermath of the battle, the euphoria that a victory generated found the
newspapers mentioning that even XI Corps played a positive role in the battle.1170
However, as the meaning of Meade's failure (supported by the majority of his corps
commanders) to pursue the Army of Northern Virginia became clear, a scapegoat was
needed, available and pounced upon. In the objective historical sense, the outcome of
Gettysburg was little different from that of Chancellorsville. Lee's army, shaken but intact,
would live to fight again - as long as it had time to recuperate. In its eastern provincialism,
indecisiveness and caution, the officer leadership of the Army of the Potomac guaranteed that
much. Latter (28 January 1864) Congress singled out XI Corps commander O.O. Howard
(along with Meade) and expressed its gratitude for the victory at Gettysburg. In a roundabout
way, this commendation exonerated XI Corps. But in the interim the German speaking
soldiery of XI Corps was once again verbally assaulted, pilloried and scapegoated, for what
were exclusively command failures (Barlow, Howard, Slocum).
As the year 1864 opened the prospects for a victorious Union conclusion to the war before
year end appeared very hopeful. In light of this anticipation, and with the Congressional
resolution of thanks and a new proven general (Grant) over all the Union armies about to
assume command, the painful task of ascertaining command responsibility for the near
disaster at the first day of Gettysburg would not be necessary. Instead, since XI Corps was
expelled from the main eastern army, and in part broken up, there would no longer be any
need for recriminations (although every "American" would know in their heart of hearts that the
1168This account of the situation in town is drawn from Pfanz, Ibid, 45-58.
1169For the sole military criterion for evaluation XI Corps' performance, Greene, "Ibid," 74.
1170On 4 July, the New York Times offered the remark that the XI Corps had restored its honor following its shameful

behavior at Chancellorsville. But soon afterwards, stories began to appear in the northern newspapers the made all
the old accusations. Pula, Ibid, 117.
Ladley wrote: "Gen. Ames had the Div. at that time but they have put an infernal Dutchman in command of the Div.
and sent Ames to his Brig. His name is Shimmelpfennig or something of that kind, he is the General who hid in a shop
barrel in Gettysburg to keep from being taken prisoner. He is a poor excuse. Gen. Ames is a young man of good
judgment, a graduate of West Point and far superior to any Dutchman in the army. Western troops might as well be in
Halifax as here [in camp near Bern, Maryland]. The dutch run and leave us to fight, so we have to fight twice our
numbers or run too which we don't like to do at the first fire." The Ladley Letters, 16 July 1863, 146-147.

"Dutch" were cowards, soldiers who couldn't be trusted in a combat situation, etc., while
Howard would continue to be known as an abolitionist general, a devout Christian, a
temperance man, i.e., he shared many of the views of the Republican majority in Congress),
and the command hierarchy of the Union Army of the Potomac would not have to undergo any
(drastic) shakeup apart from that which the new general might at any rate be expected to
undertake.
Gettysburg (V)
Tactical Assessment
[Barlow's "Blunder"]
Nonetheless, the setbacks on the first day at Gettysburg were products of poor judgment
among the commanders on the field - beginning with Barlow. More than any other event,
Barlow's failure to refuse his line coupled with his order to the 1st division to advance to
Blocher's Knoll, once achieved, sealed the fate of the Union army north of Gettysburg on 1
July. For once in position, (a) the extreme right of Barlow's brigade was unprotected on its
flank, (b) the entire divisional line (after Schurz ordered the 3rd division forward to reconnect
the line) was spread far too thin not to invite a concentration against any of its now visibly
weakened points, and (c) a strained connection to the extreme right (north) of I Corps had
been completely severed thereby exposing both the flanks of XI Corps to enfilading fire and
leaving I Corps on its right in the air. Barlow's actions guaranteed the untenability of entire XI
Corps line once the new position was established.1171
Barlow's "blunder" was complicated by events as they unfolded once the retreat back into the
town of Gettysburg had been carried out. Neither Howard nor Schurz had made provisions for
an orderly retreat. The mass of soldiers and military vehicles in the streets of the town, as well
as the lack of a retreat route, allowed the Confederates in pursuit to take plenty of Union
soldiers as captives. In this context, it should be note that among these were members of 45NY, a German speaking regiment, who, trapped along with other troops in buildings along one
of the towns main streets, refused to surrender. By sundown only rebel soldiers occupied the
town, and after discussion, it was decided, after destroying arms and cartridges, to surrender.
The captured men refused parole and, with the retreating rebel army three days later, were
shipped south to Confederate prisons, many of whom ended up at Andersonville. These
"Dutch cowards" had hoped "to encumber the enemy," cost him in minimal prisoner
provisioning, in that little extra time marching prisoners southward would require as well as the
loss of troops assigned to guarding prisoners, "believing that the Union army would capture
the cripple[d] foe and thereby effect their release."1172
1171For confirmation of the centrality of Barlow's "blunder" for the outcome of fighting at the end of the day, see the

contemporary, meticulous researched tactical accounts of Hassler, Crisis at the Crossroads, 69-70, 78, 80-83, 85, and
Greene, "From Chancellorsville to Cemetery Hill," 76-79, 82, 89, 91. Also Pfanz, Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill, 41.
Note also the remarks by Col. Andrew L. Harris, (commander, 75-OH and temporary brigade commander when Ames
assumed command of Barlow's division): "Arrived at Gettysburg at about 1 p.m., and was sent immediately to the
northwest part of the city and placed in line of battle ready to meet the enemy on the right center of Second Brigade,
First Division; was ordered forward [by Barlow] in line of battle to receive the attack of the enemy. Advanced to the
edge of the woods, when both flanks, being unsupported [in the air] and exposed to an enfilading fire, were
compelled to fall back with heavy loss in killed, wounded, and missing; rallied again the few men left, and fell back to
the [Cemetery] hill, which we now occupy" (Emphasis added). "Report of Col. Andrew L. Harris," WR, Ser. 1, V. 27,
Part 1, 715.
Fritsch commented to Albert Ames on the evening of 1 July while both were on Cemetery Hill that, "Ewell must have
had fifty times more men than we [i.e., than Gilsa's brigade], and I think that we were posted entirely too far
out"[emphasis added]. Butts, Ibid, 78.
1172The story of captured soldiers of the 45-NY infantry regiment is related by Pfanz, Ibid, 49. The citation appears as
a legend on the 45-NY Gettysburg memorial plaque, cited in Ibid, 415, n. 12. The 45-NY was, like almost all Union
regiments at Gettysburg (and before 1864) a volunteer outfit. It is to the heroic behavior of those captured men of the

