Jared Emry
The American Civil War divided the country; neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother. About one hundred fifty years later the division still exists, the war appears to still be waging, even though the Union managed to conquer the Confederacy. The separation exists now over the motives and justifications of the war. The CNN Opinion Research Corporation found forty-two percent of the population does not believe slavery was the motive behind the North’s invasion, yet the schools teach it was the fundamental reason behind the war. Were there other reasons? If so, why are they not so as much mentioned in modern textbooks? The division of thought in the nation begs the justification of the North into question. There is an old saying history is always written by the victor, and the victor tends to bend truths and rewrite history in order that posterity will look kindly upon them. The American Civil War is a unique example of that because the right to free speech in America allows for extra difficulty to alter the histories. George Orwell said in his book 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The Union controls the past to prevent one from seeing the Union was morally unjustified in its conduct concerning the American Civil War.
The popular view of the American Civil War is taught in all public schools, most private schools, and popular television. The view is basically stated as there being two sides, the Southern Confederacy and the Northern Union. The view portrays the South as being evil slave-owners and the North being Righteous Liberators, forgetting the fact it was the North that sold the slaves to the South, and the North had built their economy based upon it before diversifying into industry (Greene 319).
This argument, embraced almost universally by New England abolitionists made good sense as part of a strategy to heap blame for everything wrong with American society on Southern Slavery, but it also had an advantage, to Northern ear, of conveniently shifting accountability for a locally specific situation away from the indigenous institution from which it had evolved (Melish 222-23).
However, “history books have misled today’s Americans to believe to believe the war was fought on the basis to free slaves” (Williams). “[Charles] Dickens stubbornly resisted ascribing the American Civil War to the conflict over slavery, instead accusing the Union of hypocrisy” (Lee 128). Dickens said,
I take the facts of the American slave quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing to do with it…. Every reasonable person may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the abolitionists and derided them uphill and down dale.
Dickens was certainly right about the war, yet the view is never shown today.
President Abraham Lincoln is considered one of the greatest presidents of all time. He is considered great for freeing the slaves because he believed all men are created equal and slavery was an abomination, right? “If Lincoln was such a saint, why can’t his record speak for itself?” (DiLorenzo 12). Lincoln believed in white supremacy as is evident in the way he conducted himself. He believed inter-racial marriage was an abomination. He believed America should be an all-white nation and all black Americans should be expelled into labor “colonies” (DiLorenzo). “It was an article of faith to [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and you couldn’t have one without the other,” historian and scholar Leron Bennett, Jr. states in his controversial book Forced into Glory. Another little known fact about the “great” man, Lincoln, is he supported the abominable Corwin Amendment, which would have made slavery perpetually legal (Encyclopedia Britannica). In his first inaugural address, Lincoln stated,
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Yet later, as the war waged on, the Proclamation of Emancipation was given by President Abraham Lincoln, which cited slavery as the primary cause of the war. Incidentally, the Anti-Slavery Society of London did not side with the North until after this proclamation, because they recognized the war as not being about slavery prior to this document. Abraham Lincoln himself stated in a letter to Horace Greeley in 1862,
My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is neither to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it 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 save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
Thus he had previously undermined any credibility of the war being about the termination of slavery. The Proclamation was not a humanitarian gesture but a piece of propaganda that would hurt the Confederacy’s international relations. The Emancipation Proclamation also did not include northern and border slaves, allowing for northern slavery to continue. Lincoln also is known for imprisoning thousands of northern citizens for disagreeing with his politics. He censored telegraphs, sheet music, and sermons. He closed down anti-war newspapers. He waged a pitiless war against the South, killing six hundred thousand soldiers, laying to waste entire cities while leaving their citizens starving and homeless (DiLorenzo). He even ordered the arrest of Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, for calling him a despot for suspending habeas corpus (a writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, especially to secure the person’s release unless lawful grounds are shown for their detention) (American Oxford Dictionary) without consent of the Congress; the Circuit Court had overruled Lincoln’s executive order and Lincoln had ignored Taney and his court, which is illegal (DiLorenzo). That was the Union’s leadership, a man who craved a drastic intensification in federal power, a racist tyrant who used slavery as a scapegoat for a bloody war. “The North’s lack of large-scale slavery is not due to morality, but with climate and economy” (Melish xii). Lincoln’s war was inexcusable.
Abraham Lincoln was a man who reflected the popular view of the North: from Webster arguing for immediate deportation of all none-whites for purposes of constructing a white utopia, to that of the New York press from where Walt Whitman was fired for being anti-slavery. What did the North base its war on, if not slavery? The call to arms for the Union was from the start “Preserve the Union,” so the war was based on an ideology. The ideology itself is not bad, except it happened to be illegal and resulted in the deaths of about six hundred thousand Americans. The war was illegal because it was not authorized by Congress and because habeas corpus was illegally suspended during the war’s beginning. Also constitutionally, the states had the right to leave the Union in the same way one might leave a club: one resigns and then leaves. This right was guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment, which reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Quite simply put, the Constitution does not give the federal government the right to kick a state out of the Union; therefore, the states have the right to kick themselves out of the Union. Also, Article Four shows quite clearly the states are admitted to the Union in the same way as one might enter a club; so why not leave it similarly? The Union’s war was illegal.
