American Civil War - Books about Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

Like the Underground Railroad for the salvation of slaves, the American Civil War itself has assumed mythic proportions in the century and a half since the last man fell. The railroad was, in fact, a haphazard affair, not the Twentieth-Century Limited that it became in reputation, and the war was hardly the clash of passionate men fighting to the death for their convictions. Neither side was the least enthusiastic about having a war.

When Abraham Lincoln promised to limit the spread of slavery upon his election to the presidency in 1860, southern slave owners feared this would give nonslave owners (three-quarters of the population of the South), the uppity idea of abolishing slavery themselves. Already in 1861 it was difficult to get volunteers to fight, and the following year the Confederacy ruled that those who could afford it could hire a substitute to fight for them. Moreover, anyone owning a minimum of twenty slaves was exempt from the draft entirely For the man who had neither slaves nor a bank account, this was a rich man's war. Indeed, only a few days before the collapse of the Confederacy the Georgia Early County News wrote: "This has been a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. It is true there a few wealthy men in the army, but nine tenths of them...get out of the way when they think a fight is coming on, and treat the privates like dogs....there seems to be no chance to get this class to carry muskets."

On the Union side, the enthusiasm for war came primarily from businessmen who were afraid to lose southern markets for their products and the cheap cotton that came north in return. The working man cared very little about the existence of slavery far away from home, just as today the reality of Iraq pales as you move inland from the coastal United States. Moreover, in the North as in the South, a man with money could hire a substitute to go to war for him. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 allowed Lincoln to accept black volunteers, but that was no more popular in the North than in the South. The Union feared a wave of black migration from the South, claiming their jobs at lower wages. Again, in the North as in the South, this was considered a rich man's war--a contention that was one of the foundations of the widely scattered draft riots in the North in 1863.

There is no jingoism in the omnium-gatherum from which this measured view of a chaotic war is drawn. As impartial as the judgment of Solomon, the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History contains 2,733 pages of alphabetical entries from Abbot, Henry Larcom to Zouaves as well as many of the relevant documents, lists of the general officers in the armies and members of the government for both North and South, the sites and maps of the battlefields, a chronology of the war, a glossary, a vast bibliography, a compulsive index, and many period photographs.

The majority of the sixteen hundred entries by some three hundred contributors are devoted to people, baffles, and places. The rest are subject categories such as "Rebel yell," which occupies an eloquent two columns. The yell was an "ululating howl" that came to intimidate Union troops mightily The entry relates that "the yell seemed to be a mixture of certain Celtic calls, brought by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland and used to gather cattle, hogs, and hunting dogs, combined with pent up nervousness, hatred, exultation, and 'a pinch of pure deviltry" Alas, the composition of the actual yell is lost to us, for "by the time recording equipment became available, old Rebel throats were too weak and feeble to produce their famous battle cry."

An entry for "Lost Cause," a phrase first published in 1866, offers the theory that despite valiant resistance, the South lost the war because of the Union's overwhelming superiority By embracing the concept of the lost cause, the South was relieved of taking any responsibility for its defeat. It is such entries as these that extend the scope of this book to social history, as the title promises.

The entry on "Rations, C.S.A." begins: "It is one of the great ironies of the American Civil War that, while the Old South took pride in its rich agrarian culture, the Confederate states failed efficiently to feed the army that was sent forth in its defense." One of the reasons for the lack of food was the overabundance of cotton, which growers continued to plant in great quantities because of rising prices. While the rich Southerners continued to live well throughout the war, the poor staged food riots in towns large and small as early as 1861. The discontent spread to the army from which deserters joined draft dodgers in gangs that attacked government supply trains and raided plantations. Particularly in the southern hill country, these marauders more or less eliminated control by the government m Richmond by 1864, the year in which Jefferson Davis confessed that two-thirds of the Confederate army was missing, most of them without leave.