Although renowned Union general William T. Sherman was rather conservative on the issue of slavery (he was far from an abolitionist) and did not believe in equal rights for "negroes," there is scant evidence that he ever owned any slaves he certainly did not own "many," nor did he own any during the course of the Civil War. However, those slaves had been purchased by Julia's father, Frederick F. Dent, and there is no record of his ever having transferred ownership of them to Julia without such a transfer, neither Julia nor her husband Ulysses would have had legal authority to free them. "It will be seen that the disloyalty of West Point was not as great as is generally supposed. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. South Carolina's decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds renewed debate over the Civil War. that black soldiers would still be slaves. Some volunteered to assist the Confederate war effort, while many others were forced to support the Confederacy, working on farms and in factories and households throughout Virginia. Washington, DC Sarah Pruitt is a writer and editor based in seacoast New Hampshire. "Ninety-eight percent of Texas Confederate soldiers never owned a slave Surprisingly, to many history impaired individuals, most Union Generals and staff had slaves to serve them! The Union led wheat production with 100 million bushels produced in comparison to 35 million bushels in the Confederacy and 20 million bushels in the Border States. Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts.". As in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, the slaves that Lee supposedly owned actually belonged to his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, and lived and worked on the three estates owned by Custis (Arlington, White House, and Romancoke). That, of course, is to be expected; soldiering is a young man's game, and most young men, then and now, have little in the way of personal wealth. ". 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. Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. All Rights Reserved. These men chose not to escape, and while there can be little doubt that these stories convey evidence of strong bonds between owner and slave, the tendency of Lost Causers to frame them around the narrow motif of unwavering loyalty fails to capture other factors that may have influenced their behavior. Many Northern civilians owned slaves. Casting the Confederacy as a honorable force standing strongagainst Northern aggressorsis a willful misreading of the historical truth that the institution of slavery was at the core of the Civil War, as George Washington University professorJames Oliver Horton reiteratesin a National Park Service history. I never saw fidelity stronger in any one, noted the quartermaster in a letter. Confederate soldiers were optimistic about the prospects for the survival of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery well into 1864. . In fact, until March 1865, Confederate Army policy specifically prohibited Black people from serving as soldiers. The Confederacy produced nearly all of the nation's rice which amounted to 225 million bushels. NOT in the North! A second, separate schedule records the name of each slaveholder and lists the slave he or she owns. For many Confederate officers who were separated from their servants as a result of the battle or the confusion of the retreat, disappointment awaited them, as it did Captain Waddell of the 12th Virginia, who rejoined his unit on July 8 only to learn that his servant Willis had run off with his personal baggage. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine The user who posted the original tweet and the Facebook user who shared it on July 11 did not respond to requests for comment. Mackey is an educator, a retired U. S. Air Force officer and a former human resources manager with a global company. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery. 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. But it's simply not true in any meaningful way. El nuevo WhatsApp de 2023 permite ver con quin estn hablando tus contactos en vivo. Gettysburg may not have been the great turning point of the war for Lee and the Army of Northern Virginiathe army would go on to fight for close to two more yearsbut the Gettysburg campaign did signal a crisis of confidence in soldiers belief in their slaves unwavering fidelity. About the only periods in his life when he could conceivably have owned slaves would have been between 1840-46, when he was a U.S. Army officer stationed in Southern states (Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina), and 1859, when he was the superintendent of Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (now Louisiana State University). Some Confederate officers wanted to enlist enslaved people earlier: Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting African American soldiers early in 1864, but Jefferson Davis rejected the suggestion and ordered it never to be discussed again. The answer to the question of why the Northern states didn't outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War is an obvious one: it simply wasn't possible. New York Gov. The Confederate Congress played a role in that. Lee went on the offensive for the following two days but failed to crack the Union defenses. The Union was attributed with having 40 million heads of livestock compared to 35 million in the Confederacy and only 10 million in the Border States. The U.S. had 395,216 slaveholders at that time, so about 1.4% of free people were classified as slave owners in the 1860 census, according to data archived by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series at the University of Minnesota. