Anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved people supported in various capacities Lee's army in the summer of 1863. Confederate soldiers were optimistic about the prospects for the survival of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery well into 1864. . The claim that only 1.6% of U.S. citizens owned slaves in 1860 is MISSING CONTEXT, based on our research. is rarely a cogent or convincing form of historical argument, especially when as in this case one is referring to actions that were very different in degree and time. Fact check:Decades-old essay about Declaration of Independence signatories is partly false, You can use statistics to demonstrate a lot of things that arent relevant or true, said Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor at Arizona State University. In 1865, the Union won the war. He has become an expert on the U.S. Civil War and writes a blog called Student of the American Civil War., Policing, Enforcement, and Justice (Information Forthcoming), Media Communications: Narratives of Inequality, DITE Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics, Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute, The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, NEW NSF GRANT AWARDED TO COOK CENTER RESEARCHERS FOR COVID-19 PROJECT, From administrators to animals, heres who you need to know at Duke. ", stated on April 6, 2023 in a video shared on Facebook. Congress passed a bill authorizing equal pay for Black and white soldiers in 1864. . For one major from South Carolina, his war ended along the difficult retreat route from Gettysburg, forcing his servant to take steps to properly bury the body. Not many. But again, those slaves belonged to Grant's father-in-law, so Grant himself had no legal authority to set them free. 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. 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. PolitiFact and Snopes have previously evaluated similar claims that popped up in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Accordingly, Lincoln had no legal authority to free all slaves everywhere, only in the "states and parts of states in which the people thereof" were in "rebellion against the United States.". These declarationsoften cited Lincoln's statement that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,"Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for The Atlantic. 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.". In July 1861, the two armies were nearly equal in strength with less than 200,000 soldiers on each side; however at the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. . These heroic stories of abandonment were quickly supplanted by the extraordinary steps of fealty taken by enslaved men like Moses, Dave or Kincien and became the centerpiece of the Lost Cause movement, which stressed unwavering and unquestioning obedience of slaves to their masters. 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. 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. Surprisingly, to many history impaired individuals, most Union Generals and staff had slaves to serve them! ), 'The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! 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? The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! 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. They swam in it, and no amount of willful denial can change that. But indentured servitude, by definition, came nowhere close to chattel slavery. Abraham Lincoln was their President. Using total population as a reference point also includes babies and children, for example, said Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. Gallagher noted that over the fouryears of the war, the South put 800,000-900,000 men under arms. All three historians told us that the number of men on the Union side who owned slaves was quite small. J.D. We need your help. Enlisted men owned less wealth, with combined levels of $1,125 for the median and $7,079 for the average, but those numbers indicated a fairly comfortable standard of living. In the vast majority of cases, each household (termed a "family" in the 1860 document, even when the group consisted of unrelated people living in the same residence) that owned slaves had only one slaveholder listed, the head of the household. 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. They were fighting for survival as cotton and tobacco prices were on a roller coaster.. Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didnt fight the battle because of slavery. The battle that commenced west and north of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, expanded gradually as the two armies shifted units along the roads leading to the small town. Needless to say, men of modest means wereless likely to own slaves. 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." Percentage of slaves in each county of the slave states in 1860. . Here are county maps for all eleven Confederate states, with the proportion of slaveholding families indicated in green -- a darker color indicates a higher density: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, All States. Townsend had a brief passage about the number of West Point graduates who remained loyal to the Union. More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. As the Civil War progressed, desertion amongst Confederate soldiers infected the Confederate Army like a poisonous cancer. Where it was still legal, slavery was far more widespread than the number in the post indicates, they said. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property some 400,000 acres formerly owned by Confederate land . More:Court clears way for removal of Confederate statue at the center of deadly Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. For the Union states that allowed slavery, the 1860 census shows that they had much lower rates of slave ownership than the Confederate states. 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. Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. 801 3rd St. S Carter wanted it known that he was willing to die and that he talked to the clergyman about dying . "Among those Southern whites who did own slaves, even in the Unionist border slave states, many supported the Confederacy, and fought for it.". Many of those white families, who couldnt afford enslaved people, aspired to own slaves as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. "This pecksniffery even went so far as to find the state of Delaware rejecting the 13th Amendment in December of 1865 and did not ratify it (13th Amendment / free the slaves) until 1901!". These primary source accounts, in the form of letters and diaries, detail how camp slaves remained in the rear, prepared to perform various support roles. Advertising Notice A number of rebels passed by until a young man of benevolent expression attempted to locate a surgeon. These men performed a wide range of roles for their owners, including cooking, cleaning, foraging and sending messages to families back home. The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. He managed to limp off the field with the help of a camp servant by the name of Jim. Evaluating the share of households that owned slaves in seceding states is a much more effective means, said Joseph Glatthaar, history professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. #FHTE In 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." Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. About 5% of people in those states were considered slaveholders, the data shows. T he presidential election of 1860 deepened a growing chasm between divided Kentuckians. Addressing and correcting the many inaccuracies and misleading statements contained in that piece would require a very lengthy article, so we have chosen to tackle it here in smaller, more easily digestible chunks. The bloodiest battles of the Civil War were: Note: Antietam had the greatest number of casualties of any single-day battle. | The purpose of the museum is to tell the story of the Confederate Soldier, Sailor, and Marine and it will provide facts for everyone to make their own mind up about the war. I encourage readers to consider if our concept of 'Old South Charm' relies on the racist mythology of the Lost Cause, will that not hinder Maury Countys 'New South Progress' in the 21st century?". Just last weekend, groundbreaking began on the site of the museum dedicated to continuing a long-discredited myth about the beginnings of the Civil War: the Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Kevin Levin writes for his blog,"Civil War Memory". But theres no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Black soldiers fought under the Confederate banner against Union soldiers. Danny Lewis Although stories of these impressed workers and camp slaves have been erased from our popular memory of the war in favor of mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, their presence in the Confederate army constituted a visual reminder to every soldier slaveowner and non-slaveowner alikethat their ultimate success in battle depended on the ownership of other human beings. . (Some of the slaves at White Haven eventually drifted off during the Civil War; any that remained were freed when Missouri's constitutional convention abolished slavery in January 1865.). 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). This included men in all the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days.".
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