Slavery & Bravery

Reconciling Conflicting Perspectives on Confederate Soldiers

By John Coski

Captain John Taylor Smith (title photo) was 23 years-old when he raised a volunteer company in Randolph County, Alabama, in 1861. As Company I of the 13th Alabama Infantry, Smith’s unit served throughout the Civil War in the Army of Northern Virginia. His wartime letters to his wife, mother, and sister, donated to the Museum in 1984, reveal a highly literate and sensitive young man who was at once deeply reflective about life and fervently devoted to the Confederate cause.

“We are at last in Richmond, the capital of the last refuge of Republican Constitutional Liberty, the city that gathers the feelings of the whole southern people,” he wrote his mother in July 1861. “I had expected to find a few sorebacked Lincolnites in Virginia, but so far the tide in favor of independence or death rolls high & overwhelming. There seems to be perfect unanimity & confidence in our Confederate states government. I have heard only one sentiment and that is war! War! War!” Smith’s subsequent letters described matter-of-factly the horrors of war and how he and other soldiers adjusted to them.

On February 3, 1863, he penned an introspective diary entry: “This is my birthday. I am today twenty five years old. A short time ago I was a little boy. Now what am I? What have I done? Have I been a blessing or a curse? Have I been as useful as I might have been? Have I accomplished more good than harm? Have I done all the good I could, and as little harm?”

February 20 found him in a philosophical mood: “The sun rises this morning in splendor and glory, while the sweetest songsters of the grove warble their most melodious strains. Ah, little birds, you are merry and full of life and joy, but man is still engaged in the bloody work of death.” His letter of April 15, 1863 anticipated the spring campaign and predicted that the enemy would attack. Three weeks later, at the battle of Chancellorsville, John Taylor Smith fell, in the words of a resolution that his Masonic brothers passed in his honor, “Sealing his devotion to his Country, while charging the enemy’s fortifications….”

Smith’s letters – along with several family Bibles and cased image photographs – provide the kind of human interest story and “dramatic personalness” (quoting journalist Julian Street) that has been the Museum’s stock-in-trade for more than a century. For the last 30 years, I have been mining such letters and diaries for exhibits and for dozens of magazine articles highlighting and promoting our collections.

Smith’s letters (and the article that I wrote about them in 2002 for America’s Civil War) mention his desire to hire from his stepfather an enslaved man named “Boss” – or to procure “an ordinary field hand” – to be a camp servant. He estimated that there were 25-30 African-American servants in his regiment, a reference that has given scholars a baseline from which to extrapolate the number of African Americans traveling with the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863.

How does – and how should – that sobering revelation about John Taylor Smith’s family affect our perception of him as a soldier and as a person? How does it affect the validity of his patriotic rhetoric about the Confederate cause?

For many of you, the answer is a simple “not at all.” Smith’s performance as a soldier and the value of his descriptions and testimony about campaigns, battles, and soldier life exist independently of his family’s status as slaveholders.

For many Americans today, however, owning slaves or any kind of complicity in the ownership of other humans shapes and taints their perception of people in history, whether they were obscure farmers or American presidents. For many Americans reading about men like John Taylor Smith (to reduce the issue to a kind of bumper sticker language), slavery trumps bravery.

The study and admiration of men as soldiers and the contempt for them as servants of a slaveholding republic have coexisted for a long time. To attend a typical meeting of Civil War roundtables and then take a class or attend a program at a university can be like visiting different worlds. The former almost always emphasizes “bravery” and the latter “slavery.”

The two worlds long have coexisted, but we know from reading the headlines that those separate worlds often collide, especially over monuments and other features on the modern commemorative landscape of the Civil War.

Is there a way of bridging what often seems like a huge chasm in how diverse Americans study – and judge – the Civil War, specifically the Confederacy? Yes. Prominent Civil War historians, such as Gary Gallagher, James McPherson, and William C. Davis, emphasize the centrality of slavery as the ultimate cause of the war (and the immediate cause of southern secession) even as they narrate the “Homeric” story of soldiers in battle and parse the behavior and decision-making of their commanders.

At the Museum’s February symposium, I asked Dr. Susannah Ural how she could write and talk admiringly about the fighting prowess of the men of Hood’s Texas Brigade even though she explained that most of the men were fighting to preserve a slave society. “Those Texans,” she replied, “they fought for things with which we all fundamentally disagree – that means slavery, of course…..But what I was most curious about is what makes an elite unit an elite unit.”

Ambrotype of the winter quarters of “Wigfall Mess,” 1st Texas Infantry at Camp Dunlop, Dumfries, Virginia, early 1862, attributed to photographer Solomon Thomas Blessing.

ACWM

Perceptions of how central or peripheral slavery was for ordinary white southerners often turn on different interpretation of statistics. Those who believe slavery to have been peripheral often cite census figures that only 5% of white southerners in 1860 owned slaves. A more meaningful interpretation of those census figures is the percentage of white southern households that owned slaves, which exceeded 25%. (To use the 5% figure as a measure of the significance of slavery is analogous to using the percentage of modern Americans who own a home, then representing all the children anddependents in homeowning households as not living in home-owning households because they personally did not own the house.)