[Slocum]
Howard, in particular, may or may not be forgiven for designating a route of withdrawal. What
was clear before the fighting at Gettysburg even began to unfold was that the XI Corps'
commanding general, prior to Chancellorsville possessed of a respectable command record,
would not be humiliated again. He would order his troops at all costs to fight. This much could
also be said of the common soldiers (and their officers) themselves. Regardless of what was
thought of the "Dutch," Howard's resolve was at least well known among leading officers of
the Army of the Potomac. At crucial junctures, however, it was ignored.
Just after 11:30 am as he learned of the death of Reynolds, about 2 pm, around or shortly
after 3:20 pm and at 4:10 pm, Howard send aides with messages to Henry W. Slocum,
commanding officer of XII Corps, explaining the situation in and around Gettysburg and
requesting he urgently move his corps forward in order to assist those Union army troops
already on the battlefield. In the first two instances, similar messages were also sent to Daniel
Sickles commanding III Corps. The messages to Slocum were of special import to Howard,
since the latter knew that XII Corps was the closest Union army formation to the actual field of
battle. In fact, the regiments of Slocum's command were, by no later than 11:30 am on 1 July,
just 4 miles southeast of the center of the town of Gettysburg at Two Taverns on the
Baltimore Pike. This was a distance that could have been traversed by the entire corps in no
more than 1 hours with the advance elements coming up and positionable before 1 pm - had
they been so ordered.
Of course, it was a hot and muggy day, but then I Corps and particularly XI Corps had moved
onto and were engaged on the same hot, muggy day - and Howard's troops had further to
come. (Moreover, Slocum's troops had had plenty of rest in the past three days, having
marched only about 13 miles on the two previous days.) Yet XII Corps did not arrive at the
south end of the battlefield area until approximately 4:30 pm. Slocum (some 12 years) later
related that he did not receive any messages before 3 pm, and that the fire heard from west of
Gettysburg had the sound of a cavalry duel involving merely a few pieces of artillery. (A sound
dulling may have been created by the specific geological formations between the battlefield
and Slocum's corps. On the other hand,) other officers reported around 1 pm they were
suddenly alerted by the sound of artillery, a sound that later became a steady roar, as well as
the distinct sound of musket fire. To the northwest, they saw shells bursting and smoke rising.
Further, Slocum was operating under assumptions derived from a circular Meade had issued
that morning. That circular indicated the Army of the Potomac, having prevented [!] rebel
forces from assaulting Harrisburg, would look to fall back upon a defensive line inside
Maryland and not assume an offensive posture unless the success of the outcome was
rendered certain.
Slocum was, moreover, anxious about the repercussions flowing from any decision to
immediately advance on Gettysburg: He knew the an offensively-minded officer, one holding
Meade's full confidence, had been assigned command of the entire left wing of the Union
army, and that moreover this officer, now dead, had engaged the enemy. He was fully justified
in moving forward, for example, to cover a retreat of the forces in the field to higher ground (a
retreat which he could have ordered). Such an action would have been, as Abner Doubleday
(commander of I Corps succeeding Reynolds) stated in his account of the battle, in "the
general interest of the Army." Furthermore, Slocum could have, as Doubleday also pointed
out, sent an aide with all dispatch to Meade inquiring whether or not he wished to fight at
Gettysburg. He did not. Instead, Slocum chose to delay, for, ranking Howard on the basis of
his earlier promotion to major general, he would, having taken the field, have had to take
45th, and other like them, that the epigraph to this Appendix most adequately applies.

command. It was this responsibility he sought to avoid, and it is this that singularly accounts
for his temporizing that afternoon. (He did not appear on East Cemetery Hill until 5:30 pm well after the retreats through town by I and XI Corps had been effected, and a defensive line
on the hill established.)
Slocum had indicated as much in remarks on the afternoon of 1 July to Lt. Col. Charles
Morgan, an officer assigned to Hancock's staff. Having reached the battlefield, he stated to
Morgan that he had seen the stragglers, a situation which to him was reminiscent of
Chancellorsville, and, accordingly, didn't desire to assume command, since, Morgan
recounted, it "might make him responsible for a condition of affairs over which he had no
control." So he evaded his command responsibility. However, had the temporizing Slocum
immediately brought up his brigades at the earliest opportunity - instead of permitting his
soldiery to take a noon meal and nap, XII Corps regiments could have been on the battlefield
both west and north of Gettysburg before 2 pm - in plenty of time to reinforce the two corps in
the field and not merely prevent the retreat but, in our view more importantly, to prevent the
huge number of deaths, injuries and capture that were to occur later that day. But Slocum,
exhibiting the mechanism and structure of prejudice which rationalized his command failure,
reactively and automatically assumed the worst about the "Dutch" soldiery.1173
Gettysburg (VI)
Barlow's Rationalization
That prejudice was generalized among officers of the Army of the Potomac - especially those
less than fully competent. Francis Barlow presents a perfect example of both its mechanism
and structure. Having made the unauthorized, and at least retrospectively foolhardy and costly
command decisions that negatively determined that fate of XI Corps that day, he, of course,
immediately found fault with the German speaking soldiery in his and Schimmelpfennig's
divisions. In August, he stated to a friend that "these Dutch won't fight. Their officers say so &
they say so themselves & they ruin all with whom they come in contact." Obviously, the victims
of his ill-considered decisions are to blame, as they themselves admit; and, moreover, their
cowardice, neglectful behavior victimizes the innocent, destroying the reputation of all those,
namely, their commanding officer, with whom they deal. Howard himself, as we shall now
show, held a version of this attitude.1174
On the evening of 2 July, long after XI Corps had regrouped and deployed on East Cemetery
Hill, Hays' and Hokes' (Avery's) Confederate brigades of Early's division (Ewell's corps) made
an assault on the men and artillery massed on the hill. Prior to the fighting that evening,
Samuel Carroll, commanding the 3rd brigade, 3rd division of Hancock's II Corps had been
1173Howard's performance on 1 July 1863 is heavily censured (for a rash report to Meade concerning the fight by I

