Interesting book review: Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong

[pampango]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2011/06/09/civil_war_america_aflame/index.html

Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety -- as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I've seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was "incited" by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion's emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn't show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists' minds.

Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves' abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious, violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates Southern whites' violence against black people before and after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants, and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working, business-friendly American progress.

Goldfield shows how leading Union generals almost immediately became warriors on the frontier, bringing the zeal with which they decimated the backward South to the task of decimating backward "savages." That new crusade had direct ramifications for Southern blacks. Even when President Ulysses S. Grant tried to use the military to beat back white Southern paramilitary groups literally massacring African-Americans trying to execute basic rights, he couldn't, because soldiers were deployed out West in the new Civil War against Indians. One hero of the book, Mississippi Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames, tries to use his power to protect blacks from Southern Democratic violence, but there were no Federal soldiers left in his state to call upon, they were all on the anti-Indian front. As the state's "White Line" paramilitary group tore through Mississippi to violently intimidate black voters, Ames was forced to give up his governor's position and flee. Early in the book, Goldfield quotes a Northern newspaper editor proclaiming "We can have no peace in this country until the CATHOLICS ARE EXTERMINATED." Near the end, he finds a Birmingham News headline that reads: "We intend to beat the negro in the battle of life, and defeat means one thing: EXTERMINATION." That doesn't feel heavy handed; it's fact, and it's tragic.

Meanwhile, attacks on Irish Catholics continued. Although the famed Civil War Irish brigades fought bravely, the Organization of Union Veterans wouldn't include them – or black Union veterans, either. And if certain abolitionists hadn't already shamed themselves with their anti-Irish Catholic bias, they would later, when they dropped their concern for African Americans – and in fact, joined slavery advocates in concluding that blacks were unfit for self-government. After the war, Henry Ward Beecher began hawking watches and preaching "The Gospel of Prosperity;" he also wrote a novel whose hero was an industrious white Southerner, and whose main black character was a stupid, drunken man-child incapable of self-support. Beecher remained viciously anti-Irish Catholic and opposed to the emerging labor movement (those two things were connected, by the way, for quite a few abolitionists), arguing that the era's strikes showed that the working class was "unfit for the race of life." During the Great Railway Strike of 1877, he denounced the strikers in his loathsome "bread and water" sermon, where he thundered: "Man cannot live by bread alone but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live." A few days later he proclaimed: "If you are being reduced, go down boldly into poverty." I wonder if Scott Walker is an admirer.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. More

1. Most of the generals of the Civil War went to West Point together, took the same courses from the same teachers.

2. Forget the moral indignation as the motivation of the North to end slavery. The real reason was the capitalists of the North feared the South overtaking them financially due to the free labor of slaves.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. This might explain why my German GGGrandfather left NY to 'Fight Indians"

in Minnesota. Well, he was late signing up, his unit was re-routed to the first battle at Mananas, where a few days later he is listed as a deserter.

Put's an interesting new spin on an old story... thanks!

[snagglepuss]

3. A really fascinating read. Thanks for posting. K & R nt

[loudsue]

4. So, IOW, the abolitionists were wingnuts, except they hadn't learned to hate/fear black people

That's just dandy.

[RainDog]

5. k&r n/t

[joshcryer]

6. Had the slaves been bought and freed (for much less the cost of the war itself)...

...I think that The United States would probably have still been split on states rights vs federal rights. It would've been the better compromise, naturally, as Goldfield appears to be arguing that we were split anyway. The unity between north and south was hardly real for many decades, and a lack of such unity continues to this day.

[Monarda]

7. My great-grandfather was Irish and Catholic.

Nevertheless, Catholicism tended to be illiberal at the time and the Pope supported slavery. This revisionist history simplifies things too much.

[JVS]

9. Also, the Church was hostile toward Democracy. Only with Leo XIII in 1901 was democracy spoken of..

in positive terms.

[MadHound]

8. Written by the Robert E. Lee Chair of History at UNC-Charlotte

A man who is nothing more than a Confederate apologist still fighting the Lost Cause.

A far better historical analysis is Kevin Phillip's "The Cousins' Wars"

A lot of this is claptrap nonsense based on cherry picked evidence. And this specious link between Northern abolitionists and the modern RW fundies ignores one very salient point, that modern RW fundamentalist arises out of the Southern Evangelical religious movement.