Historical scholarship in recent decades has since disabused Civil War students of the merits of thisideology. That distinction might make no difference to Baldwins argument, but it makes a big difference in the underlying math. West Virginia fell somewhere in between because it split off from Virginia in 1863 to join the Union. These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States "Check it out.". Chuck Baldwin, a fundamentalist pastor and columnist, made this case in a recent essay that appeared on his website and many others, including a fan page for Fox News Megyn Kelly. NOT in the North! The approximately $3.5 million, 18,500-square-foot museum in Elm Springs, Tennessee, has been in the works for eight years and will also serve as anadministrative space for membersthe Sons of Confederate Veterans, the organization spearheading the project, Jay Powell reports for the Columbia Daily Herald. Below is a condensedexcerpt from his e-mail: "Thank you for reaching out to us and I am glad to provide some additional information. . The Army of Northern Virginias ability to safely cross the Potomac with the Union army in pursuit depended in large part on camp slaves, who cared for their wounded owners, and the great numbers of enslaved workers assigned to ordnance trains, wagons and ambulances, all of which extended for miles. Nevertheless, this. (Maryland had to be kept in the Union by any means necessary, else the United States capital in the District of Columbia would have been completely enclosed within Confederate territory.) Some eagerly awaited reunion with their own families. Virginia had the largest population of enslaved African Americans of any state in the Confederacy, and those slaves responded to the American Civil War (1861-1865) in a variety of ways. Townsend doesnt say which "Southern" states he had in mind. A quartermaster in John Bell Hoods division observed that a great many Negroes have gone to the Yankees. Union cavalry raids, such as the one led by Judson Kilpatrick at Monterey Pass on July 5, hampered the retreat of tired Confederates and resulted in additional prisoners being taken, including the camp servants attached to the Richmond Howitzers as well as Major William H. Chamberlains servant, horse, and personal equipment. Historians, though, say that statistic is hugely misleading since it both wrongly factors in the entirety of the non-slave-owning states and ignores that families owned and had power over slaves, not just one individual adult. But Schermerhorn said even that minimizes the number of white people who benefitted from slavery. #FHTEIn 1860, 1% of white southern families owned 200 or more human beings, but in states of the Confederacy, at least 20% owned at least one and in Ms and SC ran as high as fifty percent.. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Throughout most of his pre-war life Sherman had little opportunity to own slaves, as he lacked the money to purchase them and/or lived in states (California, Indiana, and Ohio) where slavery was not legal. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. This is particularly useful in revealing political divisions or disputes within a state, although it takes some practice with the online query system to generate maps properly. IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. In this way, many Confederates who did not enslave people went to war to protect not only slavery but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they knew. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. tho so weak he could hardly be understood. He assured his family that they would meet again in heaven. Fortunately, one of the leading Civil War historians, James McPherson at Princeton University, knows Townsends work and told us that he included the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. While Joe Glatthaar undoubtedly had a small regiment of graduate assistants to help with cross-indexing Confederate muster rolls and the 1860 U.S. Census, there are some basic tools now available online that will allow anyone to at least get a general sense of the validity of his numbers. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. Percentage of slaves in each county of the slave states in 1860. . Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far fewer (20 percent of families in Arkansas). As far as slavery goes, every museum on the war is currently obsessed with the subject. All Rights Reserved. By the end of the first day, Confederates had achieved the upper hand as the Union army established a new defensive line south of the town, with Confederates taking up a position opposite along Seminary Ridge. Custis' will stipulated that all of his slaves were to be freed within five years: " upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executor in such manner as he deems expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease." Fact Check: What Percentage Of White Southerners Owned Slaves? - Moguldom One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. Slavery played no role it the coming of the war, they say; how could it, when less than two percent (four percent, five percent) actually owned slaves? As James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,wrote in the Washington Post: In fact, Confederates opposed states rightsthat is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery. The idea that the war was somehow not about slavery but about the issue of states rights was perpetuated by later generations anxious to redefine their ancestors sacrifices as noble protection of the Southern way of life. It records basic data about the free population, including names, sex, approximate age, occupation and value of real and personal property of each person in a household. The Union had 101,000 factories, while the