Corps west of town, a failure to exercise real control over the Union forces on the battlefield, his impressionist grasp
and cavalier dismissal of concerns of I Corps officers, his failure to act on his understanding of the danger of being
flanking northeast of town, and, of course, his initial petty challenge to Winfield Scott Hancock's authority on the field
once the latter arrived) by Hassler, Ibid, 65, 117, 123, 154-155; a balanced defense of Howard is presented in
Greene, "Ibid.," 89-91.
For Howard's requests to Slocum for urgent assistance, Greene, "Ibid," 72, 76, 80, 82.
The account of Slocum is taken from Pfanz, Ibid, 89, 92-98, and also Edwin Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign,
312-313, 315; for Doubleday's evaluation of Slocum's failure to advance, Ibid, 98; for Morgan, Ibid, 97; for the account
of officers other than Slocum hearing fire of a major engagement, Coddington, Ibid, 311.
Abner Doubleday was definitely abused by Howard in his premature report to Meade concerning an alleged late
morning collapse of I Corps west of town. (Doubleday was removed from command by Meade the next day.) In fact,
Buford and Doubleday were the real heroes, aside from the countless, unnamed and unacknowledged cavalry
troopers and ordinary soldiers of I Corps, on 1 July. For Doubleday's role in holding ground until reinforcements
arrived, Hassler, Ibid, 54, 108, 116, 131, 153, 154-155, esp. 120.
1174Barlow to Robert Treat Paine, 12 August 1863, cited by Greene, "Ibid," 88.

ordered from his position south and west of Cemetery Hill on the Taneytown Road to assist
Howard's defenses on the eastern side of the hill. Four of Carroll's regiments were lightly
involved in the fighting that evening. After an assault that had broken through the line on the
poorest defensive terrain occupied by Gilsa's brigade and was shortly thereafter repelled, both
Ames (commanding Barlow's division) and corps commander Howard pleaded with Carroll not
to return his regiments to their position on the Taneytown Road. In his report to Hancock,
Carroll stated that Howard requested he stay where he was since, "He could not rely on his
troops and had not any ... he could trust to the front." But, as Pfanz indicates, it was the XI
Corps soldiery that had thrown the attack back, and Carroll's troops had confronted only a
"spent assault" that "needed only a nudge to send it ebbing down the hill."1175
Gettysburg (VII)
Aftermath (II): Meade's Failure to Pursue Lee's Army
In the aftermath of the three day battle of Gettysburg, various formations were assigned tasks
of pursuing Lee's Army. The effort was half-hearted. The Army of Northern Virginia was still in
Maryland: With its back against the Potomac River it waited for waters fed by spring melting to
recede and the fords to become crossable. Lee's army was heavily damaged and (Lee's
willingness aside) not well-prepared to immediately undertake another major engagement.
Meade called a council of war on 13 July, putting to question to his corps commanders:
Should we attack? Along with Pleasanton and Wadsworth, Howard, expressing his own as
well as XI Corps' sentiment, argued Lee's left flank was weak, successfully assailable, and,
thus, voted for an assault; however, five other corps commanders voted against it, and Meade
decided to allow the rebel army to cross safely back into Virginia. The pursuit, cautious to be
sure, continued.
Control of the Orange & Alexander formed the lifeline for the Army of the Potomac as it
various corps movement carefully and slowly southward in northern Virginia. The railroad was
under frequent assault from irregulars (e.g., Mosby's command), and on 18 August XI Corps
was detailed to garrison the line to protect the army's supply lines. During the month of
September, XI Corps was detached to guard the line of communications of the Army of the
Potomac along the Rapidan River opposite Lee's army.1176
Gettysburg (VIII)
Aftermath (III): Reorganization of the Army of the Potomac
The recriminations reemerged and continued following Gettysburg, and officers again
resigned as a consequence. If there was no justice in the treatment of XI Corps, "punishment"
this time was carried out under the guise of what in other respects was a necessary
reorganization for the Army of the Potomac as a whole. Losses in the XI Corps, particularly
those regiments that had been on the right of the line on the north of Gettysburg on 1 July,
had again been heavy. This was, of course, true of other corps also.1177
I Corps had been devastated, III Corps had suffered, and the distinctive identities of both
disappeared in the general reorganization that followed that autumn. John Reynolds' I Corps
was assimilated into Warren's V Corps. I Corps had been ruined in its successful defense of
the western approaches to Gettysburg on 1 July (1st day) - defense, conducted along with
1175Account of fighting on East Cemetery Hill, Pfanz, Ibid, 268-275; Carroll's report to Hancock, Ibid, 274; Pfanz's

evaluation, Ibid, 275.

1176Hartwell Osborn, Trials and Triumphs, 108, 110-111, 113; Pula, History of a German-Polish Civil War Brigade, 9293.
1177For resignations following the national abuse heaped on XI Corps after Chancellorsville, Butts, Ibid, 69, and for
similar resignations in the recriminatory aftermath of Gettysburg, Pula, Ibid, 91, and For Liberty and Justice, 117.

