“The War of Northern Aggression” as Modern, Segregationist Revisionism
On the Diane Rehm show I mentioned earlier, I was struck by an observation made by Chandra Manning, that the term she first learned in elementary school in Florida, “the War of Northern Aggression,” is itself a modern term, one that was not used in the 19th century:
I grew up all over the country on naval bases and the first place that I learned about the Civil War in a classroom was Jacksonville, Fla. And we said the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag each morning, but we then sang “Dixie” to the pictures of Lee and Stonewall Jackson on either side. And so my introduction to the study of the Civil War has an interesting cast to it.
You can’t pigeonhole me North or South and so I was taken by his noticing of that phrase, “War of Northern Aggression,” because when I was six, that’s how it was introduced to me. So imagine my surprise to learn that that’s a 20th century invention, that nobody called it that during the war itself. Northerners called it “The Rebellion,” Southerners, if they called it anything other than “this awful war,” called it the “Civil War.”
Is that true, that the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” is a modern term? It is:
Google News can be used to track the appearance of words and phrases in its archive of hundreds of thousands of pages of historic newspapers, going back through the 19th century and beyond. Not only is “the War of Northern Aggression” a term that was not widely used at the time of the war, it didn’t come into wide use for nearly a century after, from the mid-1950s on. In Google’s indexing, it appears exactly once during the conflict, describing the war, not as a proper name as it is commonly seen today. (The single example in the 19th century comes from an 1862 speech by Union General John Alexander McClernand, who cautioned Tennesseans that “you have been told, gentlemen, that this is a war of Northern aggression. I deny it. It is no war of aggression. It is a war of defence, of defence of our common Constitution and Union.”)
As a proper noun, “the War of Northern Aggression” doesn’t even date back to what may be termed the “golden years” of the Lost Cause, around the turn of the 20th century.
Other large newspaper databases return similar results. GenalogyBank (a subscription service), turns up the earliest reference to “the War of Northern Aggression” in a May 12, 1956 article (above) in the Augusta, Georgia, Chronicle (“S.C. Governor Suggests Negroes Evacuate South”), in which the phrase is set off in quotes, and the governor warns about Northerners “stirring racial strife in the South.”
The subscription service NewspaperArchive similarly dates the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” to no earlier than 1957:
Apart from the 1862 example mentioned earlier, the term “War of Northern Aggression” didn’t appear in the New York Times again until 1972.
While there may be other, scattered examples that predate the mid-1950s, it’s clear that the phrase “War of Northern Aggression,” used as a proper noun for the Civil War, only came into regular use in the last 50 years or so. It is not a term that was used during that conflict, or for nearly a century after.
So what, exactly, was happening in the United States at about that time? What was going on the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s that caused it to become a popular rhetorical device? Part of it seems to be the Civil War Centennial, but there was also Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock, Mansfield, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, the Citizen’s Councils, the Freedom Riders and so on. There was lots going on, and even a quick perusal of early examples of its usage make clear that “the War of Northern Aggression,” as a proper noun, was routinely employed by Southern segregationists to draw parallels between the civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century and the conflict of a hundred years before, to enlist the memory of Confederate ancestors in opposition to federal court-mandated processes like the desegregation of public schools and integration of public facilities. The phrase “War of Northern Aggression” does not trace its origins to the cause of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis; it finds its champions with the likes of Orval Faubus and George Wallace.
The Southron Heritage™ movement rails continually about “revisionist” history and “presentism,” usually in reference to “politically correct” authors who put the issue of slavery at the center of the conflict. But they should keep in mind that revisionism cuts both ways. Most of the orthodoxy held as The Truth by such folks (secession was about states’ rights, slavery would have gone away on its own, slavery was a benign institution, etc.) aren’t based on original, primary sources from the 1860s so much as they are from the voluminous Lost Cause literature from the 1890s onward, and (to a lesser degree) the Dunning School of historiography that followed it. The tenets of the Lost Cause itself are revisionist, departing from the words and deeds of Southerners during the war, to reshape and redefine the Confederacy and its legacy as something wholly pure and noble, and to deflect moral accountability onto others. It’s old revisionism, but revisionism nonetheless.