Confederacy had 21,000 and the Border States had 9,000. A rich mans war, but a poor mans fight became the cry of many southerners of modest means.". That, of course, is to be expected; soldiering is a young man's game, and most young men, then and now, have little in the way of personal wealth. But again, those slaves belonged to Grant's father-in-law, so Grant himself had no legal authority to set them free. Prior to, during and even after the War of Northern Aggression. The data in the UofV online system can be broken down either by state or counties within a state, and make it possible to compare one data element (e.g., households) with another (slaveholders) and calculate the proportions between them. Specifically, we'll be assessing the statements from "the Truth about Confederate History" reproduced in the shaded box below, which claim to be separating myth from fact (while doing anything but): FACT: Entirely untrue. Today some of these stories pulled from the historical record can be found on hundreds of websites, not as the stories of enslaved men, but as black Confederate soldiers. White officers in the Confederacy did indeed bring enslaved people to the front during the Civil War, where they cooked, cleaned and performed other labors for the officers and their regiments. He is the author of numerous articles and books about the Civil War, including Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil Wars Most Persistent Myth. They were fighting for survival as cotton and tobacco prices were on a roller coaster.. The prevalence of slaveholding was so pervasive among Southerners who heeded the call to arms in 1861 that it became something of a joke; Glatthaar tells of an Irish-born private in a Georgia regiment who quipped to his messmates that "he bought a negro, he says, to have something to fight for.". 2023 Smithsonian Magazine The 642,427 total Union casualties have been divided accordingly: The 483,026 total Confederate casualties have been divided accordingly: Of the 211,411 Union soldiers captured 16,668 were paroled on the field and 30,218 died in prison. Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri were called Border States. But indentured servitude, by definition, came nowhere close to chattel slavery. Viral post gets it wrong about extent of slavery in 1860, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. You don't have to talk to a Confederate apologist long before before you'll be told that only a tiny fraction of butternuts owned slaves. Most of these soldiers were farmers and the vast majority had direct contact with slavery. a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States, Decades-old essay about Declaration of Independence signatories is partly false, Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor at Arizona State University. slaves represented nearly a third of the population in those slaveholding states. 4 . Slavery during the Civil War - Encyclopedia Virginia Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldnt have gone to war to protect slavery. Slavery is an important subject to study in its total as an American institution, but the politicizing of it to support modern political agendas will not be addressed at our museum. Was the Civil War Really a Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight? The bloodiest battles of the Civil War were: Note: Antietam had the greatest number of casualties of any single-day battle. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia. Failing this he directed some negroes to go and gather items that might improve our comfort. Matt Butler, assistant surgeon of the 37th Virginia, had a horse shot out from under him and was wounded in the foot on July 2 as he tended to fallen Confederates. The Uncomfortable Truths of Jewish Life in the U.S. South This myth, that the Civil War wasnt fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school history teachers believe and teach that the South seceded for state's rights, said Jim Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me:. As retold by the family of the fallen officer after the war, the servant eventually made his way home and remembered enough information about the burial site to escort family members there to disinter the body for transport home shortly after the war. Most importantly, servitude wasnt hereditary. I never saw fidelity stronger in any one, noted the quartermaster in a letter. More a practical wartime measure than a true liberation, it proclaimed free all enslaved people in the rebel states, but not those in the border states, which Lincoln needed to remain loyal to the Union. A common argument in the dispute over official displays of the Confederate battle flag is that most people misunderstand the reasons behind the Civil War. Those inaccuracies have since been corrected. Facts - The Civil War (U.S. National Park Service) Misinformation about the antebellum South, the Civil War, and the practice of slavery in the U.S. is rife on the Internet. We dont know where Baldwin got his number, but it could be tied to an 1889 book written by Thomas Seaman Townsend, a private historian with a passion for recording the role of soldiers from New York in the Civil War. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy. If Confederate Major General William Dorsey Pender worried about his camp servant named Joe, he Pender did not share it in what would prove to be his final letter home to his wife. Absent the body, news that a soldier had been comforted in his final hours and had prepared himself for death reassured family members that their loved one experienced what 19th-century Americans understood as a Good Death.. In 1863, more than 6,000 accompanied the 71,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania.

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