Buford's earlier arriving cavalry brigade, that allowed the Army of the Potomac time to
concentrate and mount the heights of Cemetery and Culp Hills. (Reynolds himself, perhaps
the best and most aggressive officer in the eastern armies, had been shot in the head and
died instantly on 1 June while organizing this defense and encouraging his men on.)
Dan Sickles' III Corps was absorbed into Hancock's II Corps. Sickles' corps had been severely
damaged but not ruined, as its commander brought it down - against orders - into the flatland
immediately west of Cemetery Hill. Here in Peachtree Orchard on 2 June, III Corps suffered
heavy losses. In an outcome that must have been satisfying to some of the naturalized citizensoldiers of XI Corps, Sickles, XI Corps' great accuser in the aftermath of 2 May at
Chancellorsville, never regained his command following recovery from a wound he suffered 2
June.
XI Corps underwent a wholesale reorganization, but retained its identity. It is not that Meade
did not attempt to officially disband the corps, not because he hadnt tried but because on
purely military grounds Stanton's War Department rejected his proposal to do so.
Nonetheless, regiments and brigades that had taken heavy causalities in the past three
months were partially reformed, while some regiments were reassigned to other commands.
For example, Wladamir Krzyzanowsk's (3rd division, 2nd) brigade lost the 82-OH and gained
68-NY and 141-NY; and, on 2 August, the 1st division (Devens' at Chancellorsville, Barlow's at
Gettysburg), reinforced by ten regiments, was transferred to the South Carolina coast to
augment troops there. Howard retained his command, Alexander Schimmelpfennig lost his
(having contracted malaria after Gettysburg, and, returning in 1864, was without a command),
and the Corps most disgruntled "native" (and nativist) commanders, Francis Barlow and
Charles Devens, were reassigned. Barlow was given command of the (four brigade) 1st
division of Hancock's II Corps. Devens had suffered his third combat wound at
Chancellorsville. When he returned to active service, he did so as a staff officer attached to
the Army of the James. He ended up in that army's XXIV Corps formed 3 December 1864 with
command of its 3rd division. Adelbert Ames was also transferred out (1st brigade commander,
2nd division, XI Corps at Gettysburg), reassigned to South Carolina attached to Quincy
Gilmore's South Carolina command. He returned to take a divisional command in William
"Baldy" Smith XVIII Corps. He fought with it as it was detached for duty with the Army of the
Potomac at Cold Harbor (June 1864), and went on to command the 3rd division in the X
Corps of the Army of the James (formerly Gilmore's command in South Carolina that was
incorporated in the Army of the James in spring 1864).1178

1178Meade's plan was to dismember Schurz's "German" division and reduce its soldiers to guards for the Alexander &

Orange railroad, to give one division of the corps to Howard and then give him command of II Corps, and to transfer
the other division to XII Corps to make good its depleted fighting strength. The War Department's rejection of the plan
was premised on the calculation that it would take the entire existing XI Corps to guard the Alexander & Orange. This,
as we have seen, was what was done. See Meade to Halleck, WR, Ser. I, V. XXVII, P. 1, 105; for Barlow, Devens and
Ames, their respective entrees in Patricia Faust (ed.), Historical Times. An Illustrated History of the Civil War, also
Gordon Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, 456 (Barlow), William Glenn Robertson, Back Door to Richmond, 119,
(Devens), 59, 257 (Ames), and Noah Andre Trudeau, The Last Citadel, 378, 493 (Devens, Ames); for Krzyzanowski's
brigade and the 1st division, Pula, Ibid, 93, Osborn, Ibid, 111, 113.

Part V
An Eastern Military Formation in the Union Armies of the West
Chattanooga 1863 (I)
In latter September 1863, following a costly defeat (and measured in casualties it was costly
for both sides), the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosencrans retreated from
the battlefield along Chickamauga Creek, in Georgia east of Missionary Ridge just south
southeast of Chattanooga, back to Chattanooga. The opposing, rebel army pursed
Rosencrans forces. The northernmost portion of Missionary Ridge, running north-south, lay
just east of the city of Chattanooga, and along its heights the Confederate commander,
Braxton Bragg, stationed the bulk of two corps (Breckinridges and Hardees). Due south of
Chattanooga some 3 miles from the center of the city and across (rising south of) the
Tennessee River, stood the northernmost spur of Lookout Mountain. The northern tip of the
mountain (back, roughly 1 miles to the resort village of Summertown) was, up until the
morning of 5 November, held by Longstreets corps. 1179 Thereafter, Lookout Mountain, from its
northernmost spur down the steep slopes to the river, was held by three brigades of
Stevensons division (Breckinridges corps). Moving south along the mountain ridge back to
Summertown, three brigades of John Mudwell Jacksons division (Hardees corps) were
posted. In the valley between Missionary Ridge and the northernmost point of Lookout
Mountain, a thin line of regiments was strung out. On the extreme Confederate left (east of
Lookout Mountain), pickets were extended down the Tennessee River to dispute any resupply
crossings undertaken by Union forces. (see Map 18).
The final element of Braggs command was a fully cavalry corps commanded by Joseph
Wheeler. Rebel cavalry moved about pretty much without Union opposition. For example, on 1
October, Wheelers forces had intercepted, pillaged and destroyed a food supply caravan in
the Sequatchie valley (northwest of Chattanooga) along one of the four main resupply routes
open to the Union forces, now effectively trapped in Chattanooga. Earlier Confederate cavalry
troopers had burned two rail bridges on the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad west of the
city. Other routes into Chattanooga existed (namely, a portion of the Tennessee River,
unnavigable this time of year, and an uneven road roughly paralleling the railroad). Effectively,
rebel cavalry had cut off all overland routes of resupply. Rosencrans army of the Cumberland
was hemmed in, if not under siege, and his army was beginning to starve.1180
1179Prior to 5 November, what had been Braggs third corps was commanded by James Longstreet. The corps itself

had been temporarily detached from Lees Army of Northern Virginia to assist the Confederate, Braggs, Army of
Tennessee. Bragg and Longstreet had had a difficult relation, not the least because the Army of Tennessee was a
hotbed of intrigue with a large number of the general officers opposed to Braggs command. The man was
contentious, aloof, and often militarily foolish. Matters were not helped by the fact that Longstreet himself coveted
Braggs command and had been disputatious, contrary and outright insubordinate. At Jefferson Davis suggestion,
and in full knowledge that it would severely, perhaps fatally, weaken his army - since the intent was to allow
Longstreets corps to make it way back to Virginia, Bragg, frantic to rid himself of one more rebellious general, on 3
November ordered Longstreet to detach his corps to Knoxville in order to rid the area of Ambrose Burnsides Union
army IX Corp. It should be noted the discussion (below) of fighting at and near Wauhatchie told place prior to the
departure of Longstreets corps.
1180For the depositions of rebel Army of Tennessee around Chattanooga (circa 20 November), Grant, Personal
Memoirs, 357, and Peter Cozzens, The Shipwreck of their Hope, 118; for Bragg and Longstreet, Ibid, 23-26, 103-104
(detachment of Longstreets corps); for Wheelers cavalry and the resupply routes, Ibid, 17-19. A back road, more like
a deer trail, ran off the main, improved wagon road into Chattanooga. However, as events would prove, it was not
passable, a deadly quagmire of mud in the late autumn rainy season around Chattanooga.
West of Chattanooga, between Browns Ferry and Kelleys Ferry, the Tennessee River ran through a narrow
mountainous gorge which on the descent downriver created a rapids. A steamboat had to be towed by men with
ropes pulling it through the rapids from the shore (Grant, Ibid, 359). Such an exercise would have been easily
disrupted by a small force of rebel pickets.