Consistent with the familiar adage that the Civil War was, for the South, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” it is widely believed that the percentage of Confederate soldiers who owned slaves (or lived in slave-owning families) was smaller than in the population generally. Recent research suggests that the opposite was true – that sons of wealthy slave-owning families were overrepresented in Confederate forces, especially early in the war.

Joseph Glatthaar’s magisterial 2008 book, General Lee’s Army, found that 36% of soldiers who enlisted in the Army of Northern Virginia in 1861 lived in or with slave-owning families, a rate 42% higher than the general population. In her study of the famed Texas Brigade, Susannah Ural found that one-third of privates and two-thirds of officers came from slaveholding families.

And, although those figures mean that a minority of white southerners and Confederate soldiers came from slaveholding families, even that figure is misleading. Slavery constituted a system of economic, social, and cultural incentive and of racial social control and white supremacy in which all but a few estranged white southerners held a strong stake.

With these figures in mind, I have long been interested in learning more about patterns of slave ownership among Confederate soldiers whose letters and diaries in the Museum’s collections I have transcribed, annotated, and published over the last 30 years. What follows is hardly a “scientific” survey, but it yields an impressionistic look at a small sample of men as both Confederate soldiers and as members of the antebellum “master class.”

The sample I am using consists of 22 men whom I have profiled or whose letters and diaries I featured in articles published primarily in the Museum’s magazine, but also in America’s Civil War, Civil War Monitor, Civil War Regiments, North & South, and Goochland County Historical Magazine. The purpose of the articles was to highlight and share the Museum’s rich collections and to use those collections to tell the stories of men at war or to give new perspectives on specific campaigns and battles. My sample avoids familiar high-ranking general officers, emphasizing instead privates and lower ranking officers.

Of the 22 men in my sample, at least 13 (almost 60 %) lived or were raised in slave-owning families. This number is higher than the average because it is easier to find evidence of slave ownership than definitive evidence that men did not live in or grow up in slaveholding families, and possibly because families who preserved letters and diaries and donated them to the Museum were more likely to be more affluent and, thus, to have been slaveholders.

Only one soldier in my sample – John Christopher Winsmith of the 5th South Carolina Infantry – came from a family that fit the customary definition of a “planter,” owning 20 or more slaves, but several others (in addition to John Taylor Smith) were raised in substantial slave owning families: Edward Estes of the 38th Virginia Infantry lived on his father’s Pittsylvania County, Virginia, farm with 18 enslaved males, ages 7-45; Pride Jones of Orange County, North Carolina, father of Lt. Halcott Pride Jones of the 13th North Carolina Artillery, owned 14 enslaved males ranging in age from 3 to 56; Allen V. Montgomery of Camden, Mississippi, who received the famous blood-stained letter from his dying son, James Robert Montgomery of the 11th Mississippi Infantry and the Confederate Signal Corps, owned 10 enslaved males, ranging in age from 5 to 50; the father of brothers Archie, Albert, and Theodore Livingston of the 3rd Florida Infantry, Scottish-born Daniel G. Livingston, owned eight enslaved males, ranging in age from 6-30.

The slaveholding households in which others lived or were raised were more typical of the white southern experience. Randolph Fairfax of the Rockbridge Artillery grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, in a family that owned three enslaved men. John B. Cary, colonel of the 32nd Virginia Infantry, was the headmaster of a private school in Hampton, Virginia, and owned four male slaves. The father of James Thomas Petty of the 17th Virginia Infantry and John Summerfield Petty, who fought for the Union in two Ohio regiments, did not own slaves, but the elder Petty’s brother, a prosperous carriage maker who lived in the same town of Front Royal, Virginia, owned seven slaves in 1860 (and many more in 1850).

References to slavery and race are sparse in the letters and diaries that I highlighted or used (which is the reason that the articles paid so little attention to those topics). Most of the references were descriptions of encounters with U.S. Colored Troops or opinions about the debate that occurred in the South in late 1864 and early 1865 about arming slaves for the Confederacy.

The most frequent references to enslaved people are found in the letters of John Christopher Winsmith, who routinely closed his letters with “Tell all the negroes howdye for me” (as did another soldier, Jacob O. Woodson of the Virginia artillery, who is not in this sample).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most frequent references to enslaved and free African Americans and to race come in the writings of Northern soldiers, for whom enslaved black people were new and unfamiliar, not a presence whom they could take for granted, as they were for most southern soldiers. The diaries of Virginia-born Ohio soldier Lt. John Summerfield Petty (brother of Confederate soldier James Thomas Petty)included frequent – and sympathetic – descriptions and accounts of encounters with African Americans.

