An Overview of the Civil War: The Bloodiest in US History

Episode 16: The End of War and of Slavery

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

Rather than describing specific battles, Ayers limits this lecture to a brief overview of the Civil War, beginning with the stalemate reached by 1862. By this point, Union ships controlled the entire coast along the periphery of the Confederacy. The latter, in turn, still controlled nearly all South’s productive farmland.

As the North pushed into Confederate territory, slaves fled their plantations to seek Union Army protection. Some Union officers returned slaves to their owners while others retained them as guides in unfamiliar Confederate territory. In August 1861, Congress passed a law classifying slaves crossing Union lines as “contraband of war” and banning their return to their owners. Instead they were housed in overcrowded, hastily constructed “contraband” camps, where they experienced tragically high mortality rates.

Meanwhile internal divisions in both North and South continued to hamper the war effort. While northern “Copperhead” Democrats openly opposed emancipation, Lincoln fought with other Republicans seeking to grant former slaves the right to enlist in the Union army. In April 1862, Washington DC officially ended slavery, issuing compensation to former slave owners.

In mid 1862 Lincoln pushed a law through Congress authorizing Union generals to confiscate or destroy southern plantations as. He also issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an Executive Order that took effect on January 1, 1863 that freed all slaves in Confederate states.

Convinced speculators were hoarding flour, in early 1863 poor southern women staged bread riots in Salisbury (North Carolina), Atlanta, Columbus and Augusta. After southern farmers rebelled against “impressment” of their crops by Confederate troops without adequate compensation, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens openly lambasted the tyrannical policies of Jefferson Davis.

The Civil War is still the most costly US war ever, in terms of lives lost. The North lost 365,000 men to wounds and disease and the South (with a smaller population) 260,000. 37,000 Black men serving in the Union army died, and 10,000 Black men, women and children died in contraband camps.

By the end of the war, the southern economy was virtually destroyed, with many cities reduced to rabble, and many acres of farmland abandoned. In contrast, the northern economy was growing robustly with Lincoln’s greenbacks* spurring rapid expansion in business investment and manufacturing.

Congress passed the 13th Amendment (banning slavery in the US) in January 1865, though the war wouldn’t end until May. It would be ratified by 27 of the required 36 states by December.

With the formal status of former slaves uncertain, some former slave owners fled to Latin America, some chained them up to keep them from leaving and others let slaves continued to live in their cabins and work for wages or for a share of crops they produced.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, formed in March 1865 as a US government agency, dispensed free medicine, food and clothing to poor whites and blacks. It also created courts to settle disputes between landowners and former slaves, drew up contracts, and set up public schools.

Southern Blacks themselves were politically divided. More wealthy black teachers, ministers and artisans merely sought equality before the law and the right to vote. In contrast impoverished former slaves were mainly interested in acquiring their own land.

As Congress was in recess (until December 1865) when Vice-president Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency (following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865) they had virtually no influence over his policies. Under the so-called Presidential Reconstruction program he launched he granted amnesty to former Confederate leaders who signed a loyalty oath, protecting them from seizure of their property and prosecution for treason. He made no provision for Blacks to vote and refused to intervene when former Confederate states enacted Black Codes restricting the rights of former slaves. While allowing them to marry, own (non-real estate) property and sue and be sued, these laws forbade them to change jobs, own or rent land, testify in court or practice certain occupations.

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*Greenbacks were emergency paper currency Lincoln issued during the Civil War when both US and European banks refused to grant his government loans at a reasonable rate of interest.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/end-war-and-slavery

Just to let people know I’m moving to Substack and Telegram after several readers informed me I’ve been censored from WordPress Reader feed. The link to my Substack account is https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/. The link to my Telegram channel is https://t.me/themostrevolutionaryact I’ll continue to publish on WordPress as long as I’m able, but if my blog suddenly disappears you’ll know where to find me.

1941: The Year Slavery Finally Ended

Slavery by Another Name

PBS (2012)

Film Review

This shocking documentary reveals how virtual slavery persisted in the South for 80 years after the Civil War and the enactment of the 13th amendment. This involuntary servitude, based on Jim Crow laws and illegal debt slavery, allowed Southern factories, railroads, mines and plantations to use former slaves as a captive workforce. Prior to 1941, the federal government largely turned a blind to these activities, owing to the economic importance of free labor in the industrialization of the South.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, Congress imposed a period of radical Reconstruction on the South. Enforced by federal troops, it ensured that newly freed slaves enjoyed the right to vote and other civil liberties they were guaranteed under the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment.* The 1500 or so black politicians elected to Reconstruction governments established the first free public schools (for white and black students) in the South.

Jim Crow Laws and Convict Labor

Reconstruction ended in 1875. When a pro-Southern majority took over Congress, control of Southern states and communities reverted to the wealthy elite which had run the slave plantations. Thanks to a loophole in the 13th amendment (see below), all the former slave states quickly established a system to lease convict labor to private companies and plantations. The Jim Crow laws they passed made blacks subject to arrest for petty misdemeanors, such as walking along the railroad tracks, speaking in a loud voice in front of white women, spitting, loitering and vagrancy (all blacks were required to carry proof of employment at all times).

Following their arrest, Southern prisons hired these men (one-third were boys under 16) out to plantations and private companies for $9 a month. Small towns would conduct large police sweeps at cotton picking time or when coal companies were recruit miners.

Working conditions were far worse than under slavery. Companies had no incentive to keep black workers healthy and safe – workers who died were easily replaced. Death rates, especially in the coal mines, were extremely high – roughly 30-40% per year.

Debt Slavery

Even more Southern blacks were enslaved through illegal debt peonage schemes, which used real and fictitious debts to force them into involuntary servitude. This was based on a totally corrupt legal system in which unscrupulous law enforcement officers collaborated with bent magistrates and justices of the peace. Deputy sheriffs would take blacks into custody, claiming they owed them money. Without a shred of proof, their magistrate friends would throw them in jail. The same deputies would then “buy” and resell them at a profit to private companies and plantation owners.

In the early 1900s a federal grand jury investigated Alabama for debt peonage, illegal under federal law, and returned a number of indictments. Although most were dropped, two of the worst offenders sentenced to federal prison. Concerned about potential ramifications for American industry (the world’s largest corporation US Steel owned the Birmingham coal mine that employed convict and debt-based labor), President Teddy Roosevelt pardoned both of them.

Sharecropping Also Illegal Under Federal Law

Sharecropping was another form of illegal debt peonage. Forced to borrow their living expenses from plantation owners who charged 50-90% interest, sharecroppers had no hope of ever repaying their debts. Worse still, state law prohibited them from leaving the plantation with unpaid debt. Those who tried were arrested and brought back.

The Early Role of the NAACP

All this began to change in the early 1900s with the steady migration of Southern blacks to the North, as well as the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. The latter actively campaigned for anti-lynching laws, as well as stronger enforcement of federal laws banning debt peonage and convict leasing to private entities.

Progress was incredibly slow. By the early 1930s, there were still 4.8 million blacks in the South. Most were caught up in some form of involuntary servitude.

It would the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December for Franklin Roosevelt to mandate aggressive prosecution in all cases of involuntary servitude. His primary concern was that Japan would seize on America’s horrific treatment of African Americans for propaganda purposes.

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*13th amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
14th amendment: (Sec 1): “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
15th amendment (Sec 1) “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”