On 17 October, Grant met war Secretary Stanton in a train car outside Indianapolis. Stanton
presented him with an order creating and appointing him commander of the Department of the
Mississippi essentially everything west of the Alleghenies. Stanton also offered Grant the
opportunity to remove Rosencrans, which, in fact, the general did immediately, replacing the
Army of the Cumberland commander with George Thomas. Grant, in turn, proceeded to
Chattanooga in order to personally oversee the relief of Thomas army.1181
Once in Chattanooga (arriving 23 October via a tortuous route that revealed to him the
deathtrap for mules, horses and wagons the rain drenched back road into Chattanooga had
become), he approved a plan that W.F. Baldy Smith had worked out to effect creation of a
new route of resupply to the beleaguered Army of the Cumberland. Now Grant was never one
to seek merely to redraw from a tenuous situation. Upon his arrival, he instructed Sherman to
forego his activities in Mississippi and to move his Army of the Tennessee to Chattanooga.
With an independent command under Joseph Hooker now southeast of Bridgeport (roughly
thirty miles west of Chattanooga), Grant was already preparing to go over to the offensive.1182
On 23 September, Lincoln had authorized an independent command of 18,000 troops under
Hooker. It was detached from the Army of the Potomac and ordered to Chattanooga to
reinforce the Army of the Cumberland (ultimately answerable to that armys commander).
These troops were formed by XI and XII Corps, still under Howard and Slocum respectively.
Slocum, anticipating having to serve under Hooker again, threatened to resign his
commission. To accommodate him, the War Department assigned him to head a division
(detached from his corps) that would guard the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad. Slocum
remained in the army with the knowledge he would not be subject to Hookers command.
Traveling by rail, in six days Hookers force had reached Nashville. Thereafter, it was routed
by rail to Bridgeport. When Grant entered Chattanooga, Hooker (who Grant and his party had
met and passed) and his command, having been issued orders by Rosencrans (prior to his
removal from command) to halt, was strung out between Stevenson and Bridgeport.1183
On 24 October, Grant approved Smiths plan for moving supplies deadheaded at Bridgeport
into Chattanooga. Thomas then issued instructions to Hooker to move his force (minus
Slocums division now guarding the rail lines between Murfreesboro and Bridgeport) eastward
following the rail line into the lower reaches of Lookout Valley (parallel to and west of Lookout
Mountain). From here, Hookers force was to descent the valley, to move north(eastward)
toward the Tennessee River in order both to guard a river crossing and ultimately to deploy
itself for an assault on rebel positions on the northernmost spur of the mountain. By midafternoon of 28 October, the lead column of Howards XI Corps (Steinwehr division),
confronting very little rebel resistance, had already reached Wauhatchie, just three miles from
the Tennessee River at Moccasin Point (just opposite the northernmost tip of Lookout
Mountain). Marching nearly due north from Wauhatchie (as opposed to marching northeast
alongside Lookout Mountain), Howards lead units reached Browns Ferry on the Tennessee
1181Ibid, 348.
1182For the mountainous deathtrap, Ibid, 354; for Smiths plan, Ibid, 348 and Cozzens, Ibid, 40-53 (a detailed

examination of that plan based on Smiths own account).

1183For the creation, size and detachment of Hookers command, Pula, Ibid, 93, and Cozzens, Ibid, 18.
The Nashville and Chattanooga railroad, beginning in Nashville, ended in Stevenson, Alabama. From Stevenson, the
east-west Memphis and Charleston railroad (which begins in Memphis) runs northeasterly to Bridgeport, Alabama,
then mostly due east to and through Chattanooga to Cleveland, Tennessee where it ends, running into the northsouth Tennessee and Georgia railroad. Nonetheless, the rail line running form Stevenson through Chattanooga is
conventionally referred to as the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad.
Bridgeport, on the Tennessee River about a mile due south of the Tennessee-Alabama line, is west southwest of
Chattanooga 29 miles by rail (20 miles in a line). The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War, Plates XCLIX, CL, and
CLIV.

River within an hour and a half. With a heavy force now posted here, the last contestable point
at which resupply could be challenged was now firmly in Union army hands. Hooker, however,
carelessly deployed his forces. Schurzs and Steinwehrs (XI Corps) divisions were allowed to
bivouac where they halted in fields a half-mile above (south of) Browns Ferry. The remainder
of XI Corps was posted from this ferry downriver (westward), a very winding 14-15 miles, to
Kelleys Ferry. John Gearys tiny division was positioned on the Browns Ferry Road back up
Lookout Valley at the railroad station of Wauhatchie. The carelessness in deployment of a
portion of Hooker command aside, this force nonetheless controlled the cracker line and
effectively reopened the wagon road for Union resupply of Chattanooga (see Map 18). In the
positions that Hookers command now assumed, it formed the rightwing of the Union forces at
Chattanooga.1184
Chattanooga 1863 (II)
Once a small Union force had temporarily secured Brown's Ferry (and it was secured firmly by
the arrival of advanced elements of Howard's XI Corps), Hooker's command had lifted the
"siege" of Chattanooga virtually unopposed. From the heights of Lookout Mountain Bragg and
Longstreet had gloomily watched XI Corps marched into positions along the Brown's Ferry
Road. The rarefied air there may or may not have been full of recriminations, but there is no
doubt that Bragg demanded Longstreet undertake an effort to reverse this course of events.
Though an assault upon the Brown's Ferry position would have been costly, and perhaps
ultimately futile, it was also the key to Union resupply of Chattanooga. Nonetheless,
Longstreet chose to attack what he took to be a small isolated Union force at Wauhatchie
(visible from Lookout Mountain), presumably to get in the Union "rear" and thereby to compel
Hooker to detach some of his strength from, weakening, the Brown's Ferry force to assist that
rear. In point of fact, that small Union force was Hooker's remaining XII Corps division, albeit a
depleted one of a mere 1,500 men, commanded by John Geary. While reminded by Bragg
that he had his entire corps at his disposal for the effort to reclose the Union supply line,
Longstreet assigned this attack to a single brigade (Jenkins' brigade of Hood's division), and
gave, culpably, no instructions to any of his divisional commanders (Jenkins included) to
support John Bratton, temporarily in command of Jenkins' brigade. For his part, Jenkins,
temporarily in command of Hood's division, instructed brigadier Evander Law to take his own
brigade and that of Roberston's and position them on the high ground between Brown's Ferry
and Wauhatchie overlooking the Brown's Ferry Road. From there Law was to intercept and
destroy any column send back to aid the small Union force in the rear (Geary's division at
Wauhatchie). Sometime around 10:30 pm that evening the attack was made.1185
The attack surprised Geary. He was forced to feel his way in the dark, having to refront
several of his regiments and to engage in sharp fighting. Yet, there was little doubt about the
outcome. Bratton's brigade was no match for even an undersized division. If the effort to
retake this vital section of the Union supply route into Chattanooga was at best feeble, Hooker
for his part had no knowledge of it. Hooker had been warned earlier in the day that his troop
depositions were lax, perhaps seriously flawed. At the moment guns could be heard in the
direction of Wauhatchie, he (camped nearby) immediately detailed the nearest formation,
Schurz's division - ordering his lead brigade, to break camp and rush to the aid of Geary.
Howard had already ordered Schurz's and Steinwehr's divisions back toward Geary's soldiers.
Steinwehr got his forces on the road faster and consequently was in the lead on the (Brown's
Ferry) road toward Wauhatchie. Orlando Smith's brigade of Steinwehr division was in the
vanguard when fired upon in the flank from Alabamians (Law's brigade) just before reaching
1184 Cozzen, Ibid, 51-53, 72-74; James Pula, For Liberty and Justice, 125-130.
1185Cozzens, Ibid, 78-81.

