“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” – Abraham Lincoln
The American Civil War was the most devastating conflict the people of the United States ever fought. The fratricidal slaughter saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands on both sides, higher than the losses suffered by America in all other major wars combined. Over 6,000 were killed in the Revolution, 2,260 in the War of 1812, 13,283 in the Mexican-American War, 2,246 in the war with Spain, 116,516 in World War I, 407,316 in World War II, 33,746 in Korea, and 58,152 in Viet Nam, totalling 637,954. In the Civil War, where families were torn apart and friends were sent into battle against each other, as many as 850,000 were killed according to recent estimates by historian Dr. J. David Hacker, not even counting the 50,000 civilians who perished in the fighting. More common estimates place the number of dead at 620,000, but this figure does not account for the error range caused by lack of proper documentation that indicates the death toll could have been significantly higher than we think.
The war witnessed some of the deadliest episodes in US history, such as the Battle of Antietam, where 23,000 soldiers, Northern and Southern alike, were killed, injured, or went missing in a single day and Gettysburg, which saw nearly 10,000 deaths in three days and over 50,000 casualties. The Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia was another shocking example of the immeasurable bloodshed that defined the Civil War when 7,000 Americans died in the first twenty minutes of fighting, more than all American combat deaths over the course of the eight-year Revolutionary War and more than twice the number who fell on D-Day.
The bloodshed undoubtedly stands as the darkest period in all of American history, when their enemy was not a foreign invader but their very own fellow countrymen. On the bodies of the fallen, the American experiment in democracy, freedom, and liberty was pushed all the way to the brink of collapse, and for a while, it actually seemed as if the great Republic would fail. Sparked against the backdrop of the horrid injustice of slavery, the war was a fight for the soul of America which left nearly a million dead, the South in ruins, and the entire nation in mourning.
When the war began in the spring of 1861 with the bombardment of Fort Sumter by Confederate forces, no one had any idea the extent of the brutality that would unfold or that it would take four years or that it would irrevocably transform the United States. When the fighting first started, people even went on picnics to watch the initial confrontations between the North and the South. Not yet grasping the fact that their nation had splintered painfully into two, there was a kind of romantic view of the war, perhaps based on the old and misguided notions of glory and honor to be found in conflict, and hundreds of people — everyone from tourists and sightseers to congressmen and senators, followed the Union army to watch the early fighting.
It was at the First Battle of Bull Run, or the First Battle of Manassas in Virginia where it really began to occur to the American people the full scale of the devastation that was only just beginning when in a single day of fighting on July 21st, 1861, both sides suffered a total of about 5,000 casualties, including 800 dead. It was the single bloodiest day in American history until then, more devastating than any battle the US had ever fought.
The war would go on to kill hundreds of thousands more, literally pitting brother against brother as families broke apart in their loyalties to the Union and the new Confederacy. The soldiers who served in both the Confederate and Union armies found themselves going into battle against men they knew as countrymen, and often as personal friends or family. Even more famous figures of the time such as Senator John J. Crittenden, known for the highly problematic Crittenden Compromise that sought to make it possible for the abolition of slavery in the North but enshrine it in the Constitution so that it could never be stopped nationwide, had one son serving in the Union army and another in the Confederate, both as major generals.
In no other place was the fratricidal nature of the war more concentrated or better reflected than in Kentucky, where 100,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union and 40,000 for the Confederacy. Even former First Lady Mary Lincoln herself who, like her husband, hailed from Kentucky, had relatives who fought and died in both the Confederate and Union ranks.
The devastation to cities, infrastructure, and most importantly, human life that unfolded during the Civil War was unlike anything Americans had ever seen, and in some ways, unlike anything the world had ever seen. Total war was employed for the first time, and in 1864, the Union army numbered over 500,000. It was the largest force in the world. Entire cities, including Atlanta, were reduced to rubble. Winchester, Virginia saw constant fighting and changed hands seventy times. One particularly horrid episode that stands out was the Burning of Chambersburg in Pennsylvania on July 30th, 1864.
In retaliation for the brutal raids carried out by Confederate irregulars, Union general David Hunter had ransacked the Shenandoah Valley after expelling Southern forces from the area, destroying many buildings and vital resource production facilities. But some of his men got carried away and burnt private homes and defaced the grave of Stonewall Jackson out of spite.
In response, Confederate Major General John McCausland advanced on Chambersburg with his army to demand that the city pay him $100,000 in gold or half a million dollars in US currency. The citizens of Chambersburg first tried to stall him, waiting for Union forces to rescue them, but after some time were forced to start scrounging up the ransom money.
