Themes of the American Civil War
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| Causes, Character, Conduct and Results (Philadelphia, PA, 1868) I, p. 11. Davis attributed the war to transcendent sectional competition. If slavery provided the occasion for the conflict, he insisted, it was far from being the cause The war was, instead, the offspring of sectional rivalry that preceded and existed quite independently of slavery the same rivalry “would have manifested itself just as certainly if slavery had existed in all the states or if there had not been a negro in America Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881, rpr. New York, 1958) I, pp. Edward A. Pollard, Life of Jefferson Davis, with a Secret History of the Southern Confederacy (Atlanta, GA, 1869), p. 453. 37. Durden, The Gray and the Black, pp. viii, 253. Early presentations of this view appeared in Charles H. Wesley, The Collapse of the Confederacy (1937, rpr. New York, 1968), p. 166; Reid, Confederate Opponents of Arming the Slaves,” pp. 260, 264. 39. Escott, After Secession, pp. 254–5. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), pp. 291–4, 299. Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists The Ideological Leadership of an Elite (Chapel Hill, NC, p. 93; Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South lost the Civil War (Athens, GA, 1986), p. 391; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and his Houri (New York, 1991), p. 598; Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne, “Self-interest and the Decline of Confederate Nationalism in Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke, eds, The Old South in the Crucible of War (Jackson, MS, 1983), p. 32; Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, p. 287; Craig L. Symonds, Stonewall of the West Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War (Lawrence, KS, 1997), p. 182. While noting anomalous cases, Clarence Mohr agreed that the debate generally ranged traditionalists for whom secession was merely a tactic to defend chattel bondage against Rebel patriots who reversed the priorities and saw political independence itself as the transcendent war aim Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens, GA, and London, 1986), pp. 275, 277. 42. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Ser. 1, Vol. Ii The Destruction of Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie Rowland (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 38–40 ; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 637, Edward Pollard to Jefferson Davis, January 13, 1865, National Archives, Letters Received by the Secretary of War, letter P 16 Ina certain sense, after the first few months everybody knew that slavery was done with that no matter who won, the condition of the slave could never be the same after the disaster of the war DuBois wrote. As accustomed means of enforcing slave obedience disintegrated “there was a certain feeling and apprehension in the air on the part of the whites and the rigor of the slave system in the South softened as war proceeded DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935, rpr. Cleveland, OH, 1964), p. 59. See also Armstead Louis Robinson, Day of Jubilo: Civil War and the Demise of Slavery in the Mississippi Valley, PhD. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), pp. 546–9; Thomas, Confederate Nation, pp. 236–40; Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, pp. 210–34; and esp. Berlin et al., The Destruction of Slavery, pp. Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), pp. CB. Leitner to Jefferson Davis, December 31, H. Kendall to Jefferson Davis, September 16, original emphasis. 48. Editorial in the Memphis Appeal, refugeeing in Atlanta, December 23, 1863, in Durden, The Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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