"Among those Southern whites who did own slaves, even in the Unionist border slave states, many supported the Confederacy, and fought for it.". Camp slaves like Moses who, for whatever reason, were committed to their owners made do with the limited resources available and resigned themselves in the end to passing on their owners parting words to their grieving families. Slavery in Delaware nonetheless ended with the adoption of that amendment in December 1865. A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. West Point is located in New York. IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. Where it was still legal, slavery was far more widespread than the number in the post indicates, they said. Lees decision to bring his army north into free states in early May, following his victory at Chancellorsville, was fraught with danger given the dramatic shift in Union policy; his soldiers rear guard, the support staff of enslaved labor, were at risk of emancipation. Others included laborers, 9 percent; mechanics, 5.3 percent; commercial, 5 percent; professional occupations, 2.1 percent; and miscellaneous, 1.6 percent. Myths and Misunderstandings: Slaveholding and the Confederate Soldier Others have refuted Daritys claim, denying that slaves enriched their white owners. Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860? PolitiFact | No, 300,000 slave owners did not fight on the Union side For the men from the Confederate states, Tinkler said the pattern is clear. This is an extremely common argument among Confederate apologists, part of a larger effort to minimize or eliminate the institution of slavery as a factor in secession and the coming of the war, and thus make it possible to maintain the notion that Southern soldiers, like the Confederacy itself, were driven by the purest and noblest values to defend home and hearth. A House Divided: Civil War Kentucky | American Battlefield Trust Confederate soldiers were optimistic about the prospects for the survival of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery well into 1864. . Recently, reparations activist and Duke professor William Sandy Darity disputed this on Twitter. 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. 1995 - 2023 by Snopes Media Group Inc. Civil War Facts | American Battlefield Trust U.S. Census | Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog Two years later, that number had . Although stories of these impressed workers and camp slaves have been erased from our popular memory of the war in favor of mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, their presence in the Confederate army constituted a visual reminder to every soldier slaveowner and non-slaveowner alikethat their ultimate success in battle depended on the ownership of other human beings. 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. "Ninety-eight percent of Texas Confederate soldiers never owned a slave." "That could only be accomplished by putting the vast majority of males from slaveholding families into service," Gallagher said. It was neither a law passed by Congress nor the equivalent of a constitutional amendment, with the power to free slaves everywhere throughout the United States (and former states then in the Confederacy); it was an executive order issued as a wartime measure by President Lincoln, based on his constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Farmers comprised 48 percent of the civilian occupations in the Union. 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. That left about 27.5 million free people in the U.S., according to 1860 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Terms of Use 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. 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. 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. "This pecksniffery even went so far as to find the state of Delaware rejecting the 13th Amendment in December of 1865 and did not ratify it (13th Amendment / free the slaves) until 1901!". . The Antietam Campaign took place in Maryland, a slave state at the time. Privacy Statement So while a slave owner was only counted once, other people and businesses, including railroad companies, could benefit from slavery as well, Schermerhorn said. Thats nearly three times higher than the number shared in the post. Specifically, we'll be assessing the statements from "the Truth about Confederate History" reproduced in the shaded box below, which claim to be separating myth from fact (while doing anything but): FACT: Entirely untrue. In fact, until March 1865, Confederate Army policy specifically prohibited Black people from serving as soldiers. 727-821-9494, When President AbrahamLincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation, "there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army. Black Civil War Soldiers - Facts, Death Toll & Enlistment - History South Carolina's decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds renewed debate over the Civil War. Become a member! Electronic voting machines didn't allow people to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Privacy Statement 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. Our first installment dealt with the history of the Confederate flag; in this second installment, we examine "facts" asserted in a section of "the Truth about Confederate History" about the practice of slavery in the U.S. and its eventual abolition. Slavery is an important subject to study in its total as an American institution, but the politicizing of it to support modern political agendas will not be addressed at our museum. Congress passed a bill authorizing equal pay for Black and white soldiers in 1864. Chuck Baldwin, The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered, July 9, 2015, Thomas Seaman Townsend, The Honors of the Empire State in the War of the Rebellion, A. Lovell and Co., New York, 1889, California State University-Chico, Southern Unionists in the Civil War, U.S. Census Bureau, Census of population and housing - 1860, Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, Dyer Publishing, Des Moines, Iowa,1908, Civil War Statistics, Strength of the armies, Email interview, James McPherson, professor emeritus, Department of History, Princeton University, July 22, 2015, Email interview, Gary Gallagher, professor, Corcoran Department of History , University of Virginia, July 23, 2015, Email interview, Robert Tinkler, professor, History Department, California State University-Chico, July 22, 2015. The map of Virginia, in particular, goes a long way to explaining the breakup of that state during the war. 