Not only are the letters and diaries in my unscientific sample largely silent on matters of slavery and race, but they defy the modern orthodoxy of what the Civil War was all about. Whereas it has become an article of faith among historians (including myself) that slavery was the indispensable root cause of the war and the distinguishing characteristic of the Confederate nation, these letters and diaries usually cast the Confederates as the victims of northern “invasion,” and, as John Taylor Smith wrote, the defenders of “Republican Constitutional Liberty.”

Thomas Petty wrote in his diary about the South’s “Sacred cause of liberty” and predicted that besieged President Jefferson Davis would, like George Washington before him, emerge in the verdict of history as “first of his age in intellect, courage, & devotion to the Sacred Cause of Liberty.” The famously pious Randolph Fairfax of the Rockbridge Artillery (eulogized in a widely-distributed pamphlet after his death at the battle of Fredericksburg) saw the hand of God behind Confederate victories. He was ecstatic to be serving under “such a Christian man as [Stonewall] Jackson,” confiding to his mother, “No wonder the blessing of God attends his arms in such a signal way.”

Fairfax, Petty, Smith, Winsmith, and others among my sample were intelligent, articulate, well-read, and moral young men. They were the kind of young men who, in modern political parlance, you would “like to have a beer with.”

We’re familiar with the philosophical conundrum: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This article poses a variant of that: Why do (or did) good people do bad things? How did intelligent, articulate, moral, and likable young men own other people or reconcile themselves to slavery, and fight for the preservation of a slave society?

Did those people really believe what they were saying and writing? Did they really believe they were the victims? Were they oblivious to what we see as hypocrisy when they used “slave” to describe their own status? Difficult as it is for modern Americans to accept, white southerners of the Civil War era apparently did indeed believe those things. The ownership of other human beings was “normal” for them, so they accepted and took it for granted, and they believed that interference with slavery was a form of aggression against the liberty of free people.

We must try to understand people from the past on their own terms and in the context of their own times. Stating this does not, however, sanction the frequent and fallacious corollary that we cannot and should not judge people from the past.

Americans often engage in what I call the “scorecard” or “cheering section” approach to studying history. To state that “we must understand people from the past on their own terms” will prompt many to react favorably and assume that this article is a “win” for “my side” in the debate about the relative importance of slavery to the Confederacy. To the contrary, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate how all of us must – and can – transcend that cheering section approach.

“To judge or not to judge” people from the past is a conundrum as old as the historical profession. One common rule is that we can judge people only if we use standards that were familiar to them. Did those people know and understand the moral standard that we are applying to them?

Did Confederate southerners have reason to believe that owning other human beings was wrong? To answer that question we need only quote Robert E. Lee’s oft-cited December 1856 letter to his wife: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil,” he wrote. Lee then qualified his statement to explain why he nevertheless considered it impractical and even immoral to free slaves then or in the foreseeable future.

White southerners knew that owning other human beings was wrong, but most of them operated in a moral universe with a hierarchy in which slavery was less evil than the economic and social fallout from its abolition. That moral universe is certainly fair game for our judgment.

Judging is not, however, a substitute for understanding. Judgment may make us feel superior to people of the past, but it does not help us understand why those people believed and acted as they did. Judgment has its place, but understanding should be the objective of our study. If the past is, indeed, “a foreign country,” we must explore its landscape and its features to understand its foreignness.

What this means for students of Civil War history is that we must reach a consensus that allows us to conduct our exploration without wasting our time and energy debating the rules of our expedition. That consensus must begin with the recognition that the war was, undeniably, “about slavery,” but not all about slavery. We must stop denying the central role that slavery played in the coming of the war and in the lives and outlooks of white southerners – and, to a lesser extent, white Americans generally – even those who did not own slaves. But we must similarly stop denying the reality and validity of white southerners’ testimony that they believed they were fighting for independence and “constitutional liberty.” Their testimony does not mean that the real effect of their fighting was not to preserve and perpetuate slavery or that many soldiers and commanders counted ownership of slaves and perpetuation of white supremacy among the “rights” they were fighting to preserve. They exhibited what we call “cognitive dissonance” and we can learn much about them and about the past by trying to come to grips with that dissonance.

Ideally, we can also come to grips with our own contemporary dissonance and decrease the distance between the worlds of Civil War roundtables and University classes and programs. As roundtable groups deliberate over the backgrounds of military leaders, they should consider those peoples’ association with and positions on slavery and the issues of the war as well as their military training. Don’t explain away slavery with knee-jerk defensiveness and references to Lee’s alleged “hatred” for slavery and Stonewall Jackson’s slave Sunday school. And, as university classes and programs emphasize the role of slavery and race in the Confederacy and the postwar “Lost Cause” ideology, don’t exploit evidence of support for slavery and white supremacy and conveniently ignore or explain away the more conscious and frequent references to other issues and concerns found in soldiers’ letters and diaries.

If all of us take seriously the role of slavery and bravery, we will gain a fuller understanding of our Civil War.

John M. Coski is the Museum’s Historian. He has been contemplating this article for several years and finished writing it in March.