Even so, I’m surprised at how new the term “the War of Northern Aggression” actually is. Knowing its genesis, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to invoke it, or expect to be taken seriously when they do.
_____________
Too Many Historians, Too Little Time
Blog reader dmf alerted me this morning to today’s Diane Rehm Show on NPR, that devoted an hour to the subject of The Civil War: America’s 2nd Revolution, with particular emphasis on the coming of the war and the way it’s perceived today. I don’t usually have a chance to listen to Rehm’s show, but the panel today was A-List: Adam Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening; David Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, the upcoming American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, and a popular undergrad lecture series available online; Thavolia Glymph, author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household; and Chandra Manning, author of What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War.
They covered a lot of ground, and easily could have gone on for another hour. I’ll have more to say when the episode’s transcript is posted, but for now you can listen online.
Update: Transcript here.
____________
Clara Barton, Confederate Heroine
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Under Dixie Outfitter’s “Southern History” section, I stumbled upon this gem. While I don’t doubt that, as a battlefield nurse, Barton tended to wounded Confederates as well as Union troops, it sure seems a bit of a stretch to claim this Unitarian daughter of Massachusetts as a “Confederate heroine.” (This is almost as good as the time recently when I saw a paean to the virtues of traditional antebellum Southern womanhood, headed by a picture of New England Quaker, abolitionist and proto-feminist Lucretia Mott.) It’s hard to imagine what the woman who organized the exhumation, identification and reburial of the remains of over 12,000 Federal prisoners at Andersonville would think of Dixie Outfitters’ honorific. The Geocities link at the bottom died with that online hosting service in 2009, but you can view it here in the Internet Way-Back machine. No “Confederate heroine” foolishness there.
I’m not sure why I should be surprised; the subject of Dixie Outfitters’ “Legends of the Confederacy: Washer Women” shirt was actually the wife of a soldier in the 31st Pennsylvania Infantry.
_______________
Hari Jones Drops the Hammer on National Observance of Juneteenth
Hari Jones, Curator of the African American Civil War Museum, drops the hammer on the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, and the organization behind it, the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation (NJoF). He argues that the narrative used to justify the propose holiday does little to credit African Americans with taking up their own struggle, and instead presents them as passive players in emancipation, waiting on the beneficence of the Union army to do it for them. Further, he presses, the standard Juneteenth narrative carries forward a long-standing, intentional effort to suppress the story of how African Americans, in ways large and small, worked to emancipate themselves, particularly by taking up arms for the Union. He wraps up a stem-winder:
Certainly, informed and knowledgeable people should not celebrate the suppression of their own history. Juneteenth day is a de facto celebration of such suppression. Americans, especially Americans of African descent, should not celebrate when the enslaved were freed by someone else, because that’s not the accurate story. They should celebrate when the enslaved freed themselves, by saving the Union. Such freedmen were heroes, not spectators, and their story is currently being suppressed by the advocates of the Juneteenth national holiday. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves; it made it legal for this disenfranchised, enslaved population to free themselves, while maintaining the supremacy of the Constitution, and preserving the Union. They became the heroes of the Republic. It is as Lincoln said: without the military help of the black freedman, the war against the South could not have been won.
That’s worth celebrating. That’s worth telling. The story of how Americans of African descent helped save the Union, and freed themselves. Let’s celebrate the truth, a glorious history, a story of a glorious march to Liberty.
One gets the idea that Jones’ beef with the NJoF and its director, Dr. Ronald Myers, is about something more personal than mere historical narrative.
