1861-1865+American+Civil+War

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= Introduction to the Civil War = The Civil War was the highlight of Abraham Lincoln's presidency. Of the war, he noted, "I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving first popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of people to govern themselves." Lincoln felt that his foremost duty as president was to preserve the Union. In his words, he suggests that he was fighting to that end as well as to show that government by the people, manifested in America's democratic republic, could survive upset and disagreement--that a government that promoted liberty could stand the test of time where tyranny could not.The irony of the Civil War, though, is that the other side felt they were fighting for liberty as well. Jefferson Davis pronounced, "This great strife has awakened in the people the highest emotions and qualities in the human soul.... It was perhaps in the ordination of providence that we were to be taught the value of our liberties by the price we pay for them." The Confederates felt that their struggle was justified: they were fighting for the freedom to govern themselves much like the revolutionaries had fought. || = The Master Narrative =
 * Who: || This war was fought between the United States of America, commander-in-chief President Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate States of America, commander-in-chief Jefferson Davis. Soldiers included men from both countries and though they were initially barred from serving, blacks were eventually enlisted as soldiers in both armies. Women serves as soldiers disguised as men as well as spies and nurses. ||
 * When: || 1861-1865 ||
 * Where: || [[image:forhistory/map_of_civil_war_battles.htm_txt_civil_war_map.gif width="80" height="54" align="left" caption="Click to Enlarge"]]Mostly in the southern states of present-day U.S. contiguous territory, but what was at the time Confederate States of America territory. The most correct and honest way to describe it is still debated. The first aggressive act of war happened at Fort Sumter, South Carolina and the bloodiest battle occurred at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. ||
 * Why: || Several reasons are offered concerning the Civil War. Sectionalism, the regional differences between the North and the South, which increased over time began as practical differences born out of the political and economic necessities unique to each region, owing themselves to geographic and climate-based realities. Issues that are proposed to be part and parcel of these sectional conflicts include tariffs, an impediment to the continued economic development of the South, slavery, states' rights, and the constitutionality of secession.

What is it for this particular war?
America stands for freedom and equality. The way the Master narrative showed this is by first touting the Emancipation Proclamation as a formative document that "freed the slaves". In truth it did open up the war to black soldiers, but the Confederacy remained opposed to the idea until the very end of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation, coupled with America's other "formative documents" supposedly shows how America has always been progressing towards giving everyone equal opportunities to participate in our nation's historical development.

What does it say about America?
The main story of the Civil War portrays America as "Captain Save a Negro". The master narrative declares that Lincoln deeply cared for black people. All these heroic white figures zealously fighting for equality of the poor, helpless, black slaves. It re-invites us to think about "civilizing" the savage and the "white man's burden".

What does it say about African Americans?
When the Civil War began African Americans couldn't join the war effort as soldiers. In July 1862, black men started fighting and months later Lincoln announced his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. 18,000 black men joined the Union army and half were freed slaves. The master narrative suggests, in a sense, that all African Americans were controlled by and moved to the whims of powerful white men. It also suggests that black men in the war were fighting somewhat selfishly, though honorably enough, to end slavery rather than to preserve the Union. Lastly, there is due focus, but to the detriment of forgetting others, on the 54th Massachusetts infantry attack at Fort Wagner. Half of the men who fought were killed and defeat was clear. There is thus a sense that although African Americans were willing to fight they were still inefficient; though courageous they did not turn the tide of the war.

Who/what is being fought for?
The struggle of the Civil War is that the Union side is against the Confederate side. The Confederate master narrative says that the fight is for the rights of states. The Union master narrative states that the war is circling around the emancipation of slaves.

= Subaltern Narrative =

What challenges were African Americans really facing?
African Americans were facing many challenges during the Civil War. One of the challenges were that they kept volunteering for service in the armed forces but were repeatedly rejected. Time and again, black soldiers would volunteer and get denied--in effect being told this was a "white man's" war, not a struggle for emancipation and certainly not a place for these "second-class citizens" to try to assert their manhood.