that point at which the Nashville and Chattanooga veered sharply eastward away from the
(north-south Brown's Ferry) road. Smith fronted his regiments toward the firing (to the left) and
undertook an assault. This fighting was fierce, lasting a couple hours. Smith's regiments, the
33-MA and 73-PA in particular, took a real beating, getting the worst of the fighting (against
entrenched, hidden troops), yet eventually took the hilltop (thereafter known as Smith's Hill)
held by Law's Alabamians (and Robertson's Texans). They did so only after Law ordered a
withdrawal. Law, having been dubious about the entire operation from the start, having been
informed that Jenkin's brigade had failed in its assault on Geary's division and having some
indication that Smith's brigade was about to be heavily reinforced, withdrew. But before the
fighting had ended here, Hooker, as well as his aides, had instructed two of Schurz's three
brigades (Hecker's and Krzyzanowski's) to halt and form up for an assault on the two
interlocking hills held by Law's entire command. Schurz was unaware of these halts, as he
was with his lead brigade (Tyndale's) that had already passed Smith's Hill. Just before the
fighting closed at Smith's Hill, Schurz's march with Tyndale's brigade was countermanded by a
ubiquitous aide of Hooker's (Lt. Paul Oliver): Schurz was instructed to return to the scene of
the fighting back off of Brown's Ferry Road. Upon his return, Schurz (looking for the return of
his two brigades) found Hooker who severely censured him for failing to get all his forces to
Wauhatchie. Schurz was, of course, mystified.1186
Schurz on Trial
In the days following the events at Wauhatchie and Smith's Hill on the Union right, Hooker
publicly elaborated his private criticisms of (both) Schurz (and Hecker). Hooker's remarks
were clearly obfuscation aimed at covering up his neglectful troop deployment once having
reached Brown's Ferry. Schurz, in particular, had unforgivably protested the verbal abuse and
scapegoating of his division after Chancellorsville (and Gettysburg). Schurz, moreover,
remained the most powerful spokesman in the German-American community - one which
Lincoln as a politician could not and did not fail to heed. And, for Hooker, if it was not enough
to have an outspoken "Dutchman" grating on his nerves, not only had he, Hooker, lost his
command, he was, to boot, still stuck with Schurz in his new (vastly reduced) command. With
his integrity personally impugned, this time Schurz did more than write letters of protest, and
futility request his reports be written into the official records. This time he insisted on a court of
inquiry. Since Hooker had long since fallen from his commanding heights as general of the
leading Union army (Amy of the Potomac) and was no longer in favor especially in the West
(where it is doubtful he had even been), George Thomas, commander of the Army of the
Cumberland, authorized the inquiry.1187
The Court of Inquiry was held at XI Corps headquarters in January 1864. The most striking
characteristic of those officers (all holding commands in XI Corps) making up the official Court
was their rank: They were all subordinates of Hooker. They consisted of Col. Adophus
Buschbeck, presiding officer, Col James Wood (2nd brigade, 2nd division), Col. P.H. Jones
(154-NY) and Capt. W.H. Lambert (33-NJ), recorder. The inquiry itself was originally called to
respond to Schurz's request to answer public charges of misconduct make by Hooker against
Hecker and himself. But when the proceedings convened, it was discovered Thomas' Special
Order allowed inquiry into any aspects of Schurz's command. Schurz objected (since, among
1186For the fight at Wauhatchie, Ibid, 83-90, for that at Smith's Hill and its immediate environs, Ibid, 91-99, for both

Osborn, Ibid, 122-125; for the role of XI Corps in the battle of Chattanooga and its immediate aftermath, Ibid, 127138.
1187The Court of Inquiry was authorized by George Thomas' Special Order No. 23. The proceedings of the court can
be found in WR, Ser. I, Vol 23, pt. 1, 137-216. Also consult Pula, Ibid, 137-157.