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. In 1860, nearly 20% of households in seceding states owned slaves, he said. Very few accounts exist today of black men marching with Confederates in the heat of battle at Gettysburg. tho so weak he could hardly be understood. He assured his family that they would meet again in heaven. Southerners across the Confederacy, from Texas to Florida to Virginia, civilian and soldier alike, were awash in the institution of slavery. The total number of black Confederate soldiers is statistically insignificant: They made up less than 1 percent of the 800,000 black men of military age (17-50) living in the Confederate. NOT in the North! 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. Not many. All Rights Reserved. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. Mackey is an educator, a retired U. S. Air Force officer and a former human resources manager with a global company. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine This material may not be reproduced without permission. The historians we reached said the actual number of slaveholders who fought for the Union was tiny, perhaps a few thousand. St. Petersburg, FL On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a law to allow black men to serve in combat roles, with the provision "that nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which said slaves shall bear toward their owners," i.e. 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. David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Unlike other museums on the war, well focus our lens through the Southerners eyes because their perspective, which was once placed side by side with the Northern view, is now completely absent. Perhaps nowhere more so than in a widespread and ironically titled "Truth about Confederate History" article. 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. For one thing, it was temporary; all but the most serious felons were freed at the end of their contracts. This included men in all the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and. But that provides no evidence that all of them owned slaves, either directly themselves or through their families. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands. (In addition, as many as 200,000 black former slaves became Union soldiers and sailors.). If other museums refuse to provide that balance, well do so. Small Truth Papering Over a Big Lie - The Atlantic On July 11, a Facebook user shared a screenshot of a 2019 tweet that claims only 1.6% of U.S. citizens owned slaves in 1860. Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto, he noted, and is quite active in looking up hidden property.. Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts. Well address states rights in the context of the founding principles of our country and the Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian views of republicanism. Others included laborers, 9 percent; mechanics, 5.3 percent; commercial, 5 percent; professional occupations, 2.1 percent; and miscellaneous, 1.6 percent. 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. The U.S. Coast Survey map calculated the number of slaves in each county in the United States in 1860. Its true that not every white person in the pre-Civil War South owned slaves. Tinkler said across Appalachia, support for secession was thin at the start of the war and as time went by, resistance increased. 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). 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. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days. Likewise, many of the people fighting for the Union were far from paragons of virtue themselves. More a practical wartime measure than a true liberation, it proclaimed free all enslaved people in the rebel states, but not those in the border states, which Lincoln needed to remain loyal to the Union. Danny is based in Brooklyn, NY. For real Confederates from Robert E. Lee on down, camp slaves and other enslaved workersthe entire institution of slavery, reallywere crucial to the ultimate success of the army in the field and the Confederate insurgency as a whole. Fact check: Stat grossly misleading about slave ownership in 1860 20006, Florida 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. In 1863, more than 6,000 accompanied the 71,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. But theres no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Black soldiers fought under the Confederate banner against Union soldiers. These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. 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. The Confederacy included the states of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. You don't have to talk to a Confederate apologist long before before you'll be told that only a tiny fraction of butternuts owned slaves. The closest we can get to that figure is an estimate that 300,000 men from states that allowed slavery put on the Union blue uniform. 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:. But indentured servitude, by definition, came nowhere close to chattel slavery. Terms of Use Children of indentured servants were born free; slaves children were the property of their owners. Blake Masters wants to privatize Social Security. For one major from South Carolina, his war ended along the difficult retreat route from Gettysburg, forcing his servant to take steps to properly bury the body. These primary source accounts, in the form of letters and diaries, detail how camp slaves remained in the rear, prepared to perform various support roles. Greg @lblanconx360 replied to Daritys tweet, Yes- but in the case of SC, most of these were not large plantations like in Gone with the Wind on the coast, but were smaller farms. ), 'The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com. 