Civil War Today

A very brief primer on Who, What and Where

In general, the Southern armies wore gray and the Union armies wore blue, although early in the war some Northern units wore gray and some Confederates wore blue, which caused no end of trouble in the first few battles. As the war stretched on most Confederates ended up wearing butternut colored uniforms if they had any uniform at all. The Northern Army, also known as the Union, the Yankees or the Blue Bellies, was fighting to preserve the United States and to end slavery. The Southern Army, also called the Rebs, the Rebels or the Confederates, was fighting for States Rights and to preserve slavery.

Some people will argue against the idea that the South was fighting to preserve slavery; but, oh come on get real.

Origins of the Civil War

The first Europeans to land in the Americas were Nordic seamen sailing under Leif Ericson come in from Iceland. They landed in what we now call L'Anse aux Meadows northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland. They called the place Vineland and though they established a colony it didn’t last long and they didn’t try again. The next Europeans were part of a Spanish expedition led by an Italian named Columbus.

Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas. The Spanish followed by the Portuguese quickly moved into South America. The first English expedition landed at Plymouth Rock in New England. The Pilgrims as they were called suffered a hard winter but survived with the help of the local Native Americans who were eventually wiped out in payment for their kindness.

The English explored the coast of North American and eventually established a colony at Yorktown in Virginia. The Jamestown colony survived by getting Europe hooked on tobacco. Two groups of colonists were now established in North America: in the North were the Puritans, religious fanatics who had fled the reach of the Church of England, and in the South were farmers who quickly settled in on two main export crops, tobacco and cotton. Both groups used slaves for manual labor.

Most of the slaves at this point were indentured servants who had sold themselves into slaver for a fixed period of time, debtors who chose to come to America and work rather than go to prison and finally a few slaves who had been purchased from Africa.

New England had been blessed with huge old growth forests and shortly a ship building industry got going in Boston. In the South plantations grew and spread and there was a greater demand for cheap labor than the courts of England could supply.

There is an interesting effect at work in the North Atlantic, a current flows up from the Equator along the North Coast of America, turns and flows toward Ireland, there it heads south along the west coast of Europe to the west coast of northern Africa, turns again and flows into the Caribbean and back up to, well Boston. A consortium could build a ship, buy a load of cotton or tobacco, sail it to England and sell it for a huge profit. Then they could use the money to buy English manufactured goods, sail it to Africa and sell the goods for a huge profit. Now all they needed was a cargo to haul from Africa to the Caribbean, where they could pick up a load of sugar and rum. Slaves were the answer.

It was a great setup, every leg of the trip was a huge money maker and the shipping families of the North made a fortune off of it. In the South resentment grew against their northern counterparts because the Southerners felt like the North got the mine while they were getting the shaft.

Remember the Pilgrims landed in New England while the Spanish landed in the Bahamas? It turns out there are some smaller currents that cut across the Atlantic, one comes from the base of the North Sea and hits roughly New York. That current is why New York is New York. The Northern shippers discovered that there was more money to be made hauling European immigrants than there was hauling slaves. They had to buy the slaves whereas the immigrants paid them; also, the journey was much shorter so a ship could make more trips.

By this time the Spanish had control of most of the Caribbean except for a few islands under English domination. The Portuguese took over the slave routs that the Northerners had abandoned, hauling the slaves to the Caribbean and trading them to the Spanish for gold, silver, rum and sugar and hauling the cargo back to Portugal. It wasn’t as profitable as it had been under the Northerners but the money was still very good.

Here’s where the split comes, for all the talk of abolition and what not, the North was trading with England and the South was trading with the North (they still had the ships) and with Spain for slaves. Two totally different societies formed out of these relationships. In the North, stern New Englanders wore tight black coats buttoned up to the chin, tall stove pipe hats and prided themselves on their puritanical roots. In the South they wore colorful waist coats, low flat hats with broad brims, enjoyed going to parties and dancing. Two peoples could not have become more different.

In the North there was an endless supply of cheap labor coming in from Europe and especially Ireland where the British were enforcing a famine to decrease the surplus population. While in the South virtually all incoming labors were slaves. There was no reason for an immigrant to go there, no jobs.

The puritan streak in the North began to demand the abolition of slavery, they being safely done with the trade and fat with Irish looking for work. By this point even the language was different between the North and the South. About the only places where the two cultures met was on the trading floor where the South still resented the North, in the western goldfields, and at West Point.

There is a fundamental problem built into an agrarian society based on the plantation model; namely, as a parent do you split the plantation up among your sons or do you keep it intact by having the younger work for the oldest? The usual choice not to split up the land, so if you were a younger sibling and you didn’t want to work for your brother you struck out for California and sudden wealth, or you joined the army.

The South even created special prep schools like VMI to feed students into the West Point Academy. This explains why, when the Civil War broke out, 40% of the officer corps was made up of Southerners even though they made up a much smaller portion of the total population.

So the situation had become: the North, industrial, puritan, driven by immigration and international trade; the South agricultural, militaristic, and driven by slavery and trade with the North which they very much resented.

Even before the first shot was fired, the country was divided.

Now, I’ve just summed up 400 years, and there are people who will disagree with some part of everything I’ve written. The English will say the Irish were starving because of a potato blight, which is true if you ignore the fact that Ireland was exporting food during the famine. The Northerners will say they were out to free the slaves and preserve the Union, ignoring the prominent role they played in establishing the slave trade to begin with and the money they were making shipping Southern cotton and tobacco. The South will say they were trying to preserve their culture ignoring that their culture was built on slavery and their resentment of the North’s control of manufacturing and shipping.

It will also be argued that the North was predominately agricultural, which was also true, but it was a very different kind of agriculture. In the North the farms were what we use to call truck farms growing produce to feed the large industrial cities like Boston and New York; these were worked by families not slaves. Also, a younger son could find work in the city if he wanted to leave the farm, or if he was very adventurous he could go west for land or gold. Either way the Northern son had many more options available to him that did his Southern counterpart if he did not choose to go west.

All of this is why when the North spoke of the Civil War they called it the War of Rebellion, the War to Preserve the Union or the war of Abolition; while in the South they called it the War of Northern Aggression, the war for States Rights or The Cause.