But there wasn’t enough. And when the people were unable to pay him, McCausland sacked the city and set it on fire. The civilians were subjected to ill-treatment and the burning left 2,000 people homeless and one dead. The Confederate forces burned down thousands of homes and non-military buildings, under direct orders, dealing out damage several times worse than what Hunter had done in Shenandoah. But there were some who resisted, such as Colonel William E. Peters, who refused to do any harm to defenseless civilians, and felt that taking revenge against Hunter by doing the very thing his men had done was wrong. His story deserves a more thorough exploration, and cannot properly be discussed here. But it can be said that there were many others like him who were disgusted at McCausland’s orders and those among them who obeyed, so many that when, on his way home, McCausland threatened two other cities in Maryland with the same ultimatum he presented to Chambersburg, they refused to carry out the order, and the towns were spared.
Insidious Tyranny
The war was witness to many episodes of brutality, tragedy, and suffering. It began in the midst of the Secession Crisis when one by one, the Southern states broke away from the Union. Secessionist politicians spoke of federal tyranny and a threat to the Southern way of life posed by the North’s opposition to slavery. They claimed that the split, and then the war that erupted afterward was a just and noble struggle, and that they were fighting for the people.
Nothing could have been farther from the truth.
In the long and tragic narrative of how our struggles throughout history have many times been nothing but the result of manipulation by a few powerful figures looking to rig the world in their favor, often at the painful expense of everyone else, the American Civil War was one dark chapter.
In examining the historical landscape of the events that led to the Civil War, it becomes clear that the divisions which caused the country to break apart and even the process of secession itself was but the interests of a small group of powerful people who had complete control over the South, not the millions of average Americans who lived in the region, the overwhelming majority of whom were not slave owners.
The Confederacy, created under the veneer of democracy, was, while claiming to champion the will of all Southerners, in reality steered by a small planter class that numbered only 300,000 families in a population of 9 million, including 5.2 million white non-slave owning families and 3.5 million slaves. This elite group, representing only 6% of the white population and a little over 3% of the entire region, prioritized its personal economic interests over basic humanity and even the interests of their fellow white Southerners, and touted a struggle against the federal government simply to protect their own profits. They pushed for secession, steamrolling over the resistance of the many white Southerners who in fact were opposed to secession and certainly to war against their own people.
State to state, the process of secession varied somewhat, but there was a clear pattern of undemocratic behavior in the referendums that were held to decide on the immensely important decision of breaking away from their country. Conventions were convened and delegates were technically elected by popular vote so they could themselves vote on secession, however there were many instances of voter intimidation and manipulation. In Alabama, for one, some counties reported more pro-secession ballots than there were people eligible to vote — white males over the age of 21, indicating irregularities and vote-dumping. Other similar methods to force the measure through were also employed in Georgia and Louisiana, representing the dominating position that the planters held in the region.
These undemocratic practices, coupled with the fact that many white Southerners opposed secession, paints a very complicated yet also glaringly clear picture of how the Confederacy formed and the devastation that occurred afterward. It was not the noble, common man’s struggle like many Confederate politicians boasted it to be. And while framed as a resistance to federal, Northern elitist tyranny, the Confederacy in fact oversaw restriction of liberty in its constituent states during its existence, not to mention the cruel desire to maintain slavery.
Some significantly restricted voting rights, even for white men who had been previously allowed to vote without any qualification other than being over 21 years of age. These measures were aimed at securing the power of the minority elite and maintaining control of the population in an atmosphere where even the loudest Confederate politicians could sense the opposition they faced from those they claimed to represent. The most common ways this was done was by imposing wealth or property requirements on voting, such as in Georgia, where a $10,000 property requirement was implemented, effectively disenfranchising large swathes of the white population, again, the same group they claimed to be fighting for. The entire foundation of the Confederacy and the so-called governance that unfolded within it after its formation prove that it was a deeply undemocratic regime which was geared more towards plutocratic rule and serving the needs of the wealthy than popular sovereignty and serving the needs of the people.
Resistance
Southern life and culture, especially during the Civil War, has unfortunately been disproportionately defined as a single and uniform entity centered around race-based politics and similarly exclusionary and extreme policies by both historians and the demagogues who sought to galvanize the region behind certain agendas. While there were indeed many Southerners during the Civil War who were staunch secessionists and supporters of slavery who harbored deeply racist sentiments, there were a significant number of white Southerners who did not, who stood against slavery, and who resisted the Confederate onslaught.