Jones makes a powerful argument, with solid points. But I think he misses something crucial, which is that in Texas, where Juneteenth originated, it’s been a regular celebration since 1866. It is not a modern holiday, established retroactively to commemorate an event in the long past; the celebration of Juneteenth is as old as emancipation itself. It was created and carried on by the freedmen and -women themselves:
Some of the early emancipation festivities were relegated by city authorities to a town’s outskirts; in time, however, black groups collected funds to purchase tracts of land for their celebrations, including Juneteenth. A common name for these sites was Emancipation Park. In Houston, for instance, a deed for a ten-acre site was signed in 1872, and in Austin the Travis County Emancipation Celebration Association acquired land for its Emancipation Park in the early 1900s; the Juneteenth event was later moved to Rosewood Park. In Limestone County the Nineteenth of June Association acquired thirty acres, which has since been reduced to twenty acres by the rising of Lake Mexia.
Particular celebrations of Juneteenth have had unique beginnings or aspects. In the state capital Juneteenth was first celebrated in 1867 under the direction of the Freedmen’s Bureau and became part of the calendar of public events by 1872. Juneteenth in Limestone County has gathered “thousands” to be with families and friends. At one time 30,000 blacks gathered at Booker T. Washington Park, known more popularly as Comanche Crossing, for the event. One of the most important parts of the Limestone celebration is the recollection of family history, both under slavery and since. Another of the state’s memorable celebrations of Juneteenth occurred in Brenham, where large, racially mixed crowds witness the annual promenade through town. In Beeville, black, white, and brown residents have also joined together to commemorate the day with barbecue, picnics, and other festivities.
It’s one thing to argue with another historian or community leader about the the historical narrative represented by a public celebration (think Columbus Day), but it’s entirely another to — in effect — dismiss the understanding of the day as originally celebrated by the people who actually lived those events, and experienced them at first hand.
What do you think?
_____________
h/t Kevin. Image: Juneteenth celebration in Austin, June 19, 1900. PICA 05476, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
Juneteenth, History and Tradition
[This post originally appeared here on June 19, 2010.]
“Emancipation” by Thomas Nast. Ohio State University.
Juneteenth has come again, and (quite rightly) the Galveston County Daily News, the paper that first published General Granger’s order that forms the basis for the holiday, has again called for the day to be recognized as a national holiday:
Those who are lobbying for a national holiday are not asking for a paid day off. They are asking for a commemorative day, like Flag Day on June 14 or Patriot Day on Sept. 11. All that would take is a presidential proclamation. Both the U.S. House and Senate have endorsed the idea.
Why is a national celebration for an event that occurred in Galveston and originally affected only those in a single state such a good idea?
Because Juneteenth has become a symbol of the end of slavery. No matter how much we may regret the tragedy of slavery and wish it weren’t a part of this nation’s story, it is. Denying the truth about the past is always unwise.
For those who don’t know, Juneteenth started in Galveston. On Jan. 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But the order was meaningless until it could be enforced. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865 — after the Confederacy had been defeated and Union troops landed in Galveston — that the slaves in Texas were told they were free.
People all across the country get this story. That’s why Juneteenth celebrations have been growing all across the country. The celebration started in Galveston. But its significance has come to be understood far, far beyond the island, and far beyond Texas.
This is exactly right. Juneteenth is not just of relevance to African Americans or Texans, but for all who ascribe to the values of liberty and civic participation in this country. A victory for civil rights for any group is a victory for us all, and there is none bigger in this nation’s history than that transformation represented by Juneteenth.
But as widespread as Juneteenth celebrations have become — I was pleased and surprised, some years ago, to see Juneteenth celebration flyers pasted up in Minnesota — there’s an awful lot of confusion and misinformation about the specific events here, in Galveston, in June 1865 that gave birth to the holiday. The best published account of the period appears in Edward T. Cotham’s Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston, from which much of what follows is abstracted.
The United States Customs House, Galveston.
On June 5, Captain B. F. Sands entered Galveston harbor with the Union naval vessels Cornubia and Preston. Sands went ashore with a detachment and raised the United States flag over the federal customs house for about half an hour. Sands made a few comments to the largely silent crowd, saying that he saw this event as the closing chapter of the rebellion, and assuring the local citizens that he had only worn a sidearm that day as a gesture of respect for the mayor of the city.