other reasons, not all officers would be present to defend their conduct), but when referred
back to him Thomas ruled the inquiry should proceed on the basis on which it was convened.
In the course of the inquiry, Schurz and Hecker called several staff officers - their own, and
additionally Capt. Robert H. Hall and Lt. Paul Oliver on Hooker's staff and Maj. Charles
Howard on O.O. Howard's XI Corps staff. The upshot of their collective testimony was clear:
Schurz was originally ordered by Hooker to proceed to Wauhatchie to assist and reinforce
Geary's division. Along the way, in the confusion of the fight around Smith's Hill, Hooker
countermanded this order halting both Hecker and Krzyzanowski's brigades. Somewhat later,
the last brigade, Tyndale's, was also instructed to return. Hooker had no grounds, outside
lying to cover his own inadequate preparations, to accuse Schurz of failing to undertake relief
of Geary.
When the testimony was completed, the Court officers were left to evaluate the testimony and
to rule on the validity of the charges made by Hooker. The Court undoubtedly agonized: After
all, when the work of the inquiry was terminated, these officers would return to their units all
ultimately under Hooker's command. Hooker had obviously lied. Did a Court composed of
subordinates dare to read a pronouncement to this effect into the official record? In the event,
the Court ruled that because of darkness and the distance involved, regardless of who
stopped Schurz's brigades, it would have been impossible to reach Geary before the fighting
in Wauhatchie stopped. This much would have been enough. But, contrary to the testimony
and in a patent effort to appease Hooker, the Court also ruled that Krzyzanowski, in halting,
had failed to follow orders thereby causing a delay. Krzyzanowski, however, was not present
to defend himself. His brigade had been detailed to Granger's command, which was
ostensibly pursuing Longstreet in eastern Tennessee. An absent, previously uncharged officer
was scapegoated in order to preserve Hooker's reputation. Command, we suggest, still had its
prerogatives.1188
Dissolution of IX Corps
In January 1864, the terms of enlistment of the many men of the regiments of XI Corps
expired. The vast majority of the men, over seventy-five percent, "veteranized," that is, they
signed on for the duration of the war, taking, in turn, a full month's furlough in which most
returned home (both to visit families, friends and to recruit for their regiments). These
naturalized central European Union veterans were committed to the war for emancipation
beyond anything abuse could undo.1189
Yet, in early April 1864, with official Washington's and Grant's blessings, Sherman combined
XI and XII Corps to form XX Corps and integrated it into George Thomas' Army of the
Cumberland. He, Sherman, did this partially to strengthen and increase the fighting efficiency
of Thomas' army, and partially to deal with the problem of Joe Hooker (i.e., remove his
independence while retaining a fighting field commander), and, with less notoriety, to solve a
longstanding problem in the Union armies (that of the distinct identity of "foreign" soldiers).
Hooker, in turn, reorganized his divisional and brigade commands thereby destroying the
separate, corporate identity of XI Corps. This destruction was symbolized most clearly in the
removal of the old XI Corps insignia, a crescent, and the substitution of the XII Corps insignia,
a five-pointed star, on the uniform of all XX Corps soldiers. It was effectively a victory for the
1188"The astounding conclusion that the Court reached regarding Colonel Krzyzanowski's conduct was more than

absurd, it was criminal. Krzyzanowski was never previously accused. He had no way of knowing his conduct would be
evaluated. He was not even present to defend himself. The Court never pursued his case during the Inquiry, and the
preponderant bulk of the testimony that was presented certainly pointed to no culpability on the part of the
unsuspecting colonel." Pula, Ibid, 156-157.
1189For "veteranization," Pula, The History of a German-Polish Civil War Brigade, 94, Osborn, Ibid, 138.

nativists, who thereby indicated: "You can fight and die in this war, but you must not and
cannot fight on terms other than those recognized but us. We fight to preserve the Union,
never mind old Abe's proclamation. It must never be admitted that you in your desire to realize
social justice anticipated the real, underlying logic of the war [that the destruction of slavery
not Union integrity was driving events]. Not only are you no better than we are, we intend to
keep you down by subordinating you, your commands, your esprit, even your appearance to
us." As if to emphasis the same point more directly, Sherman had refused to allow the
formation of black regiments within the armies under his command during the Atlanta
Campaign (or during the marches through Georgia and the Carolinas).1190
Not only did the corps loose its separate identity, its regiments were scattered largely
throughout the divisions making up the new XX Corps. The old leadership of XI Corps (with
the single exception, not surprisingly, of Buschbeck) also disappeared. Steinwehr and Schurz,
the most outspoken German officer (of those who had defended their soldiers' 1863
performances), would not hold commands for the rest of the war. Steinwehr resigned his
commission at the rebuff, Schurz accepted an offer as a special aide to Lincoln. Similarly, the
German or German-Polish brigadiers of the old XI Corps were also left without commands.
For example, Krzyzanowski's brigade, dismantled and shuttled about to separate units, lost its
integrity and its commander was reassigned to a new Nashville-based brigade charged with
guarding the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad. Putting old XII Corps officers over the XI
Corps counterparts was ostensibly, for Hooker, a matter of efficiency and, no doubt,
prerogative (something even the bigot Sherman could, his distaste for Hooker aside,
approve). In point of fact, or, better, as a matter of motives, it was revenge for the humiliation,
from Hooker's perspective, that subordinates had subjected him to by bringing him before the
Court of Inquiry of three months past. The inquiry had been the last act (one of self-defense)
in the existence of the XI Corps.1191
As the Union armies entered the spring 1864 campaign, there was a great and renewed hope
that a new, yet tried, proven and highly successful General, now commanding all Union forces
in the field and armed with a coordinated strategy, could bring the war to a close by year's
end. There no longer appeared to be a need for socially massive denial, unjust abuse and a
national scapegoat; no longer need for the governing Republican party-based Administration
to be prepared to evade the popular and political consequences of another failed campaign;
and, finally, no longer need to have in place a straw man to blame for command failures (that
psychological mechanism that automatically came into play among officers of the Army of the
Potomac) either to circumvent feelings of guilt for avoidance of command responsibilities or to
stem surges of anxiety experienced over performance in combat situations. There was no little
irony in the fact that the order for dissolution of the corps that was home to a naturalized
central European, Union army soldiery would issue from an officer schooled in the Army of the
Potomac.

1190George Thomas thought differently. Once he was free of Sherman (as the latter's immediate command cut loose

from its base of communications and supplies marching east through Georgia), that is, as he (Thomas) pursued Hood
into Tennessee, he authorized the formation of black regiments in the Army of the Cumberland.
1191For Krzyzanowski's fate, Pula, Ibid, 94; for Schurz and Steinwehr, see their entrees in Faust (ed.), Ibid.
Sherman would have preferred not to have Hooker in his command at all. Since, however, Hooker was an excellent
field officer since his greatest tactical shortcoming (the inability to imaginatively recreate the layout and structure of a
battlefield beyond what was visibly given, see note 20, above) was generally not a handicap to a Civil War corps
commander, and the decision to retain him was political - coming as it did from Lincoln, he remained in Shermans
command. For Sherman's distaste for Hooker, Albert Castel, Decision in the West, 94, 96-97.

