TeacherScribe: Summary of the week

This MNHS class has done a magnificent job illuminating the Civil War for me. Like most everyone I thought all the cliched ideas about the Civil War: it was fought to free the slaves and was a truly pivotal moment in our country.

Those things are true, but I found out that they are no where true to the level I previously thought.

Now I won’t pretend to be an expert on the Civil War. But all I can do is illustrate some of the things I have learned. And how what I have learned has changed those cliched ideas forever.

Yes the war was fought over slavery (remember the north didn’t end slavery, the south succeeded before that. Lincoln just wanted to stop the SPREAD of slavery). But there were so many other factors - the growing economic power of the south (see Timrod’s poetry), the growing division between the north and south, and Lincoln himself.

While the discussion has come up about slavery, and how can one discuss the Civil War without mentioning slavery, that things aren’t the way we think of them. For example, five percent of all plantation owners had 20 or more slaves. Many other farmers had one or two slaves. Most plantation owners also weren’t running the plantations. They often left them to an ‘overseer’ who was responsible to turn a profit. As long as the profit was made, the plantation owner didn’t get overly involved. So the plantation owner might have had the best intentions for his slaves, it was the overseer who was often brutal and murderous.

Another way of looking at slavery came up - compare it to farm equipment today. Imagine you are a sugar beet farmer and the government is suddenly going to take all of your machinery away - which is elemental to you making a profit (and thus your lively hood). That is one way of putting yourself in a plantation owner’s shoes. And many freed slaves, after reading several memoirs and interviews of former slaves, found life just as difficult (if not more) with their freedom. The point was even made comparing the Iraqi war to this. Are the Iraqi’s lives better without Hussein? They have their freedom, but what kind of country are they left with? We set a people free, but have we opened up a new can of worms with just a different group of people getting killed?

The solution wasn’t as easy as my elementary school and high school education made it seem. A gash was left in the country that can still be felt today.

The North and South were completely different cultures. The North were driven by industry. They opened their doors to immigrants (and this might be viewed as a different type of slavery) to work in the industries. They were more liberal as well. The South, on the other hand, had their large plantations - gained from England - didn’t want immigrants (they had slaves). They had their southern chivalry (think of Preston Brooks - a southern congressman who beat Charles Sumner (a northern congressman) with his cane after the yankee spoke at length (and insulted) about the South. They farmed cotton and tobacco and generated great wealth.

The differences between the two are staggering. Could the war even have been prevented if slavery wasn’t an issue?

Some argued that with the coming industrial revolution (Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin) and a shifting way of life would have wiped out slavery. A comparison was made between slavery dying out the way the use of horsepower died away with the invention of the tractor. Now many farmers kept a team of horses because they were more reliable than tractors. So maybe that theory is flawed. Others argued that if we hadn’t had the civil war, would the issues and hard feelings had been left to stew like what has gone on in Ireland over the years?

Like never before I have come to see the south’s side of the story. Now I don’t feel sympathy for the southern slave holding states, but I can at least see their side of the battle. The north wasn’t nearly as kind as I was led to believe either.

Did the north even help the creation of the KKK by doing nothing? Four million blacks were freed without compensation (as promised or at least implied by the government). This led to bitter feelings. So to get back, the KKK arises and the lynching begin out of spite. And the north wasn’t immune from lynching and hatred either, so they were not the benevolent power I had previously believed.

To counter the southern brutality of slaves was General Sherman’s scorched earth policy in his march to the sea that finally broke the south’s back. I learned that the plantation owners who didn’t have slaves didn’t enlist in the southern cause. They continued farming as best they could. However, here came Sherman with his troops and burned his house, maybe raped or killed his wife and daughters, and consumed his livestock and destroyed his fields. This was a brutal tactic. But it worked (it destroyed the south). Often times the landholders would say, “We aren’t part of this!” And Sherman’s men would say, “That’s why we are doing this.” They had to destroy the south’s supplies (William the Conquerer did the same thing after the Norman Invasion whenever the Anglo-Saxons would have a resistance movement). So it’s quite easy to see the hard feelings toward the north’s brutality down through the generations.

Add to that the idea that Lincoln toyed with compensating the southern slave holders with government money. Free the slaves and then compensate them for it. And this might have happened had Lincoln not been killed. So when you see that no compensation was given and much of their land was destroyed, one can see the really ugly side of this war, an ugly side that I never saw before.

And all of that is without looking at the horrors of the war itself. Remember the Civil War is the bloodiest battle and most costly in terms of human life that the US has ever fought. Mike, who teaches history with us, took a trip to the south and toured a church that had been converted into a field hospital where they were amputating limbs. Medicine practices were so crude that doctors just handed the severed limbs to their nurses, who threw them out the windows. It wasn’t long before the hospital staff had to move the proceedings upstairs because they limbs were piled too high outside the windows!

Here are some pictures of the actual carnage.

Bodies from the battle of antietam.