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school history teachers believe and teach that the South seceded for state's rights, said Jim Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me:. PolitiFact | No, 300,000 slave owners did not fight on the Union side They accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia in its two invasions of the North, in the Antietam Campaign of 1862, and the Gettysburg Campaign of the following year. The UofV system also makes it possible to generate maps that show graphically the proportion of slaveholding households in a given county. Proportionately, far more officers were likely to be professionals in civil life, and their age difference, about four years older than enlisted men, reflected their greater accumulated wealth. 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 the Confederate army reorganized in the weeks following the campaign, the thin ranks of many regiments were magnified by the absence of its enslaved. Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. It was a mobilization effort that he called "astonishing.". Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought - American Battlefield Trust We are excited to tell the stories of our ancestors through their own words and deeds. Enslaved people, themselves helped make the case for emancipation as a military aim, fleeing in droves beyond the lines of approaching Union armies. When it comes to reparations, one of the consistent arguments against them is that there were actually not very many white slave owners in the U.S. Kathy Hochul wants quarantine camps and imprisonment if youre suspected of having a disease. A more accurate way to portray the extent of slavery would be to note 20% of households in seceding states owned slaves, even though the individual owner was counted as only one person in that household. 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. 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 . IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. All of them agree on these approximate totals: White Union soldiers from Confederate states -- 75,000-100,000, White Union soldiers from slaveholding Union states -- 200,000, So, in round figures, it is reasonably accurate to say that 300,000 white men from slaveholding states fought on the Union side. "Oil pulling improves overall oral health, strengthens gums, helps prevent cavities, whitens teeth and reduces plaque. Lastly, and most importantly, why did NORTHERN States outlaw slavery only AFTER the war was over? It is often stated that Grant's wife, Julia Boggs Dent, "owned four slaves," and Julia herself identified four "servants" whom she claimed "belonged" to her up until the end of 1862. 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. MSJE, as it is called, showcases the culture and heritage of the Jews who lived in the 13 southern states over a period spanning some three centuries: from colonial America through the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and up to this day. As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. As long as the Southern slave states remained in the Union, their aggregate Congressional representation was sufficient in number to block the passage or ratification of any law or constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. In the wake of the June 2015 racially motivated shooting that left nine people dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the renewed debate that event prompted about the propriety of displaying Confederate flags on the grounds of the South Carolina state capital (and elsewhere), a long-circulating article advertised as dispelling "falsehoods and inaccuracies of Confederate and Southern history" attracted renewed interest. Fortunately, one of the leading Civil War historians, James McPherson at Princeton University, knows Townsends work and told us that he included the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. In the eleven states that formed the Confederacy, there were in aggregate just over 1 million free households, which between them represented 316,632 slaveholdersmeaning that just under one-third of households in the Confederate States counted among its assets at least one human being. We found only one biography (out of many) that supported the notion that Sherman ever owned slaves, and that work merely stated, without elaboration, that Sherman "had a slave" at some point during the former period (a wording that allows for the possibility that Sherman rented or was tended to by a slave for a while rather than actually owning one). Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population. If it refers to the federal government, then it's still false: the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, was initially passed by the U.S. Senate on 8 April 1864, more than a year before the end of the Civil War (although it was not ratified by the requisite number of states until December 1865). Only in Delaware, a state which was far from being undeniably a "Northern" state: depending upon the criteria used, one could justifiably have pegged Delaware at the time of the Civil War as being Northern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, or some combination thereof. As PBS points out, New England's economywith its textile factories and banking industrywas built on the back of Southern slave labor. Using total population as a reference point also includes babies and children, for example, said Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. Cookie Policy Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. Baldwin gave many reasons to back up his conclusion, but a reader asked us to examine one in particular: Slavery was not the pivotal reason for the war because thousands of slave owners supported the North. It is, as TheRaven would say, a small truth used to paper over a big lie. Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not available due to incomplete and destroyed enlistment records. As units readied for battle, a member of the 24th Georgia recalled, The Colonels sent back their horses by their servants. On the afternoon of July 1, Union captain Alfred Lee of the 82nd Ohio found himself wounded and behind enemy lines. District of Columbia In addition to McPherson, we reached historians Robert Tinkler at California State University-Chico and Gary Gallagher at the University of Virginia. If you only focus on who technically owned slaves, though, abetter metric would be to evaluate the proportion of slave owners in the 15 states where slavery was still legal in 1860, Arizona State's Schermerhorn said. I think any museum is designed to challenge people to learn for themselves, not present a slanted storyline to accept without question. White officers in the Confederacy did indeed bring enslaved people to the front during the Civil War, where they cooked, cleaned and performed other labors for the officers and their regiments. Absent the body, news that a soldier had been comforted in his final hours and had prepared himself for death reassured family members that their loved one experienced what 19th-century Americans understood as a Good Death.. The average fraction of slaveholding families was about 11 percent for those Union states, while in the Confederacy, it was about 40 percent. To adherents of the Lost Cause,a term coined as early as 1866,the Confederacy fought to uphold the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, advancedby leaders who were "exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force," according to the site Civil War Journeys. However, the version of history that the SCV is trying to tell is rooted in Lost Cause mythology,instead of confronting more difficult truths. The 13th Amendment could not have passed until the Southern states, having seceded from the Union, were no longer represented in the U.S. Congress. Those were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Townsend doesnt say which "Southern" states he had in mind. a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States, Decades-old essay about Declaration of Independence signatories is partly false, Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor at Arizona State University. Hidden property served as a reference to the escaped slaves already living in southern Pennsylvania; orders had been handed down throughout the Confederate army to capture and return this property to the South. (This is usually followed immediately by an assertion that the speaker's own Confederate ancestors never owned slaves, either.) So while a slave owner was only counted once, other people and businesses, including railroad companies, could benefit from slavery as well, Schermerhorn said. (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.). The chance that a few thousand slaveholders fought for the Union, rather than the 300,000 as Baldwin said, does little to keep this statement in the realm of reality. Joseph T. Glatthaar, in his magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia, lays out the evidence. Removal of the wounded took on a renewed urgency through the late afternoon and evening of July 3, following another failed assault along the center of the Union line. The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861-1865), fighting against the United States forces to win the independence of the Southern states and uphold and expand the institution of slavery. The owners were not getting rich. Its true that not every white person in the pre-Civil War South owned slaves. 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. They fought the battle defending their homelands againstan invading army.. But the general scale shows how Baldwins figure stretches belief. All three historians told us that the number of men on the Union side who owned slaves was quite small. And during the fierce early days of the war when the South was obliterating the Yankee armies! For Glatthaar's purposes and ours, the 1860 census, taken a few months before the outbreak of the war, is crucial. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. A Controversial Museum Tries to Revive the Myth of the Confederacy's He focuses on stories with a health/science bent and has reported some of his favorite pieces from the prow of a canoe. magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia. As historian and public librarian Liam Hoganwrote: There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of race. The enduring myth of Irish slavery, which most often surfaces today in service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes, has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries when Irish laborers were derogatorily called white slaves. The phrase would later be employed as propaganda by the slave-owning South about the industrialized North, along with (false) claims that life was far harder for immigrant factory workers than for enslaved people. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. They werent, at least not initially; they were fighting to hold the nation together. State-by-state, we applied that percentage to the total number of military age males. | READ MORE. Jefferson Davis was their President. | Thats slightly different from the 1.6% in the July 11 Facebook post. It is thus possible to compare the number of slaveholders in a given state to the numbers of families/households, and get a rough estimation of the proportion of free households that owned at least one slave. As one reader wrote in aletter to the editor to the Columbia Daily Heraldin response to Powell's article,"Maury County is at a crucial point in its economic development. A common argument in the dispute over official displays of the Confederate battle flag is that most people misunderstand the reasons behind the Civil War. (AP). To break it down about how many U.S. citizens owned slaves is absurd, Glatthaar said in an email. The Historical Census Browser from the University of Virginia Library allows users to compile, sort and visualize data from U.S. Censuses from 1790 to 1960. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands. In 1860, nearly 20% of households in seceding states owned slaves, he said. How Did Enslaved People Support the Confederacy? He managed to limp off the field with the help of a camp servant by the name of Jim. The regiments quartermaster reassured the family that the colonels items, including spyglasses, watch, toothbrush, and various memoranda books plus $59, were all safe under Kinciens care. Civil War Facts | American Battlefield Trust The mortality rate for prisoners of war was 15.5 percent for Union soldiers and 12 percent for Confederate soldiers. Enslaved and free black people provided even more labor than usual for Virginia farms when 89 percent of eligible white men served in Confederate armies. The data from the 1860 census show that if Baldwin were correct, an overwhelming fraction of all of the young men from slave-owning families across the Deep South and beyond would needed to have broken with their communities and fought for the Union. With the exception of rice and tobacco, the Union had a clear agricultural advantage. Black Civil War Soldiers - Facts, Death Toll & Enlistment - History The Truth About Confederate History: Part 2 | Snopes.com However, theyre not the only ones with the means or motives to revise historyoften, the vanquished tell their own versions, too. Gallagher told us that there is no breakdown of which Union soldiers came from slave-owning families. For the record, in 1863, Confederate forces totaled about 300,000. Yes, There Were Black Confederates. Here's Why The Union had 1.1 million factory workers, while the Confederacy had 111,000 and the Border States had 70,000. The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! South Carolinians in Lieutenant General James Longstreets First Corps witnessed the women of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, appeal to their enslaved servants to run off and seize their freedom. In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people. Danny is based in Brooklyn, NY. In the navy about one-third of the officers came from slaveholding States, yet remained faithful to the Union; while one-eighth of the Union army, or 300,000 men, were contributed by the Southern States.". The Union had 101,000 factories, while the Confederacy had 21,000 and the Border States had 9,000. May 15, 2014. St. Petersburg, FL 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. But, as James W. Loewen writes for The Washington Post, it certainly wasn't just the slaveholdingelite who fought to maintain slavery. Ballot harvesting altered the outcome of a city council election in Yuma County, Arizona. The largest segment were day laborers, finding any work they could. Enjoy exciting benefits and explore new exhibitions year-round. In Washington County, Maryland, 1,435 people were enslaved, 1,677 people were listed as "free blacks," and 398 people were listed as slave owners. A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. Upon Custis' death in 1857, Lee did not "inherit" those slaves; rather, he carried out the directions expressed in Custis' will regarding those slaves (and other property) according to his position as executor of Custis' estate. So in theory, there were slaveholders from Union states and slaveholders from Confederate states that could have fought on the Union side. Black Confederate soldiers likely represented less than 1 percent of Southern black men of military age during that period, and less than 1 percent of Confederate soldiers. On March 14, 1865 the Confederate military . Today some of these stories pulled from the historical record can be found on hundreds of websites, not as the stories of enslaved men, but as black Confederate soldiers. To avoid confusion as to the source of the factual errors, and to prevent any misunderstanding about Levin's credentials, we have removed the pragraph. Vance said nothing about the attack on Paul Pelosi. Fact check: Stat grossly misleading about slave ownership in 1860 Historians, though, say that grosslyunderrepresents the extent of slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War because it includes babies, children and people in states where slavery was illegal in the calculation. Lee's army numbered 90,000 at its strongest and was organized into state-specific regiments and brigades, with about 55 percent of its men coming from the Upper South. The Confederacy included the states of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. A number of rebels passed by until a young man of benevolent expression attempted to locate a surgeon. More:How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States. On the Northern side, the rose-colored myth of the Civil War is that the blue-clad Union soldiers and their brave, doomed leader, Abraham Lincoln, were fighting to free enslaved people. In a world of wild talk and fake news, help us stand up for the facts. Perhaps nowhere more so than in a widespread and ironically titled "Truth about Confederate History" article. History has been skewed, and many times in society today many people try to make those soldiers out to be something they are not, said Tennessee state senator and SCV member Joey Hensley said at the groundbreaking, Powell reports.
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