The first shot of the war was indeed Confederate, but it was after secession. The Confederacy had Union forts in it and, since they were different countries, asked politely if President Lincoln would take his troops and leave. He promptly replied, no you will have to force us out of your country, so the Confederacy had to take action and open fire. Thus the blame for the war is on the Union who aggravated the Confederacy to fire by not respecting the Confederacy’s right as a sovereign nation (Encyclopedia Britannica). Lincoln had vowed not to be the first to fire a shot, so he provoked the South into starting the war so he would not break his vow, and because it looks better politically.
The war that followed Lincoln’s bombastic stubbornness resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of which were slow painful deaths caused by starvation or infection. The prisoner of war camps caused great suffering to the prisoners. In the South were not enough supplies to give to the men in the prisoner of war camps, but even the guards were malnourished. The difference was in the North the supplies were there to give to the prisoners, but the prisoners there starved while the guards had more than enough to eat. Yet, it was the man in charge of the camp at Andersonville, Henry Wirz, found to be a war criminal and executed, not the man in charge of Camp Douglas, the Northern Counterpart to Andersonville with a death rate just as high; strangely enough the official government documents that list the deaths have been “lost,” and there may be even more Confederates in the earth there than what is now understood, as can be seen by other documents like the Chicago Tribune that demonstrated thousands of Confederate Soldiers were still unaccounted for: “Mortality rates increased as Colonel Sweet complained on October 11, 1864, that mortality at the camp was up to 35% since June. In November 1864, the death toll was 217; another 323 died in December, 308 in January 1864, and 243 in February.”
Elmira, “The Camp of Death,” had unparalleled death rates over any other prisoner of war camp, a rate of a stunning twenty-five percent, resulting in more than seven thousand deaths within a year. If Elmira had lasted as long as Andersonville did, it would have surpassed Andersonville in deaths (Horigan). This is another North camp as bad, or worse, than Andersonville, yet is not conventionally mentioned.
Why were those responsible for Douglas, with its one in five death rate, and Elmira, with its one in four death rate, not also tried for war crimes? Douglas with its twenty percent death rate, Elmira with its twenty-five percent death rate, or Andersonville with its twenty-seven percent death rate; which is worst? Andersonville, yet it is was only two percent different from Elmira. Is it morally justified only to try Wirz and not the other Commandants? Especially when such atrocities happened in Camp Douglas such as the following: When the smallpox epidemic broke out in camp, the Confederacy sent medicine to its prisoners of war, but the Union confiscated the medicine as contraband; deprivation of food, blankets, and clothing; and tortures ranging from firing shots into the barracks, hanging people by their feet, forcing them to stand in the snow in bare feet for hours, making them sit on the snow for hours, whipping them if they tried to relieve themselves from the torture, or simply beating them with the side of the belt with the metal buckle in order to enhance bruising (Pritchett).
Also, is the respect for the Confederate dead the same as for the Union dead? No, the Union dead at Andersonville get a cemetery with individual gravestones in a four hundred, seventy-five acre park with a monument. The Confederate dead at Douglas were all buried in a mass grave in one acre of swampy land. The monument placed there in 1895 was provided by the family and friends of the dead, not the government like in Andersonville; there aren’t even any highway directional signs for this monument. What about Elmira? The Confederate soldiers had called that place “Hellmira.” It is considered to have been the worst prison camp of the North, worse even than Douglas. At Elmira, “one rat could be traded for five chaws of tobacco, one haircut, or a number of other items.” There was also a disparity between Andersonville and Elmira in the amount of doctors available. The North had the majority of the doctors in America; the South had to make do with less. Yet one doctor at Elmira boasted he had killed more Confederates than any of the soldiers had. The death rate at Andersonville was due to fewer doctors and supplies while the death rates at Camp Douglas and Elmira were due to cruelty of the Union. Actually, in the town of Elmira was even an observation deck where people could see the suffering inside the camp from town. It became quite popular and soon became an industry of entertainment. The commandant of Elmira was not tried, nor was the commandant of Camp Douglas (Horigan). That disparity is unjustified.
Overall, the North had impure motives, mainly of white supremacy, racism, and illegally preserving the Union causing the ultimate destruction of the Union through a sudden increase in federal power. The suffering caused by the war falls onto the heads of the North, because they were ultimately responsible for causing the war in the first place. They are also unjustified by the way they treated the Confederate dead, refusing proper burial, and failing to continue to keep the graves in good condition in direct violation of Public Law 38 (National Park Service). They are unjustified in keeping their own atrocities and war crimes hidden and untried. The North was morally unjustified in its conduct concerning the American Civil War.
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Redeeming Pandora 