[lit-ideas] Sherman and the Copperheads
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:14:58 -0700
Not everyone in the North was interested in the destruction of Southern
civilization. A group in the Democratic Party called (by their enemies)
"The Copperheads" wanted to back out of the war, leave the South intact, and
negotiate a peace. In the following Hanson describes the reaction of (most
of) Sherman's army to the Copperheads and their reasons for wanting to
finish the destruction.
Hanson, op cit., p 160-1
". . . Why as a group had the men [Sherman's army] voted for Lincoln against
the ever popular copperhead, General McClellan, in the election of November
1864, just days before they set out? And why had the army of the West
enjoyed the highest reenlistment rate of any Union force - nearly 50 percent
of its men choosing to keep marching when they could legally return home in
safety?
"The answer was twofold. First was the understandable notion of
self-interest and survival. Rice Bull wrote of the army's realism as it
neared Savannah:
'The prevailing feeling among the men was a desire to finish the job; they
wanted to get back home. The mass of those in this Army were veterans,
nearly all had served three years, many much longer, and all were tired of
army life. They had faced the loss of home comforts and loss of business
opportunity and endured privation and danger to maintain the integrity of
their country. They were not in the service as soldiers of fortune, they
were intelligent and could see that the Rebellion was nearing its end, so
were willing and anxious to meet quickly any privation or danger that would
bring a speedy end to the war.'
"Soldiers in short realized that the quickest way to return northward to
their families was to follow their mad genius into the heart of the
Confederacy and very quickly to wreck its economic and spiritual core. Thus
wrote a private in Sherman's army of Northerners who wanted to a negotiated
peace:
'Oh!! Those base copperheads. I would like to have them down here in front
of our guns and then make them do allegiance to their government or died a
traitor's death. Those are my true sentiments, and no doubt it looks hard
to you, but to those that have been serving their country for the last three
years in trying to crush the Rebels, and now to have those dastardly cowards
crying for peace when we have got them so nearly used up. That is the
feeling of three-fourths of the army.'
"There was also another reason for the troops' growing zest in the
destroying the system of apartheid. At the outset, Midwesterners really
knew nothing about either slavery or slaves. Most Northerners in general
had never seen a Negro or a plantation; many were, and continued to be, in
the abstract, racists. But once Sherman's men learned the character of the
slave, the conditions in which he was kept unfree, and the ideology and
venom of his master class, there rose among most of them a hatred and
repulsion for rich Georgians that only increased as the army daily moved
eastward and incurred the petty rebuke of the invaded. Very quickly,
Sherman's young troops came to abhor the elite of the society that they
overran - a few marchers would even begin to see black men as the moral
superior of the rich Southern white. A soldier from Illinois was only too
happy to burn Atlanta; it 'and every other Southern city deserve nothing
better than general destruction from the Yankees,' he wrote, for 'buying and
selling their betters.'
. . .
"When Sherman's men reached Savannah, the signs of hierarchy among the
departed Confederates repulsed the Northerners. . . Hitchcock wrote of the
sheer hatred that the Midwesterner held for the plantationist when he spied
Wade Hampton, the millionaire slave-owning Confederate general, at the final
armistice between Sherman and Johnston: 'Hampton['s whole demeanor was
marked with the easy 'well-bred' essentially vulgar insolence which is
characteristic of that type of 'gentleman'; a man of polished manners,
scarcely veiling the arrogance and utter selfishness which marks his class,
and which I hate with a perfect hatred.' Sherman's march really was an
ideological crusade; young recruits, like their forty-four-year-old 'Uncle
Billy,' were convinced that they were in a total war with the haughty
purveyors of real evil. Sherman's fiery rhetoric and personality had now
permeated the entire army."
Comment:
Several people here have criticized Sherman for destroying the homes and
livelihood of Southerners. I submit that they did so without context.
They anthropomorphized (so to speak) the Southern Plantation owners and made
them like ordinary Americans. "I wouldn't like to have my house burnt,"
might have been one of their thoughts. And yet there was a context and to
oppose Sherman as the Copperhead's did actively and certain Lit-Idears
retroactively, was to favor the Southern civilization as it was, to want it
to retain its integrity, to approve of its going on as it was. The
Copperheads had a very different view of the black man than those of
Sherman's army, at least the three-quarters of it the private describes
above. Copperheads believed the black man inferior and that the North was
wrong in its desire to disrupt Southern Civilization. To make allowances
for the Copperheads, it should be recalled that there wasn't scientific
evidence at that time to demonstrate that the blacks were NOT inferior. A
certain amount of faith was required whatever you believed. The Copperheads
argued that blacks were inferior, but Sherman's army, who went a-visiting
and a-burning saw things and believed the contrary, that the slave-owning
plantation owners were inferior, at least morally so.
At the risk of incurring a vituperative response, I see a parallel in some
past arguments over Saddam Hussein. Many Lit-Idears argued that we should
leave (have left) Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Civilization intact. We had no
more business going into Iraq than Sherman had going into Georgia. It was
not our business. We should leave those people alone. Implicit in saying
and believing this is the argument that the Plantation Society and Saddam's
regime ought to go on existing. Implicit also is the idea that destruction
of these civilizations would be worse than anything ramified from their
continued existence. We would have to employ Niall Ferguson's
counterfactual technique to imagine alternatives. I won't revisit the
Saddam arguments, but it seems to me that if we had left the Southern
civilization intact we would have tended in North America toward
Balkanization. We wouldn't be "one nation under God," but several. There
would be the North and the South, but Texas might be a separate nation and
California, the Oregon Territories and the Dakotas. We might be a group of
squabbling nations rather than the powerhouse that we are - which to our
local anti-Americans might seem a good thing, but not to me.
And in regard to the drawing of modern parallels from earlier examples, I am
not like the professor of philosophy, one of the Walters, I can't recall
which, who said he never used autobiography in his analyses. I questioned
him about his meaning at the time but got no response. But if I understand
his meaning, I would say that in my case I always use autobiography in my
analyses. That is, I seek application. Maybe this is merely a difference
between Philosophy and History. In history, we must (or rather ought to)
make application.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
<http://thinkexist.com/quotation/those_who_do_not_learn_from_history_are_doo
med_to/170710.html> "
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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