Civil War – Page 2 – American History to 1877

April 14, 2014

Irish Catholic Support of the Confederacy

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

In their previous blog posts, my classmates referenced the Ask A Slave web series to address the common misconceptions and general lack of knowledge surrounding slavery in this day and age. The author of Ask A Slave’s Critique of the American Education System goes so far as to suggest the ignorant inquiries presented in the series reveals a fundamental flaw in the way American history is taught. He even claims that these uninformed assumptions need to be corrected. However, the institution of slavery is not the only subject in American history where greater understanding needs to be achieved. As Dee Dee Joyce publicizes in Charleston’s Irish Labourers and Their Move into the Confederacy, a significant (yet far less important) misconception also surrounds the considerable percentage of Irish Catholics that constituted the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. According to Joyce, Irish workers “were not hapless pawns of slave owners” they are often portrayed to be. “Nor did they incorporate pro-slavery ideologies as fashioned by the Southern elite.” Instead, Joyce claims that “Irish labourers were self-motivated actors who took constrained actions to place themselves in positions of best advantage within existing social networks.”

Joyce explains that the Irish support of the Confederacy is puzzling because it presents an important paradox: many Irish Catholics – most of whom were property-less – willingly joined a fight that seemingly did not concern them. However, Joyce asserts that the Civil War did concern them. Her first argument revolves around the Nativist Know-Nothing party’s racial attack on the Irish as inferior beings. Noting that the Nativist party received little support in the South, Joyce claims the Irish made a calculated decision in supporting the South because they “knew that social inclusion mattered as much in America as it had in Ireland.” Another argument Joyce makes concerns religion. The Southern Catholic Church’s validation of slavery alleviated suspicions of Irish Catholic involvement with abolitionism and combatted Nativist party attacks. Finally, Joyce claims Irish immigrants had a direct influence on the South Carolina legislature’s attempts to restrict slaves and free blacks from working jobs that Irish laborers desired. Ultimately, Irish Catholics supported the Confederacy in order to gain a better social position than African Americans.

Overall, Joyce does a great job of explaining the motives behind the Irish Catholic support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. However, it is still important to note the work of James R. Barrett and David Roediger. They claim that many immigrants “conceived Americanization in racial terms: becoming American meant becoming white.” It was more important to the Irish Catholics to embrace their “white heritage” and turning against African Americans than fighting for their individual rights. In doing so, they gained an important social advantage; one that explains their support of the Confederacy.

April 14, 2014

The Fight for Social Inclusion: Irish Immigrants in the South

Irish immigrants were poor and used to subjugation by class status when they immigrated to the United States. The ones who ended up in the south and, specifically in this case, in Charleston seemed to rally around the battle-cry of the confederacy for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery or slave owners. This article by Joyce clearly states that these poor Irish could not own slaves, but they were above influence of powerful slave owners or other social powers which some have suggested pushed the Irish into confederate battalions. They were not socially inept or pushed around; they had institutions such as the theater, the church, social clubs (Hibernian), as well as nationalist newspapers as social outlets. They regularly critiqued the wealthy upper class of Charleston through these outlets and strengthened their nationalist identity as well as their connection to their new found home.

Instead, they became “dutiful sons” of their new country willingly and united, Joyce claims. But the question still remains why, as the elite classes bullying them into joining was shown to be invalid. It seems as if the Irish-American Immigrants were fighting for the south to secure autonomy, assert their place in society and their right to be contributing members of the southern way of life. This is a narrative that is told in many ways in many times, where a subjugated group of people rise up to fight a war in order to justify their place in society. Of course this happens with African Americans in American History as well, both in the civil war and onwards. This idea can even be extended to slavery at the time, as Ela pointed out in her last blog that we can see slave resistance through Lizzie Mae as a form of assertion to their humanity and independence.

The poor Irish-American Immigrants joining the confederacy is an extremely crucial point for civil war history. Slave owners could not have fought the war or even fielded an army. The persons who plantation owners and mass slave traders could not have realistically fought union powers. This I think may foreshadow a growing narrative of poorer, subjugated and socially devalued men joining the ranks of the confederacy not necessarily to make money off of slavery but to assert their ability to belong, their strength and their independence to the elite of the time, something which seems to be an unfortunate motif in wartime history.

February 19, 2014

Freedom at Last?

Chapter 7 in Inhuman Bondage discusses the impact of slavery in the American Revolution. Whenever I think of the American Revolution, I think of the colonists and Britain. This chapter helped to gain a new insight- the plight of the slaves. One key point the author was trying to make in this chapter is that the colonists were rebelling against Britain for feeling like they were being enslaved, but yet they were enslaving others. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (144) I never thought of it this way. It is ironic that the colonists felt that their rights are being infringed upon, when they enslaved Africans. This point truly is one of the most important in the entire chapter, and it drives the entire revolution. It is really persuasive because America is supposed to represent freedom and a new life, yet it doesn’t.

Warfare is a time of chaos for slaves. Slaves can rebel against their owners and escape, or can be enlisted and fight against their enemies. Why would slaves want to fight if in the end they didn’t even receive their liberty? Both sides tried to use slaves in their favor. The colonists didn’t necessarily want the slaves to fight for them, but they were in need of numbers. Britain tried to get slaves to leave their masters and join them. They said that “all slaves captured while they were serving the rebels were to be sold for the benefit of their captors; but all slaves who deserted the rebels were given an assurance that was hardly clear.” (150) Slaves took this as emancipation, and thousands took advantage of it, leaving Georgia’s economy in ruin.