Order of Battle
The Union Army of the Potomac XI Corps at Chancellorsville
Union Army of the Potomac
Major General Joseph Hooker, Commanding
XI Corps
Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard
General Headquarters
1 Indiana Cavalry, Companies I and K, Capt. Abram Sharra
First Division
Brig. Gen. Charles Devens, Jr.
Brig. Gen. Nathaniel McLean
First Brigade
Col. Leopold von Gilsa
41 New York, Maj. Detleo von Einsiedel
45 New York, Col. George von Amaberg
54 New York, Col. Charles Ashby
Maj. Stephen Kovacs
153 Pennsylvania, Col. Charles Glanz
Lt. Col. Jacob Dachrodt

Second Brigade
Brig. Gen. Nathaniel McLean
Col. John C. Lee
17 Connecticut, Col. William H. Noble
Maj. Allen G. Brady
25 Ohio, Col. William P. Richardson
Lt. Col. Jeremiah Williams
75 Ohio, Col. Robert Reily
Capt. Benjamin Morgan
107 Ohio, Col. Seraphim Meyer
Lt. Col. Charles Mueller

Unattached
8 New York Infantry (one company), Lt. Hermann Rosencranz
Artillery
New York Light, 13 Battery, Capt. Julius Dieckmann
Second Division
Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr
First Brigade
Col. Adophus Buschbeck
29 New York, Lt. Col. Louis Hartmann
Maj. Alex von Schuemback
154 New York, Col. Patrick H. Jones
27 Pennsylvania, Lt. Col. Lorenz Cantador
73 Pennsylvania, Lt. Col. William Moore

Second Brigade
Brig. Gen. Francis Barlow
33 Massachusetts, Col. Adin B. Underwood
134 New York, Col. Charles R. Coster
136 New York, Col. James Wood, Jr.
Lt. Col. Henry C. Loomis
73 Ohio, Col. Orlando Smith

Artillery
1 New York Light, Battery I, Capt. Michael Wiedrich
Third Division
Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz
First Brigade
Brig. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfenning
82 Illinois, Col. Frederick Hecker
Maj. Ferdinand H. Boshausen
Capt. Jacob Lasalle
68 New York, Col. Gotthilf Bourry

Second Brigade
Col. Wladamir Krzyzanowski
58 New York, Capt. Frederick Braum
Capt. Emil Koenig
119 New York, Col. Elias Peissner
Lt. Col. John T. Lockman

157 New York, Col. Philip P. Brown, Jr.

61 Ohio. Col. Stephen J. McGroarty

75 Pennsylvania, Col. Francis Mahler

26 Wisconsin, Col. William H. Jacobs
74 Pennsylvania, Col. Adolph von Hartung

Unattached
82 Ohio, Col. James S. Robinson
Artillery
1 Ohio Light, Battery I, Capt. Huger Dilger
Reserve Artillery
Lt. Col. Louis Schirmer
1 New York Light, 2 Battery, Capt. Hermann Jahn
1 Ohio Light, Battery K, Capt. William L. DeBeck
1 West Virginia Light, Battery C, Capt. Wallace Hill

Map Credits
Preface
The Tidewater Region of the Virginia Settler-Colony, circa 1676.
Robert Leckie, None Died in Vain. New York, 1990: 318 for base map. Extensive
modifications including site approximations and deletions by author.
Chapter 2
The Old West (Yankee Corridor and Butternut Belt), circa 1850.
Map by author.
Chapter 3
Western Virginia, early 1862.
The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War (hereafter Atlas),1192 General
Topographical
Map. Sheet VI, Plate CXLI. (Place locational emphases by us.)
The Peninsula Campaign (The Seven Days), May 1862.
Atlas, Plate XX.
Antietam, 16 September 1862.
Atlas, Plate XXVIII-1. Site locations by us (based on Stephen Sears, The
Landscape Ran
Red: The Battle of Antietam. New Haven, 1983: 183).
Chapter 6
Stone Wall at Fredericksburg, December 1862. Plan 4 (diagram). John Bigelow, Jr.,
The Campaign of Chancellorsville. A Strategic and Tactical Study. New Haven, 1910
Chapter 7
The Atlanta Campaign, 1864 (see A Note on Sherman, fn. 29). Reproduced from
William R. Scaife, Order of Battle. The Campaign for Atlanta, May 7 to September 2,
1864. Atlanta (privately published, 1992): Back cover.
The Mississippi River at and above Vicksburg, 1863.
Atlas, General Topographical Map, Sheet XX, Plate CLV. Place locational
emphases by us.
Grants (Mississippi) Overland Campaign, May 1863.
Atlas, XXXVI-1. Notations of force distributions and movements, dates and unit
locations by us.
The Virginia Overland Campaign, May/June 1864. Robert Leckie, None Died in
Vain. New York, 1990: 585. Map notations, legend of major battles and other
explanatory notes by us.
Petersburg and its Environs, 1864-1865.
Atlas, Plate C-2.
Chapter 10
Upland Concentrations of the Southern Yeomanry, circa 1850.
Map by author.
1192Maj. George B. Davis, Leslie J. Perry and Joseph W. Kirkley, Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the

Union and Confederate Armies. Compiled by Capt. Calvin D. Cowles. Washington, DC, 1891-1895.

Appendix 1
Bermuda Hundred, May 1864
Atlas, Plate LXV-1.
Appendix 2
Chancellorsville I, 2 May 1863, 8:00 am. Map, locations and order of battle for
opposing
forces by us (hand drawn reproduction based on Bigelow, The Campaign of
Chancellorsville, Map 17).
Chancellorsville II, 2 May 1863, 5:00 pm. Map, locations and order of battle for
opposing forces by us (hand drawn reproduction based on Bigelow, The Campaign
of Chancellorsville, Map 18).
Chancellorsville III, 3 May 1863, 5:00 am. Locations and order of battle for opposing
forces by us (reproduced from Bigelow, The Campaign of Chancellorsville, Plan 3).
Gettysburg, northern environs, 1 July 1863. Atlas, Plate XCV-1. Locations and order
of battle for opposing forces by us.
Chattanooga, points of entry from the west, late October 1863.
Atlas, Plate L-2.

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