After the war turned bloodier than anyone expected, rhetoric began to change and efforts were made to compel African Americans into the service. Once the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the door was opened for black men's service, but doesn't it ring hollow that after getting denied into the war effort these men were only considered valuable when the Union armies had faced a catastrophic loss of life on the field?

A continuing challenge was the debate about colonization. The war's end would come, and if the Union won, what would happen to all the blacks who were free? How could these men fight for a country that, in no uncertain terms, was saying that free black and free white men could not coexist? The American Colonization Society had already tried to ship free blacks to Liberia. Now talk of moving them South America was heating up. Although one can question how absurd this idea was, an equally important question is how or why blacks were willing to fight to protect a home that was trying to spit them out.

But of their valor, Frederick Douglass said, "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters 'U.S'; let him get an eagle on his button, and the musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on Earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

When the Union army started using black troops, racist Confederate leaders and troops refused to recognize them as real soldiers. Capture black soldiers were not treated like captured white soldiers (i.e., prisoners of war); instead they were abused and murdered. The Secretary of War for the Confederate States ordered: "We ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners.... summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken." It had become official Confederate policy to not waste time, energy, effort, or resources to treat black soldiers like human beings; if they were captured they were to be killed.

What were African Americans really doing?
Early on, black men volunteered to join the war but were rejected. Most of the labor black people did for the Confederacy was involuntary. They were forced into the work with no pay. Impressment laws in Virginia compelled free black men to work on Confederate defenses around Richmond and Petersburg. In 1863, the New York Draft riots arose from racial, religious, and class hostilities. In one instance, an angry mob of Irish men attacked the blacks who were in their vicinity, which inspired further violence as blacks tried to defend themselves in the supposedly sympathetic North. These Irish men were angry because the blacks had replaced striking Irish stevedores on the city's wharves in the preceding month and because, unlike working class immigrants, wealthy, rich white Northerners were using their financial clout to purchase exemption from the draft.

It seemed for blacks in the North and the South that the old adage "the enemy of your enemy is your friend" simply didn't apply to them.

James Montgomery, one of the men who had funded John Brown's antislavery expeditions, commanded the Second South Carolina Volunteers which enrolled ex-slaves (i.e., freedmen)--a lot of whom came from Georgia and Florida. The slaves did not want to fight, for obvious reasons--none of which can be reduced to cowardice--so Montgomery had to force them into service. However, once they were recruited, trained, and armed, Montgomery made this remark: media type="custom" key="10925282"

What is the story of black women during this war?
During the Civil War, women played an important role too. Women aided the war effort on both sides as spies, guides, and messengers and, particularly for the Union side, as liberators. Harriet Tubman was the organizer of an expedition that freed slaves in South Carolina. Mary Bowser, a former slave that worked for the Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia would overhear plans and communicate this "intel" to the Union. Black women would draw sketches and maps of Confederate fortifications to give the Union an advantage in strategizing for battle. Bowser herself soon fled when attempting to burn down the Confederate mansion. Overall, black women participated in meaningful ways during the Civil War, but their story often goes untold.

What is ironic about this war as it concerns African American soldiers fighting for the United States?
Black leaders were convinced that by serving in the military, black men would prove they deserved to be treated as equals. Although they fought for their country, in the end, and even during the fighting, they were not considered equals by many of the army leaders and white servicemen.

Black soldiers were demoralized and considered weak even though they showed they were more than capable of fighting. Once black men put on the Union uniform they took part in almost every battle that was fought during the rest of the Civil War. Moreover, black troops not only faced an enemy dedicated to the belief that the proper place of black people was in slavery, but they also confronted doubts about their fighting abilities among white Northerners.

It's ironic that these men fighting to preserve the Union would still not be treated as equal citizens of it, even after they proved their valor. What's perhaps more tragic, however, is that they ever had to prove their merit or worth in the first place in a country where the fundamental principle of the rights of man stemmed from an understanding that these rights were inalienably endowed by the mere fact of existence.

