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Shattering the Slave Power: Northern Soldiers Interpret Their Civil War

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Shattering the Slave Power: Northern Soldiers Interpret Their Civil War Shattering the Slave Power: Northern Soldiers Interpret Their Civil War Peter Clayton Luebke Richmond, Virginia B.A., College of William & Mary, 2005 M.A., University of Virginia, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Virginia May, 2014 i © Copyright by Peter Clayton Luebke All Rights Reserved May 2014 ii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 "For the Union, Constitution, and Enforcement of the Laws": Pennsylvania and New Jersey Troops Confront the Slave Power 29 Chapter 2 "The Bone and Sinue of the Population": Western Soldiers, Masculinity, and the Fight Against the Slave Power 77 Chapter 3 "Equal to Any Minstrel Concert I Ever Attended at Home": Union Soldiers and Blackface Minstrelsy as a Strategy of Containment 132 Chapter 4 "To Transmit and Perpetuate the Fruits of This Victory": Union Regimental Histories and the Slave Power in Immediate Retrospect 173 Chapter 5 "Bugles of Liberty": Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States Remember Their Struggle Against the Slave Power 210 Conclusion 255 Bibliography 258 1 Introduction * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The first volume of former Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America appeared in 1872. In the exhaustive work, which would eventually span three heavy volumes and cover nearly two thousand pages, Wilson gave a legal, political, and cultural history of how a slaveholding aristocracy in the South had corrupted American democracy, thereby leading to the outbreak of the Civil War. As he explained in his preface, "from the closing months of 1860 to the spring of 1865, the United States presented to the gaze of mankind a saddening and humiliating spectacle…Violence held its carnival and reaped its bloody harvest." Many "thoughtful men have asked why this Christian nation…was rent and dissevered by fraternal strife. Why was the soil of republican America reddened with the blood of husbands and fathers, sons and brothers, and bathed with the tears of wives and mothers, daughters and sisters?"1 Wilson proposed an answer to that question. In his opinion, a "Slave Power" had sought "to make perpetual its hateful dominion." He explained that "inborn indolence, conjoined with avarice, pride, and lust of power" resulted in the institution of slavery, which "reduced man, created in Divine image, to property." From such base motives, the system of slavery created "a commanding power, ever sensitive, jealous, proscriptive, dominating, and aggressive." For Wilson, the history of American politics charted out the path that the Slave Power had taken to seize control of the institutions of government, how its "Champions" sought "to oppose every interest, every institution, and every 1 Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. I (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1872), v. 2 individual that menaced its paramount sway."2 The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as president, for Wilson, marked the first time that the Slave Power faced a setback. The slaveholders, who "for more than two generations…had dictated principles, shaped policies, made Presidents and cabinets, judges of the Supreme Court, Senators, and Representatives…had been beaten."3 Reacting precipitously to this check on their power, the slaveholding aristocrats of the South engineered undemocratic conventions to take their states out of the Union. Northerners, unwilling to let the flame of republican liberty go out in the world because of the machinations of such a craven class, sprang to the rescue. Although Wilson wrote more than a decade after the start of the Civil War, his assessment that a "Slave Power" of some kind had derailed the American experiment had been a widely held idea among the wartime generation. Wilson only offered the most comprehensive and sustained account of it. Foreign critics, such as the economist John Eliot Cairnes, had also fingered a slaveholding oligarchy as the force behind secession and the American Civil War.4 But beyond politicians, common men who served in the Union armies thought that white southern aristocrats sought to undermine the Union, and said so in letters home and in their diaries. For instance, Harris Beecher, who had served with the 114th New York Infantry Regiment during the war, explained in a regimental history, a book aimed at telling the 2 Ibid., v, 1-2, and 17. 3 Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1874), 704. 4 J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues Involved in the American Contest (London: Parker, Son & Bourn, 1862). 3 families at home what the soldiers had fought for, that "history no where tells us that aristocracy is the parent of a successful revolution." After cataloguing a number of upheavals that had resulted in the overthrow of the old order, he turned to the "American rebellion," which he assessed as "a revolt of the aristocracy" with "no nobler purpose than the enrichment of the privileged classes."5 During the Civil War, Capt. Francis Moore of the 2nd Illinois Cavalry found the white populace of the South ignorant. He acidly remarked that "the rulers and leaders, who are the few intelligent and educated, find it much easier to lead and rule the masses if they are kept in ignorance." As a result, the white masses of the South had been "used by dupes by the rich." Despite the damage the war had inflicted upon the nation, Moore found it ultimately salutary in its effects, for "the South will yet come out of her baptism of fire all the better for the scorching" because "slave aristocracy will give way to northern thrift, education, and enterprise."6 Both Beecher and Moore used the Slave Power Conspiracy thesis to explain the Civil War and what they saw during it; while they opined at far shorter length than Wilson, their testimony, and much more like it, demonstrates that soldiers drew upon the idea during the war. Scholars who have looked at Union soldiers during the Civil War have often given the idea of the Slave Power short shrift in their analyses. Bell Irvin Wiley, in a pioneering study of Union soldiers during the Civil War, focused on the daily texture of 5 Harris Beecher, History of the 114th Regiment, N.Y.S.V. Where it Went, What it Saw, and What it Did (Norwich: J.F. Hubbard, Jr., 1866), 12-15. 6 The Story of My Campaign: The Civil War Memoir of Francis T. Moore, Second Illinois Cavalry, edited by Thomas Bahde with a foreword by Micahel Fellman (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 145, 86, 163. 4 soldiers' lives, what they ate, how they entertained themselves in camps, and how they dealt with the ordeal of combat. Further studies, such as James I. Robertson's Soldiers Blue and Gray deepened Wiley's analysis through a broader consideration of sources. Both Wiley and Robertson largely avoided discussing in detail the ideological motivations of Union troops.7 Other historians, more concerned with the ideologies of northern soldiers during the Civil War have mentioned the Slave Power conspiracy thesis, largely in passing. Historians Earl J. Hess, Randall Jimmerson, James M. McPherson, and Reid Mitchell have noted that the idea of the Slave Power impelled many northerners to enlist. All four of these authors pointed to the ways in which the concept helped sustain commitment to the Union cause, but they offered little sustained attention to how the idea persisted throughout the war and how it meshed with the evolution of emancipation as a war aim. Furthermore, these scholars, except for Hess, concerned primarily with the wartime years by necessity avoided discussion of how the Slave Power thesis shaped how soldiers saw the war after it had ended.8 7 James I. Robertson, Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); and Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1952). 8 Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union, 2d ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); Randall Jimmerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought During the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 45-46; James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19; and Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Penguin, 1988), 13-14. 5 In recent years, several scholars have identified how for some soldiers, the prime meaning of the Civil War became the freedom struggle, that is the primary importance of the war for both soldiers and present historians, was the end of slavery. Historian Chandra Manning has argued that "slavery" stood at "the center of soldiers' views of the struggle." She claimed that "by the end of the war, white northern opinions about racial equality and civil rights, intractable though they had seemed in 1861, were far more malleable and vulnerable to intense self-scrutiny among Union troops than anyone could have imagined when the war began."9 Indeed, Manning and other scholars such as James Oakes, have done a superb job charting the ways in which some Union soldiers began to see the key meaning of the Civil War as the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. While Manning and Oakes have written superb accounts that apply to some soldiers, they tend to overstate the breadth and depth of these views in the northern ranks.
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