Site of General Granger’s headquarters, southwest corner of 22nd Street and Strand.
A large number of Federal troops came ashore over the next two weeks, including detachments of the 76th Illinois Infantry. Union General Gordon Granger, newly-appointed as military governor for Texas, arrived on June 18, and established his headquarters in Osterman Building (now gone) on the southwest corner of 22nd and Strand. The provost marshal, which acted largely as a military police force, set up in the Customs House. The next day, June 19, a Monday, Granger issued five general orders, establishing his authority over the rest of Texas and laying out the initial priorities of his administration. General Orders Nos. 1 and 2 asserted Granger’s authority over all Federal forces in Texas, and named the key department heads in his administration of the state for various responsibilities. General Order No. 4 voided all actions of the Texas government during the rebellion, and asserted Federal control over all public assets within the state. General Order No. 5 established the Army’s Quartermaster Department as sole authorized buyer for cotton, until such time as Treasury agents could arrive and take over those responsibilities.
It is General Order No. 3, however, that is remembered today. It was short and direct:
Headquarters, District of Texas
Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865General Orders, No. 3
The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there ro elsewhere.
By order of
Major-General Granger
F. W. Emery, Maj. & A. . G.
What’s less clear is how this order was disseminated. It’s likely that printed copies were put up in public places. It was published on June 21 in the Galveston Daily News, but otherwise it is not known if it was ever given a formal, public and ceremonial reading. Although the symbolic significance of General Order No. 3 cannot be overstated, its main legal purpose was to reaffirm what was well-established and widely known throughout the South, that with the occupation of Federal forces came the emancipation of all slaves within the region now coming under Union control.
The James Moreau Brown residence, now known as Ashton Villa, at 24th & Broadway in Galveston. This site is well-established in local tradition as the site of the original Juneteenth proclamation, although direct evidence is lacking.
Local tradition has long held that General Granger took over James Moreau Brown’s home on Broadway, Ashton Villa, as a residence for himself and his staff. To my knowledge, there is no direct evidence for this. Along with this comes the tradition that the Ashton Villa was also the site where the Emancipation Proclamation was formally read out to the citizenry of Galveston. This belief has prevailed for many years, and is annually reinforced with events commemorating Juneteenth both at the site, and also citing the site. In years past, community groups have even staged “reenactments” of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation from the second-floor balcony, something which must surely strain the limits of reasonable historical conjecture. As far as I know, the property’s operators, the Galveston Historical Foundation, have never taken an official stand on the interpretation that Juneteenth had its actual origins on the site. Although I myself have serious doubts about Ashton Villa having having any direct role in the original Juneteenth, I also appreciate that, as with the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as Titanic sank beneath the waves, arguing against this particular cherished belief is undoubtedly a losing battle.
Assuming that either the Emancipation Proclamation (or alternately, Granger’s brief General Order No. 3) was formally, ceremonially read out to the populace, where did it happen? Charles Waldo Hayes, writing several years after the war, says General Order No. 3 was “issued from [Granger’s] headquarters,” but that sounds like a figurative description rather than a literal one. My bet would not be Ashton Villa, but one of two other sites downtown already mentioned: the Osterman Building, where Granger’s headquarters was located and where the official business of the Federal occupation was done initially, or at the United States Customs House, which was the symbol of Federal property both in Galveston and the state as a whole, and (more important still) was the headquarters of Granger’s provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Rankin G. Laughlin of the 94th Illinois Infantry. It’s easy to imagine Lt. Col. Laughlin dragging a crate out onto the sidewalk in front of the Customs House and barking out a brief, and somewhat perfunctory, read-through of all five of the general’s orders in quick succession. No flags, no bands, and probably not much of a crowd to witness the event. My personal suspicion is that, were we to travel back to June 1865 and witness the origin of this most remarkable and uniquely-American holiday, we’d find ourselves very disappointed in how the actual events played out at the time.
Maybe the Ashton Villa tradition is preferable, after all.
“Further legislation on that subject at this time is not advisable.”
Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin highlights a resolution passed by the North Carolina Legislature on February 3, 1865, “against the arming of slaves by the Confederate government, in any emergency that can possibly arise.” The timing of this is significant; not only was the Confederate Congress in Richmond actively debating the subject, but Sherman had just begun his march northward through the Carolinas, crossing the Georgia border into South Carolina two days before. Even with increasingly gloomy reports from Virginia on one side, and Sherman’s army — now rested and resupplied after taking Savannah just before Christmas — starting a new campaign from their south, the North Carolina Legislature could not envision “any emergency that can possibly arise” that would justify the arming of slaves.
Although the question of enlisting slaves had popped up from time to time in the local press, it appears that the Texas Legislature never considered the issue in a meaningful way, or adopted a formal and definitive resolution as did North Carolina. Part of the problem was timing; the Texas Legislature was not in session during the last months of the war, when the question of arming slaves came to a head. The last Texas Confederate Lege, the 10th, met in regular session in November and December 1863, with special called sessions in May 1864 and again in October/November 1864. The closest they got to the question was a motion referred to committee for consideration, for a resolution to urge Texas’ representatives and senators in Richmond to expand Confederate national laws for increased impressment of slaves as labor. The committee declined, reporting back to the Speaker of the House that “in their opinion the impressment law of the Confederate States now in force makes sufficient provisions for the impressment of Negroes, and that further legislation on that subject at this time is not advisable.”
Governor Pendelton Murrah (right) did, however, make a passing reference to slave labor in connection with eliminating the various exemptions from service that white men were claiming to remain in civilian jobs at home. In an address to both houses of the Lege at the beginning of the 10th Legislature, he argued (p. 21, 10.4MB PDF) that
The swarms of men engaged in profitable business on their own accounts, who are exempted from, or avoid military service upon one pretext or another — the thousands occupied in driving teams and cattle for the government and government contractors must be placed in their respective companies, and replaced with Negroes. The able-bodied soldiers and employees about the posts and towns must take the field and their places be supplied by the old, the very young, and the infirm.
It doesn’t appear that the prospect of enlisting slaves in Texas was ever a serious enough question to generate substantive discussion or debate in Austin. It was a proposition, it seems, not even worthy of formal consideration.
______________
Image: Texas State Capitol, Austin, in the 1870s. Lawrence T. Jones III Texas Photographs, Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library.
A Good Year
Dead Confederates went “live” a year ago today. Since then we’ve had 190 posts (inclusive of this one), over 70,000 page views, and over 1,300 comments. Thanks, y’all.
___________
Image: “Off to War” by Walton Taber.
More Photo Mysteries Uncovered
The new issue of Civil War Times features a neat bit of detective work by Rick Eiserman, who discovered the likely photographer behind the famous images of the Texas Brigade in its winter quarters near Dumfries, Virginia, in the winter of 1861-62. Eiserman came upon the critical reference while doing more generalized research on the Texas Brigade, in the papers of two Galveston soldiers, William and Charles Schadt:
The Schadts wrote several letters from their Dumfries encampment at Camp Wigfall during 1861-62. I was halfway through an April 2, 1862, letter from William when the words seemed to jump off the page: “When we were in winter quarters Tom Blessing in our company had some dauguean [sic] fixings send [sic] to him and he went to work taking pictures in [sic] we have had a picture taken of the mess you can see it by calling on Mr. Waters or F. Hitchcock either of them will let you have one to take a copy of if you want it.”
My heart started racing as I read and reread that letter. After so many hours of searching specifically for the identity of the photographer, I’d found what I wanted when I wasn’t really anticipating it. The Dumfries photographer had actually been a soldier in the Texas Brigade. But who was this man who had obtained “dauguean fixings,” and how did he know what to do with them?
It turns out that Solomon Thomas “Tom” Blessing, who did indeed serve with William Schadt in Company L, was one of three brothers who worked as professional photographers before and after the war. Between the three of them, they owned or operated studios in New Orleans, Houston and Galveston. Clearly he had the knowledge and skills to take the photographs.