= Timeline of Facts to Know about the War =
 * 1861 - Union army rejects black volunteers.
 * 1862 - Militia act authorized recruitment of black troops for the Union army.
 * 1862 - 1st black troops for the Union at Island Mountain, Missouri.
 * 1863 - The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect on January 1st.
 * 1863 - Black troops assault Battery Wagner in Charleston Harbor.
 * 1863 - First Black Medics are allowed in the Union Army
 * 1864 - Fort Pillow Massacre
 * 1864 - Lincoln won re-election.
 * 1865 - Congress votes to enlist 300,000 troops.
 * 1865 - Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant.
 * 1865 - 13th Amendment is passed, ending slavery in the United States.

= Concluding Thoughts = I learned a couple of interesting things while researching the Civil War. I will list some of them here in red and then include my concluding thoughts on each one in black:
 * Since 1861, several thousand slaves fought to free themselves. When we hear about the Civil War we often hear that Lincoln "freed the slaves" or that the Union army freed the slaves, but in reality without their own impetus to fight against the evil of slavery, these slaves would not have been freed. They were not the helpless victims or damsels of distress in this story, they were the heroes.
 * John Brown was a great hero for racial and gender equality, but he wasn't alone. He is an admirable martyr partly because of men like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a white sympathizer, who helped fund John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Higginson, and the "Secret Six" were very courageous, I think. Their efforts, not to just end slavery, but to prove that white and black people were equals was a thought way before their times--a thought some people would still try to challenge today. It takes a great deal of strength and leadership to oppose the very premise of a society's growth, development, and progress. But men like Higginson prove that race does not have to be an obstacle to individual understanding, even if the society itself is unacceptably biased and bigoted.
 * White men had built a reputation for deserting the army, but black men, among army commanders, were consistently remarked on for being valiant, courageous, and dedicated. This isn't to discount the effort of white men or to make a general statement about the courageousness of one "race" of men versus another. I only underscore this point to highlight the fact that questioning the master narrative is important. It seems the effort and courage of black soldiers is often lost in retelling America's war stories; the fact is that they are America's heroes too and there is historical record to attest to this fact--that not only did they fight, but they fought with the greatest honor.
 * The First Confiscation Act was passed in 1861 and allowed for any property that belonged to the Confederates which were used in the war could be taken by U.S. federal forces. That meant that slaves used to benefit the Confederates would be freed--but only those slaves. John Freemont, a Union general, interpreted this legislation quite loosely and declared free all of the slaves in Missouri. Lincoln, afraid of losing the Border States, overrode Freemont's order and made sure that the slaves of Missouri not used in the war effort remained slaves. It's quite telling that Lincoln's interest wasn't in being the great liberator that he's touted as. And although it makes sense that he was trying to juggle the fate of the war with an increasingly vocal abolitionist effort, it's still a bit shocking to think of this in simple terms: the slaves were fighting their slaveholders **and** Lincoln at the same time--because Lincoln, at this point, had effectively re-enslaved men that Freemont had declared were free. This happened again when General David Hunter ordered slavery abolished in South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. Lincoln annulled the order and then reprimanded General Hunter.
 * Even though the Emancipation Proclamation is supposed to be the turning point in regards to Lincoln's views on slavery, it in fact specified that states that returned to the Union within 100 days of its issuance would be able to maintain slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, is a misnomer. A proclamation, it was. A document for freedom? It was not. If anything, it shows how powerful economic and political interests are to the detriment of the weakest members of American society.

Given all of this new information, I am convinced that the master narrative concerning the Civil War is not only blatantly untruthful, in that it leaves so much out and simplifies to the point where people and events are misrepresented, but it perpetuates this idea that America, even in its darkest moments, was purposefully and consciously moving towards the resolution of equality and liberty and justice. The subaltern text of the Civil War has shown me that heroes are not infallible and can often times be the villains in the very same story; that in a struggle for life, rare are the people who will idly stand by when given the opportunity and resources to fend for themselves; that black men, black women, and women in general are often left out of the larger story because they don't play a "big enough" role, when in fact they have always played an integral role in America's success stories--that in fact, without them, we could not even imagine those success stories.