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. It also did not apply to slave states that had not seceded from the Union (Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri), to the Virginia counties that had opted to break away from that state (and were soon to be admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia), nor to the parts of the Confederacy that were deemed to be no longer in a state of rebellion against the United States (Tennessee and lower Louisiana) because they were occupied by Union troops. You cansubscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. "Thus," Glatthaar notes, "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." In short, Confederate volunteers actually owned more slaves than the general population. 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. J.D. El nuevo WhatsApp de 2023 permite ver con quin estn hablando tus contactos en vivo. Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. 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. Free African-Americans and fugitive slaves in Adams County (including Gettysburg) and surrounding counties fled with the news of Lees advance. 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. Many Northern civilians owned slaves. 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. Addressing and correcting the many inaccuracies and misleading statements contained in that piece would require a very lengthy article, so we have chosen to tackle it here in smaller, more easily digestible chunks. Gallagher noted that over the fouryears of the war, the South put 800,000-900,000 men under arms. And their motivation for serving isn't taken into account by the numbers, since some may have been forced into service, and others may have seen fighting as a way out of . In border states, the percentage was lower -- 3 percent in Delaware and 12 percent in. Not exactly. #FHTE In 1860, 1% of white southern families owned 200 or more human beings, but in states of the Confederacy, at least 20% owned at least one and in Ms and SC ran as high as fifty percent." Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. 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. Although Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland never formally seceded from the Union, they were not "Northern" states in either a geographic or a cultural sense. A second, separate schedule records the name of each slaveholder and lists the slave he or she owns. "Check it out.". State-by-state, we applied that percentage to the total number of military age males. Joseph Glatthaar, history professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Court clears way for removal of Confederate statue at the center of deadly Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally, Charlottesville removes Confederate statues, including one that sparked deadly far-right rally. "Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didn't fight the battle because of slavery. Southerners who didn't ownslavesaspired to one day become slave-owners themselves one day. PolitiFact and Snopes have previously evaluated similar claims that popped up in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Historical scholarship in recent decades has since disabused Civil War students of the merits of thisideology. In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a . 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. Just as the firing ceased late on July 2, Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander was pleasantly surprised to see his servant Charley on my spare horse Meg & with very affectionate greetings & a good haversack of rations. Alexander recalled, Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved. Doing so is clearly designed to make that form of property seem marginal. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. It is, as TheRaven would say, a small truth used to paper over a big lie. Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldnt have gone to war to protect slavery. As a crude analogy, how many PFCs and corporals in Iraq and Afghanistan today own their own homes? Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860? Each slave is listed by sex and age; names were not recorded. This was . The Proclamation, in effect, turned Union armies into armies of liberation, functioning as a funnel through which newly freed men could enlist in one of the black regiments that were filling up quickly throughout the North as well as in occupied parts of the Confederacy. 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. Although the New Jersey legislature passed a gradual emancipation measure in 1804 and permanently abolished slavery in 1846, the state allowed some former slaves to be reclassified as "apprentices for life" a condition that could be considered slavery in all but name. In 1860, there were about 412,000 men from slaveholding families who could serve as soldiers. While no known evidence exists that the armys slaves assisted in kidnapping of roughly 100 men from towns such as Chambersburg, McConnellsburg, Mercersburg and Greencastle on the eve of the famous battle, it is very likely that those ensnared and led south would have passed camp servants and other slaves whose essential presence in the army helped to make their capture possible. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. In Mississippi, 49 percent of families owned slaves, and in South Carolina, 46 percent did. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. Fact Check: What Percentage Of White Southerners Owned Slaves? - The But there is no reason to believe that all or even a hefty minority of these white soldiers were slave owners themselves. The Confederacy produced nearly all of the nation's rice which amounted to 225 million bushels. We wont tell people what to believe, but we will challenge them on what they think they know. 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. 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. Advertising Notice A number of rebels passed by until a young man of benevolent expression attempted to locate a surgeon. Cookie Policy He has become an expert on the U.S. Civil War and writes a blog called Student of the American Civil War., Policing, Enforcement, and Justice (Information Forthcoming), Media Communications: Narratives of Inequality, DITE Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics, Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute, The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, NEW NSF GRANT AWARDED TO COOK CENTER RESEARCHERS FOR COVID-19 PROJECT, From administrators to animals, heres who you need to know at Duke.
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