This is good stuff, made better for me by the local connection of the photographer, and the archival source being the incomparable Galveston and Texas History Center at Rosenberg Library here. The Blessings were prolific photographers in the years after the war.
Props as well to Craig Swain, who has his own photographic detective work highlighted in the same issue, along with a feature article on the Union’s 4.5-inch rifle, appropriately dubbed the “Yankee Super Gun.”
_____________
Images: At top, a photo believed to have been taken by Pvt. Tom Blessing of Galveston, Texas, of fellow members of Co. L of the 1st Texas Infantry. Left to right, as identified by Rick Eiserman: Pvt. Charles McCarty, Pvt. Joseph Nagle, Sgt. James Southwick, and Pvt. James Nagle. Photo via Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
Looking for Buster Kilrain’s Grave
Is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels the most influential Civil War novel since Gone with the Wind? Sure seems like it must be. Like GwtW, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; like GwtW, its was made into a huge, sweeping screen spectacle. (Though Gettysburg never approached the critical or commercial success of its predecessor.) Virtually everyone, it seems, has read it; almost single-handed, it’s elevated Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain into the upper echelon of popular heroes of the battle.
So here’s a question — how has the success of The Killer Angels shaped perceptions of the battle and the war for the public, for better or worse? What has it done well, and what badly?
Or is there another novel we should be talking about here?
______________
Is a Wirz Execution Photo Misidentified?
Henry Wirz (1823-1865) remains one of the most controversial figures of the American Civil War. Reviled in the North for his role as commandant of the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, Wirz was tried in the summer of 1865 in Washington, D.C. and condemned to death. He was hanged on November 10, 1865, on a scaffold set up in the courtyard of the Old Capitol Prison (below), on what is now the site of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wirz continues to have many supporters, who argue that he did the best he could to care for the Federal soldiers imprisoned at Andersonville, with the very limited resources he had at his disposal. The Confederacy, they argue, had not sufficient means to care for its own population, much less enemy prisoners, and point to hard conditions in Northern prisons, where lack of resources was far less a problem, in response. They also point out that one of the key witnesses in the prosecution’s case against Wirz was apparently an imposter, who could not have witnessed the things he testified to under oath. Nearly a century and a half after his death, efforts are still being made to exonerate Wirz and restore his reputation.
This post isn’t about any of that.
Wirz’ execution was the subject of a famous sequence of four photographs, now part of the collection of the Library of Congress, taken by Alexander Gardner. The sequence of the photos, as indicated by both their captions and catalog numbers, is usually given as follows:
- Reading the death warrant to Wirz on the scaffold, LC-B817- 7752
- Adjusting the rope for the execution of Wirz, LC-B8171-7753
- Soldier springing the trap; men in trees and Capitol dome beyond, LC-B8171-7754
- Hooded body of Captain Wirz hanging from the scaffold, LC-B8171-7755
The four images were taken from three different locations (below). The first two appear to have been taken from the roof of the prison kitchen (Point A), looking diagonally across the yard where the scaffold is set up. For the image of Wirz’ body hanging from the beam, Gardner moved the camera to the left, and to a higher position to get a clearer view of the body in the trap (Point B). Gardner may have also wanted to frame his shot to capture the dome of the U.S. Capitol in the background. For the shot labeled “springing the trap,” the camera is again at a lower position, similar to the height of Point A, but still further to Gardner’s left (Point C), again with the dome of the Capitol in the background. Gardner’s framing of these last shots is not subtle.
Plan of the Old Capitol Prison, showing the approximate positions of Gardner’s camera during the Wirz execution sequence. The plan is undated (from here), but shows the facility during its use as a prison during and immediately after the Civil War, 1861-67.
After looking closely at these images, though, I believe that these last two are transposed chronologically; the third image, labeled “springing the trap,” is properly the last image in sequence, and shows Wirz’ body being lowered from gallows into the space below the scaffold. The evidence – and somewhat graphic images of the hanging – after the jump:
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
23 comments