“Despite all the efforts to impose a uniformity of thought on southern life, the voice of dissent was never completely silenced,” as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner wrote. And “The South,” as the other Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Degler argued, “is not and never has been a monolith”. In his book, The Other South, Degler highlights a part of Southern history that has been sadly suppressed by some demagogic forces and forgotten by many historians, and that is the element of dissent. There were in fact Southerners who stood actively against slavery, who opposed the Confederacy, who joined the Republican Party of Lincoln during the Reconstruction Era, and was part of the Populist movement in the 1890s that formed as a symbol of resistance to the growing power that money and corporations had over politics.
During the Civil War itself, once prime example of this non-conformity that directly challenges the idea of Southern uniformity was the underground, pro-Union resistance group that formed in North Carolina known as the Heroes of America, also known as the Red Strings for the like-colored strings they wore on their lapels or hung outside their windows to identify themselves.
Amidst the rolling hills of Piedmont and the mountains in the west, North Carolinians who opposed what many of them felt was an authoritarian form of government under the Confederacy, who opposed the draft, and secession in the first place, people, both white and black, some who were former slaves and others who were free, formed to resist Confederate rule. Having originally started off as a group of armed Unionists in July 1861, it had been quickly suppressed by Confederate forces as a rebellion and those who had taken part were charged with treason.
They re-emerged two years later.
Its most famous leader and organizer was the pharmacist and physician, John Lewis Johnson, and it was officially led by Senator John Pool of North Carolina. The Grand Council, established in Raleigh, was the central hub of the Red String’s activities, and Johnson’s actions led to the establishment of a National Grand Council in Washington. Its activities included providing military intelligence to the Union and maintaining an underground network to help Unionists escape to the North, including slaves, while also encouraging desertion in the Confederate army and the formation of anti-Confederate guerilla units. They also promised that the wealth of the planter class, the biggest supporters of the Confederacy, would be redistributed to the poor after the war with the objective of reducing class divide in the South. While the method may have been questionable from a practical standpoint, it was certainly a noble goal.
A year later, by the winter of 1864, the Heroes of America had extended their network to parts of Tennessee and southwestern Virginia where deserters and county officials — all Southern, who were loyal to the Union and were part of the Red Strings had taken back control of the region from the Confederacy.
By the end of the war, there were as many as 10,000 people in the Red Strings, helping whites and blacks alike escape Confederate rule, aiding the United States, and fighting for freedom in their home where tyranny had been imposed. And once the war was over, the Heroes of America focused on protecting its members, including many white North Carolinians who had served in the US military from retaliation from hostile ex-Confederates and in 1868 supported once again the “scalawag” William Woods Holden during the North Carolina gubernatorial election. His story is another example of the resistance to Confederate tyranny that more than a few Southerners portrayed, and for which he was unjustly punished.
The first time he had run was in 1864, against the Confederate incumbent Zebulon B. Vance. During the campaign, he was accused of being a leader of the Red Strings whom the North Carolinian government at the time considered to be traitors. Fearful of associating with him and the danger that might bring, many of Holden’s supporters reluctantly cast no vote in that election and Vance won by a landslide.
He would become governor in 1865, however, upon appointment by President Andrew Johnson, if only for a brief term of seven months from May to December, but would be elected to the office only a few years later in 1868, whereupon he served until his impeachment and removal from office by the North Carolina Senate in 1871.
It had been five years since the Civil War came to an end. The Republican Party was still committed to enforcing the freedoms that African-Americans had gained in the South and the other social justice reforms that had been implemented across the country but which needed special attention in the region. And violence in the South against freed slaves, Northerners, Reconstructionists, and Republicans was raging, as it would continue to do so until the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act in April 1871, following which President Ulysses S. Grant led a campaign to suppress the violent and racist organization as a domestic terrorist group, defined as such in the Act itself.
During Holden’s time as governor of North Carolina, Klan activity had been surging across the South, and they were using murder and intimidation to, among other things, prevent freed African-Americans and Republicans from exercising their right to vote. They began to emerge in North Carolina which prompted the drafting and implementation of the Shoffner Act, to restore order in areas that had been disturbed by Klan violence by suspending habeas corpus and authorizing the deployment of a state militia. Senator T.M. Shoffner, who introduced the legislation to the North Carolina General Assembly, was burned in effigy and the KKK attempted many times to murder him. He was eventually forced to flee with his family to Hendricks County, Indiana.
