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Wakelyn (history, Kent State U.) presents 18 pamphlets and discusses 22 others in which southerners entreated others to support the United States and oppose the Confederacy. Written between 1861 and 1864, they were preserved by local and national political leaders and private citizens. The best known author is Andrew Johnson, who was later president. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Far from being a monolith with unanimous leadership loyalty to the cause of a separate nation, the Confederacy was in reality deeply divided over how to achieve independence. Many supposedly loyal leaders, civilian as well as elected officials, opposed governmental policies on the national and state levels, and their actions ultimately influenced non-support for military policies. Congressional differences over arming the slaves and bureaucratic squabbles over how to conduct the war disrupted the government and Cabinet of President Jefferson Davis. Rumors of such irreconcilable differences spread throughout the South, contributing to an overall decline in morale and support for the war effort and causing the Confederacy to come apart from within. When asked to make sacrifices, civilian leaders found themselves caught in the dilemma of either aiding the Confederacy or losing money through poor utilization of slave labor. To sustain profits, the business and planter classes often traded with the enemy. Upon consideration of arming the slaves, many members of Congress proclaimed that the war effort was not worth the demise of slavery and preferred instead to take their chances with the Northern government. Cultural leaders, clergy, newspapermen, and men of letters claimed their loyalty to the war effort, but often criticized government policies in public. By asking for financial support and instituting a military draft, the national government infuriated local patriots who wanted to defend their own states more than they desired to defeat the enemy.
Although over one hundred fifty years have passed since the start of the American Civil War, that titanic conflict continues to matter. The forces unleashed by that war were immensely destructive because of the significant issues involved: the existence of the Union, the end of slavery, and the very future of the nation. The war remains our most contentious, and our bloodiest, with over six hundred thousand killed in the course of the four-year struggle. Most civil wars do not spring up overnight, and the American Civil War was no exception. The seeds of the conflict were sown in the earliest days of the republic’s founding, primarily over the existence of slavery and the slave trade. Although no conflict can begin without the conscious decisions of those engaged in the debates at that moment, in the end, there was simply no way to paper over the division of the country into two camps: one that was dominated by slavery and the other that sought first to limit its spread and then to abolish it. Our nation was indeed “half slave and half free,” and that could not stand. Regardless of the factors tearing the nation asunder, the soldiers on each side of the struggle went to war for personal reasons: looking for adventure, being caught up in the passions and emotions of their peers, believing in the Union, favoring states’ rights, or even justifying the simple schoolyard dynamic of being convinced that they were “worth” three of the soldiers on the other side. Nor can we overlook the factor that some went to war to prove their manhood. This has been, and continues to be, a key dynamic in understanding combat and the profession of arms. Soldiers join for many reasons but often stay in the fight because of their comrades and because they do not want to seem like cowards. Whatever the reasons, the struggle was long and costly and only culminated with the conquest of the rebellious Confederacy, the preservation of the Union, and the end of slavery. These campaign pamphlets on the American Civil War, prepared in commemoration of our national sacrifices, seek to remember that war and honor those in the United States Army who died to preserve the Union and free the slaves as well as to tell the story of those American soldiers who fought for the Confederacy despite the inherently flawed nature of their cause. The Civil War was our greatest struggle and continues to deserve our deep study and contemplation.
These Civil War pamphlets provide insight into the views of a northern city's Union supporters during a time of national reform and rebellion. They represent Philadelphia's intellectual output during the war and stands as evidence of the intellectual ferment the war engendered. They illustrate how pro-Union constituents tried to maintain a cohesive movement in Philadelphia while promoting national reunification. The twelve pamphlets and one hymn discuss victory and peace; liberty, unity, and the abolition of slavery; organizing support for the Union, Lincoln, and freed slaves; adjustments to the Constitution and justifications for suspension of habeas corpus; the merits of the Union League of Philadelphia's cause; and medical remedies and prophylactic measures for soldiers.
