Tag Archives: Union

Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Confederate Soldiers 3

“Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the war, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. ‘I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,’ Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. ‘Just as I would have,’ Foote said. ‘I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between the North and the South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.’

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. ‘It’s a bunch of shit really,’ Foote conceded. ‘But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.’ In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. ‘It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of “I won’t give up, I won’t be insulted.”’

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ ‘abiding love’ for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. ‘It was a big admission, if you think about it,’ Foote said. ‘A Civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.'”

Shelby Foote 2

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Excerpted from Tony Horwitz’s chronicle of the south’s Lost Cause nearly a century and a half later Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

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What the Civil War Sounded Like

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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Civil War Soldiers

“They both had a particular way of yelling. The Northern troops made a sort of hurrah — it was called by one soldier ‘the deep, generous, manly shout of the Northern soldier.’ The Confederates of course had what was called the Rebel Yell.

We don’t really know what that sounded like. One Northerner described it by describing the peculiar corkscrew sensation that goes up your backbone when you hear it. And he said, ‘If you claimed you’ve heard it and weren’t scared, that means you’ve never heard it.’

It was basically, I think, a sort of fox-hunt yip mixed up with a banshee squall, and it was used on the attack. An old Confederate veteran after the war was asked at a UDC meeting somewhere in Tennessee to give the Rebel Yell. The ladies had never heard it. And he said, ‘It can’t be done, except at a run, and I couldn’t do it anyhow with a mouthful of false teeth and a stomach full of food!'”

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Shelby Foote riffing in Ken Burns’s seminal documentary The Civil War.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Abraham Lincoln 342

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Abraham Lincoln second inauguration

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387 of the 700 total words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered 150 years ago today. Above is the only known photograph of the event.

Months of sleet had made Pennsylvania Avenue look like a muddy riverbed by the first week of March in 1865. On the 4th, thousands of spectators stood in the inch-thick runoff at the Capitol grounds to hear what was one of the shortest, and undoubtedly one of the finest, inaugural speeches by an American president. Standing under a recently finished East Portico, Lincoln was sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox 33 days later. Lincoln was assassinated 6 days after that.

Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, calls the Second Inaugural the greatest speech in American history, surpassing Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg as well as the thunderclap from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Entering that monument, Buckley reflects,

Inside the memorial, graven on the walls, are the two speeches in American history that surpass Dr. King’s: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. I read the latter aloud to myself, quietly, so as not to alarm anyone. It clocks in at under five minutes, bringing the total of those two orations to about seven minutes. Edward Everett, who also spoke at Gettysburg, wrote Lincoln afterward to say, “I should flatter myself if I could come to the heart of the occasion in two hours in what you did in two minutes.”

Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Lincoln that stares out on the Reflecting Pool, studied a cast of Lincoln’s life mask. You can see a cast in the basement of the memorial, and it is hard to look upon the noble serenity of that plaster without being moved. Embarking from Springfield, Illinois, in 1861 to begin his first term as president, Lincoln said, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” When I first read that speech as a schoolboy, I thought the line sounded immodest. Harder than what Washington faced? Come on! Only years later when I saw again the look on Lincoln’s face that French had captured did I understand.

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