In the wake of the Shoffner Act, Klan violence in the state surged. In the early morning hours of February 26th, 1870, approximately a hundred Klansmen in their robes and hoods rode into Graham, in Alamance County and kidnapped Wyatt Outlaw, a town commissioner and leading African-American figure in the Republican Party’s chapter there. He was hanged in the courthouse square with a note that read, “Beware, you guilty, both white and black,” pinned to him. That evening, on the same day, Klansmen went to the home of Henry Holt, another African-American Republican, but he was not there. They told his wife that if he did not leave the area he would be killed just as Outlaw was. Holt and his family ran from the county immediately afterwards. Nearly two weeks later, William Puryear, another African-American man, who claimed he had been able to identify Outlaw’s murderers, was found tied to a rock, dead in a millpond.
Klan violence had also surged in Caswell County, where no less than twenty-one black and white Republicans were whipped between April 2nd and May 15th, and Robin Jacobs from Leasburg was killed. State Senator John W. Stephens, a Republican, grew increasingly afraid of an attack. Hoping to achieve political reconciliation in the divided county, he went to the Caswell County House in Yanceyville where the Democratic nominating convention was being held, after whose proceedings he tried to convince Frank A. Wiley, a Democrat in a time when the Democratic Party was still the white supremacist rallying point of the South, to run for re-election and that he would back him. Unfortunately, Wiley had previously agreed to work with the Klan and at their meeting, when Wiley took him to the ground level of the courthouse, Stephens found ten to fifteen Klansmen waiting for him.
Seizing him, it wasn’t long before John Lea, the founder of the Klan chapter in Caswell County, entered the room where he was being held with more men, one of whom put a rope around Stephen’s neck, while another stabbed him to death.
Violence like this was becoming worse in North Carolina, and Governor Holden responded by launching a police operation which came to be known as the Kirk-Holden war to quell Klan activity in the state. He declared both Alamance and Caswell to be in a state of insurrection, and, as authorized by the Shoffner Act, raised a militia to arrest all Klansmen suspected of violence and to restore order in the affected counties. The 1st and 2nd North Carolina Troops were established, whose command Holden entrusted to Colonel George Washington Kirk of Tennessee.
The violence was stopped by November that year, but then a politically motivated impeachment inquiry was launched against Holden in retaliation for his crackdown on the KKK. He was convicted of eight completely fabricated charges and removed from office.
Artificial Hate
Violence such as the bloodshed that unfolded in North Carolina and the horrifying atrocities that occurred all across the South in the wake of Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery at the hands of groups like the KKK were driven by hatred and anger. The widespread damage the South had been dealt over the course of the Civil War further inflamed that anger against the North, whom quite a number — yet not all, Southerners still viewed as an enemy. African-Americans were attacked in their homes and murdered in the streets in towns all across the region, and often the police forces in those areas just let it happen, if they did not take part in the killings themselves.
Lynchings became commonplace and brutality against all African-Americans as well as whites who were not racist skyrocketed. All these stupid and idiotic sentiments were the product of manipulation that stemmed from greed and a madness for money that had destroyed the very humanity in the souls of the slave owners. Dating back to the time of King Afonso V of Portugal and Gomes de Zurara in the 15th century, who created the idea of racial supremacy in his account of Prince Henry the Navigator’s life, racism and its evils were fabricated and used to justify horrible and unforgivable methods through which to attain riches.
In a detestable disregard for common humanity and a monstrous obsession with wealth far beyond the bounds of natural human ambition, these corrupt fiends created and advocated a system of oppression and suffering that made the previous form of slavery which was already savage enough even more barbaric. In the same mindset as those who manipulated the people of Europe into accepting and agreeing with the mass enslavement of Africans based on their skin color, claiming it was just and that they were in fact civilizing them, while in reality they cared only about the greater profit they could gain by not having to pay wages, the puppet masters behind the deadliest war in American history manipulated the people of the South in an effort to defend their inhuman practices by co-opting the fears of Southerners, one of them being federal tyranny.
Murderous Manipulation
Those who found themselves supporting secession and then going off to war against their brothers in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter did not realize that they were being used as pawns by the small planter class simply to defend their riches. The Confederate administrations that arose in the wake of secession also prioritized all of their laws and measures to serve the wealthy. One example of this was the Twenty-Slave Law passed by the so-called Confederate Congress in October of 1862, which stipulated that a slave owner with twenty or more slaves was exempt from the draft. As a result, thousands of slave owning families who “owned” dozens and some more than a hundred slaves were never conscripted to fight in the war they had started for their own sake.