"Leading Civil War historians explore a tragic part of our nation's history through the lenses of race, gender, leadership, politics, and memory ... the essays ... consider the fundamental issue of the Confederacy's failure and military defeat but also expose our nation's continuing struggles with race, individual rights, terrorism, and the economy"--Dust jacket.
Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting, Imagining Southern Spaces ́investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of (re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that shaped how different actors responded to these processes, this book studies spatial imaginations in a selection of abolitionist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this diversity of imaginations, the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic, political, and cultural entanglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus, it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region distinct from the rest of the country.
Exploring family and community dynamics, Enemies of the Country profiles men and women of the Confederate states who, in addition to the wartime burdens endured by most southerners, had to cope with being a detested minority. With one exception, these featured individuals were white, but they otherwise represent a wide spectrum of the southern citizenry. They include natives to the region, foreign immigrants and northern transplants, affluent and poor, farmers and merchants, politicians and journalists, slaveholders and nonslaveholders. Some resided in highland areas and in remote parts of border states, the two locales with which southern Unionists are commonly associated. Others, however, lived in the Deep South and in urban settings. Some were openly defiant; others took a more covert stand. Together the portraits underscore how varied Unionist identities and motives were, and how fluid and often fragile the personal, familial, and local circumstances of Unionist allegiance could be. For example, many southern Unionists shared basic social and political assumptions with white southerners who cast their lots with the Confederacy, including an abhorrence of emancipation. The very human stories of southern Unionists--as they saw themselves and as their neighbors saw them--are shown here to be far more complex and colorful than previously acknowledged.
Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla warfare and home front traumas that stemmed from those divisions. The essays here embrace both facts and fictions related to those issues, often conveyed through intimate vignettes that focus on individuals, families, and communities, keeping the human dimension at the forefront of his insights and analysis. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe considers this multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. He devotes attention to how the truths derived from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians with differing agendas over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His cast of characters includes John Henry, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Brown, Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance, and those who later interpreted their stories—John Fox and John Ehle, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier, Emma Bell Miles and Harry Caudill, Carter Woodson and W. J. Cash, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell, even William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Their work and that of many others have contributed much to either our understanding—or misunderstanding—of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.
This is an account of the seven military operations conducted by the Confederacy against deserters and disloyalists and the concomitant internal war between secessionists and those who opposed secession in the Quaker Belt of central North Carolina. It explains how the "outliers" (deserters and draft-dodgers) managed to elude capture and survive despite extensive efforts by Confederate authorities to hunt them down and return them to the army. The author discusses the development of the secret underground pro-Union organization the Heroes of America, and how its members utilized the Underground Railroad, dug-out caves, and an elaborate system of secret signals and communications to elude the "hunters." Numerous instances of murder, rape, torture and other brutal acts and many skirmishes between gangs of deserters and Confederate and state troops are recounted. In a revisionist interpretation of the Tar Heel wartime peace movement, the author argues that William Holden's peace crusade was in fact a Copperhead insurgency in which peace agitators strove for a return of North Carolina and the South to the Union on the Copperhead basis--that is, with the institution of slavery protected by the Constitution in the returning states.
Many accounts of the secession crisis overlook the sharp political conflict that took place in the Border South states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Michael D. Robinson expands the scope of this crisis to show how the fate of the Border South, and with it the Union, desperately hung in the balance during the fateful months surrounding the clash at Fort Sumter. During this period, Border South politicians revealed the region's deep commitment to slavery, disputed whether or not to leave the Union, and schemed to win enough support to carry the day. Although these border states contained fewer enslaved people than the eleven states that seceded, white border Southerners chose to remain in the Union because they felt the decision best protected their peculiar institution. Robinson reveals anew how the choice for union was fraught with anguish and uncertainty, dividing families and producing years of bitter internecine violence. Letters, diaries, newspapers, and quantitative evidence illuminate how, in the absence of a compromise settlement, proslavery Unionists managed to defeat secession in the Border South.