War between the States or Civil War

The War between the States (as Confederates called it) and the Civil War (as Unionists called it): 1861-1865
As late as April 1865 President Lincoln said: "I can hardly believe that the South and the North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Although 150,000 blacks had fought with Union forces, it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have for themselves." During the four years of the Civil War more than 620,000 soldiers died. The North had more than twice the population and roughly 10 times the economic capacity of the South. How it the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, July 4, 1776, relevant to the Civil War? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Lincoln had never been an abolitionist; he never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he emancipated the slaves (only in unoccupied Southern states!) half way through the war only because of military necessity. Yet he eventually supported abolishing slavery and he gave credit to Negro soldiers; however, he could never fully support black citizenship.

75,000 blacks, mostly from the South, perished in the Union army, as did thousands more in contraband camps, on Confederate army labor gangs, and in disease-ridden shantytowns. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy -- over 20 percent of the South's adult white male population. As a proportion of population, more blacks fought in the Civil War than did whites!

180,000 blacks had served in the Union army -- over 20 percent of the adult black population under the age of 45 years. Most of them came from the border states. Black recruits received less pay than white soldiers and they were assigned construction work and menial labor. However, by 1884 black soldiers received equal pay after former slaves protested to Congress.

Early in 1865, slaves were still being bought and sold in areas as yet unoccupied by Union forces. By then 1 million blacks were within Union lines inside the Confederacy, and another 700,000 lived in states of the border where slavery was dead or dying.

Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy said: "Our new government is founded on . . . the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his [the Negro's] natural and normal condition." Yet the Confederacy forbade the importation of Negroes from foreign countries, except from the slave-holding states of the United States. Over 300 whites were lynched in the South between 1830 and 1860 -- whites whose crime was a suspected sympathy for the abolition of slavery, and who were normally whipped or tarred-and-feathered and driven out of town (Wills, p. 185).

Confederate soldiers fled the South after the Civil War to establish settlements in Brazil -- land was cheap and slaves were still legal! Americana (pop. 168,000) is the most successful and largest town -- about 70 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

For a detailed history of Vicksburg, see Vicksburg: Pre and Post Civil War.
About 16 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia, four million visitors a years come to see the 825-foot high Stone Mountain with carvings of three prominent confederate leaders: Jefferson Davis (President of the Confederacy), Robert E. Lee (Confederate general), and Thomas "Stonewall " Jackson (Confederate general).

Where do whites and blacks live in Vicksburg today? Look at this map.

• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1963-1877. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988.
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Altheneum, 1983 (originally published in 1935).
• Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.
• Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
• Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
• William Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Each generation continues to be interested in the U.S. Civil War and sees it differently. More than 60,000 books, fiction and non-fiction, have already been written about it; a bibliography of books on Gettysburg alone runs to 277 pages! Seventeen biographies have been written about Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, alone. The popularly of the Civil War reflects the national ideology of anti-governmental attitudes which Wills argues sees the South as a freedom-loving underdog fighting off a powerful central government. The North is seen as impersonal, mechanical, efficient -- the very things resented in central governments. The South is seen as spontaneous, traditional, organic -- it likes to picture its war as a repeat of Washington's war with England. It is an illusion many Americans have, over the years, found themselves unable to resist. Even at the site of Lee's greatest blunder, Gettysburg, vendors who sell boys' uniforms to tourists do a brisker trade in Confederate grays than in Union blues.

Should blacks today be financially compensated for 246 years of slavery?
Read Randall Robinson's The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. New York: E P Dutton, 2000.