Granted, some colonists realized the ironic nature behind their resentment of Britain. “The period from 1765 to the early 1790s produced countless numbers of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, speeches, and editorials that challenged the basic core of slavery: the belief that human beings could be ‘animalized.’ (156) Because of this, the revolutionary war can be seen as the precursor of the Civil War. The North generally was against slavery, and many states even made it illegal. The South was dependent on it. They needed the slaves for their economies, and it even mentioned they would start a war if the government tried to make slavery universally illegal. It was only a matter of time before the two conflicting sides battled again. In my classmate’s post below Democracy and Slavery, they made a very interesting point that the Civil War could possibly have been avoided if the 1784 Continental Congress outlawed slavery in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. While this is an interesting point, I can’t help but disagree because the other regions of the south were so explicit on their desire for slavery, and that is stated within the text.

February 19, 2014

Democracy and Slavery

Achieving American Democracy was not as simple of a process as writing the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. According to Wilentz there were many obstacles involving class warfare that did not make it a smooth transition. Yeoman, gentleman, merchants, and artisans, whether they are city dwellers or rural countrymen, all wanted their rights protected. To me, a key turning point was when the Berkshire Constitutionalists proposed the plan of equal representation that was not rooted in how much wealth or property you had. Another key for democracy in the reading was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which put to rest early the idea of an elected monarch for life. As Thomas stated in his post, to really bind the United States Democracy together as a nation, Shay’s Rebellion was instrumental in getting a stronger federal government planned in the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

In Davis’s Inhuman Bondage, I believe his point was that American Slavery lasted longer here than in other countries because they were too weak as a union to withstand abolition in the early years of the country, and as a result slavery was able to take strong roots into the culture. As Thomas also wrote, keeping slavery was a huge contradiction to the American Revolution. I agree with what Olivia stated, that white colonists wanted liberty from a British oppressor and that was the same logic the slaves followed, but they did not receive it. On of the most interesting take always for me from the Davis reading was that the 1784 Continental Congress was one vote away from outlawing slavery in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. If that had passed I think the United States might have been better able to avoid a Civil War because it would have divided the Confederacy in a big way. Ultimately, it was the fear of a Civil War for a just born country that led to the creation of free soil and slave holding places. I also found very interesting in Olivia’s post about how it was the act of making slaves property that led to such a strong slave system.

February 19, 2014

The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War?

In Chapter 7: “The Problem of Slavery in the Revolution” of Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis adds a new dimension to how Americans understand the American Revolution. Davis analyzes the Revolution through the lens of the institutionalization of slavery in America, arguing that enslaved Africans were acutely conscious of the hypocrisy that the colonists’ rebellion presented with respect to their own enslavement. Slaves recognized colonists’ battle for liberty from the British as evidence of slavery’s injustice, and used the American Revolution as a platform to encourage and attain freedom.

The colonists, however, considered the enslavement of Africans to be a necessary facet of the American economy. While colonists’ opinions regarding slavery differed along regional lines, the Founding Fathers recognized that targeting the slave system would marginalize the South at a time when the unification of America was crucial to its survival. Thomas characterizes Northern concessions to slavery as an essential compromise of democracy, which “manifested itself in the form of Northern ‘protection’ of Southern slavery in order to protect unity.” This system of compromise perpetuated the institutionalization of slavery. Although it is not wise to read history backwards, we know that the “compromise for democracy” was limited. The annexation of new territories in the mid-1800s reintroduced slavery to the forefront of political discussion, eventually escalating into the Civil War.

In addition to our U.S History course, I am enrolled in the 300-level history course, Civil War and Reconstruction. This course has sparked my interest in studying the development of slavery in America and identifying the point when Civil War was inevitable (if it ever was). I believe that the constitutional arguments regarding slavery, particularly slaves as property, shaped the slavery debate and served as a justification for Southern states’ secession and Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery. Davis’s reading corroborated my claim, as he outlined how both the British and colonists manipulated the slave’s status as property to benefit their respective causes. Specifically, both sides contemplated the use of slaves as soldiers in the war. The Continental Congress enlisted and armed 3,000 slaves from South Carolina and Georgia under the pretext that the British army would utilize the slaves if they did not. The slaves were considered property of their slave-owners, and the Congress feared that seizing property would undermine the rule of law and cause dissention among slave-owners (Davis, 148).

The arming of slaves during the American Revolution mirrors the Civil War, in which thousands of fugitive slaves escaped into Union territory seeking freedom. This brought the question of slaves as property to a head. If slaves were indeed considered property under the Constitution, then it was imperative that the Union returned slaves to their rightful owners. Since the South was a “belligerent nation,” many Unionists argued that Southern slaveholders’ constitutional rights as American citizens were void, and their slaves should not be returned. Similar to the fears of colonists during the Revolutionary War, Unionists recognized that returning slaves would ultimately aid the Confederate’s war effort, as slaves would be used for the Confederate cause. General Benjamin Butler named fugitive slaves to be “contrabands of war,” who would remain in the Union so as not to benefit the Confederates. In order to legitimize Butler’s action, Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which ordered that “confiscated” slaves were not to be returned to their owners but had to participate in the Union war effort. Again concerned with the notion of slaves as property, President Lincoln clarified that slaves from border-states were exempt from the Confiscation Act, recognizing that marginalizing the border states would impel them to join the Confederacy. The similarities between the use of slaves in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, particularly with respect to slaves as property, illustrates the political complexity of slavery in America. The Revolutionary War had enormous influence on the institutionalization of American slavery, and as a result, in-depth study of the war is necessary to understand the causes of the Civil War.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

**Information also taken from Dr. Sally McMillen’s lectures in History 346: Civil War and Reconstruction.