The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

Journal of Southern History, May, 2003 by William Blair

By William W. Freehling. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xvi], 238. $25.00, ISBN 0-19-513027-8.)

William W. Freehling shifts the focus of debate over why the South lost the Civil War onto two particular groups of southerners: white people who lived in the border regions and African Americans in the slave states. The importance of these two groups, he argues, has been underappreciated. White people who remained Unionists not only denied invaluable sources of troops and food to the Confederate cause, but they also provided Federal soldiers with a safe haven for launching strikes into the middle and lower Souths. Those who remained in the border South--Unionists, Confederates who accepted their fate, or others who wished to remain neutral--failed to sufficiently mount guerrilla warfare or otherwise harass Federals. Black people, meanwhile, fought for the Union as soldiers, performed labor for that military, fled their masters, and conducted other activity that hurt the Confederate cause. Together, these anti-Confederates influenced the coming of the war, Union strategy, and policies regarding the enslaved.

Freehling's book was first presented as part of the same Littlefield lecture series at the University of Texas that gave impetus to Gary W. Gallagher's The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). In some respects, Freehling's lectures and book are meant to answer prior studies (including Gallagher's), but they do not quite meet these head-on. Gallagher's study suggested that the Confederacy did not implode from a lack of will or too much internal dissent, an argument that restored the role of the Union army in southern defeat. Although Freehling expresses admiration for Gallagher's work, he believes its focus on a group of "selected" southerners (p. xii)--white people who supported the Confederacy--was too limited. Similarly, although Freehling sees class conflict as a problem in the Confederacy, he skirts this as a major factor in his analysis. And he is careful to qualify that the internal war between southerners was not the only element in defeat. He is primarily interested in plotting a new conceptual approach, one that shows how losing the border regions and not acting quickly enough to employ their own slaves in fighting deprived the Confederacy of 450,000 soldiers who might have made a difference in the war's outcome.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Confederacy's loss of the border states, according to Freehling, was that it gave the Union a geographic as well as logistical advantage. Without the strategic avenues offered by the border states and the additional manpower they provided, the North might have had to seek other military options. This insight, along with his incorporation of black people into the story, is what prevents Freehling from merely repeating the refrain of Confederate apologists who cast defeat in terms of overwhelming numbers. Historians have long realized, as Freehling reaffirms, that the Union needed these numbers to achieve its ends.

The book's greatest contribution is synthetic. For the most part, Freehling successfully incorporates the agency of African Americans with a renewed (and welcome) emphasis on the border states. Scholars have ignored neither aspect, but Freehling brings them together in an effective narrative that shows the value of studying the border South as a whole rather than the piecemeal, state-by-state approach characteristic of previous literature. Freehling also includes interpretations that question Lincoln's status as the Great Emancipator and gives enslaved African Americans greater credit for their own liberation. He accepts criticism of Lincoln's slow adoption of emancipation but urges greater appreciation for his efforts to maintain an antislavery posture from 1863 to 1865. Emancipation resulted from a collaborative effort that involved both slaves and Lincoln's military.

A couple of things prove problematic in this otherwise thoughtful book. One is its sweep. Because of its grand perspective, nuances are lost in generalizations. For instance, predominantly white communities come across as rather uniform areas, although recent studies, even of Appalachia, typically find greater diversity within white regions. Also largely absent are Unionists in the Confederate South. Such oversights are understandable because of Freehling's mission to take the high conceptual ground, but it bears remembering that even greater complexity lies beneath his portrayal. Another problem is his tendency to make extensive claims about the underappreciated nature of certain interpretations. Most of the details of this book will come as little surprise to scholars. The battle narrative is very familiar, and in some cases, it could have been condensed to fit more snugly with Freehling's analysis. Similarly, Lincoln's slow acceptance of emancipation has been well known for some time, although Freehling is more novel in stressing the president' s post-1863 activity.