This placed the burden of military service on the poor, non-slave owning section of the population, who scowled at the Twenty-Slave Law as another measure that defined the conflict as a “rich man’s war.” Many of the soldiers who served in the Confederate army were in fact there against their will, and had it not been for the draft, many would have stayed home. Instead, they were ripped from their farms and families to be sent off to kill their fellow countrymen and die in battle for a cause that was more tragic than words could ever fully describe.
The Confederate government also exempted the entire slave-owning class from all taxes, in direct contrast to Lincoln’s income tax which opened up a source of money to fund the war effort in the North. Against all economic and practical sense, no taxes were levied on the richest section of the Southern population in a time when the region was at war, and instead, just as the burden of fighting in battle fell on the overwhelming majority of poor Southerners, so did the burden of funding the war. High taxes were levied on every other socio-economic class throughout the South, and so it was that millions of people were forced to pay for and then die in a war they wanted no part in.
In the end, the Confederacy was nothing more than an oligarchic, corrupt, and inhumane regime centered around the heartless interests of a select few, that was forced on the people of the South as a worthy cause, and that in the name of defending freedom fought to keep millions in shackles and actually restricted democracy. The bloodshed that ensued and the violence that arose afterward as the country struggled to rebuild and heal can be traced back to points in history long before the United States, or even the original 13 colonies existed, but they were also a direct result of the kind of manipulation that those too greedy and blind to recognize fellow humanity employ to secure their interests at the expense of everyone else.
In the context of the American Civil War, it was the planter class that exacerbated regional tensions and played on the people’s sentiments to build support for their own, creating tension where there shouldn’t have been and creating the atmosphere for war and death and destruction. Slavery, that inhuman violation of all natural law and the God-given rights at the bedrock of the nation’s founding, had been twisted into a supposedly just and righteous cause in an obscene distortion of reality by the few and powerful to serve their interests. These demagogic voices manipulated the South — even if not all of them, and made them believe they were defending them. They claimed to defend freedom while they restricted the rights of their people. They claimed to fight for the common man while they threw the entire burden of the fighting onto him and sent hundreds of thousands like him to die. They claimed to be patriots even as they tore the country in half and nearly destroyed the experiment in democracy that the Founders had fought so hard to build. They treated the tens of thousands of Americans who died in droves as nothing but their means to a vicious end, and they did it all while claiming to be righteous. In light of all of this, one might say the South was hijacked by the Confederacy, rather than the Confederacy having been created by the South.
The lesson that the tragedy of the Civil War and the atmosphere that precipitated it is once again that there are actors in our society who will, caught up as they are in their greed, seek to tear us apart along frivolous lines and divide us and turn us against each other, to create chaos from which they can harness followers, support, and power, to blind us to our common humanity and to consider such unnatural concepts as race and class and — whether natural or not, even gender, as more important than that. We must, therefore, always be weary of anyone who speaks of division, and ensure that we do not fall prey to their lies and do not enable, if not take part in ourselves, the horrible acts that they will seek to label as just and even necessary.
In memory of the nearly one million who died in the war, and the hundreds of millions who have died and still perish from conflict, many times sparked as a result of the kind of manipulation that took place in the American South, in Nazi Germany, in Imperial Japan, and nowadays in places such as Putin’s Russia and Modi’s India, we should make the greatest effort to be vigilant against the advances of such divisive and unnatural causes like nationalism and racism or classism or any other weaponization of categorization. So many times throughout history, whether it was the Crusades, which caused the deaths of 2 million people, the Thirty Years’ War which caused unprecedented loss of life, perhaps reflected no better than in Germany where 40% of its population perished, the world wars, the conflicts of the Middle East between terror groups and fanatics on the one hand and humanity on the other, we have fallen headlong into war and destruction without realizing that we are seen as nothing more than pawns with our lives being hijacked and controlled — stolen, by the elusive power figures behind the famous power figures who use us as tools in their unaware and cruel exercises of greed.
In the American Civil War and the events that led to it, the United States nearly fell into darkness because of partisanship, misinformation, fearmongering, and artificial racial tension, stirred up by manipulators who cared more for gold than the humanity that unites all of us. This kind of disturbance is sadly witnessed in many nations around the globe, and even till this day. The woes that almost destroyed America still plague our world, and it is thus of existential importance that we stay aware of such scheming, and to that end, of the universal truth that we are all human.
When one realizes that, one also realizes that everything in the world comes back to that one simple fact, and that as long as we recognize it and affirm it, freedom, liberty, and civilization will endure.