Historian James Oakes reviews ARMIES OF DELIVERANCE: A NEW HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR By Elizabeth R. Varon in this week’s The Nation Magazine. The review is quite is quite favorable, but Oakes says that Varon neglects the class war that led to Union victory in the Civil War. By all means, read the entire review, but I wanted to reproduce some of Oakes’s argument. Here is what Oakes writes about the class-based nature of the Union coalition:
The Civil War was an explosive example of the one thing that American mythology says this country never has: class conflict—or, at least, class politics—in this case pitting slaveholders against nonslaveholders. Start with Varon’s observation that most of the Unionist sentiment in the South was antislaveholder rather than antislavery. She makes a similar point about the War Democrats in the North, who had no interest in emancipating the enslaved but had been infuriated by the treason of the Southern slaveholders. If antislaveholder and antislavery sentiment could be united in defense of the Union, the Slave Power could be defeated.
Lincoln and the Republicans understood this. To be sure, they never separated their determination to suppress the Slave Power from their hatred of slavery itself. They went to war to uphold what they believed was an antislavery Constitution and to restore the antislavery union that the founders intended to create. They made it clear that they would put down the slaveholders’ rebellion at all costs, and they could do so because in 1861 they had taken control of the presidency and (thanks to the secession of 11 slave states) both houses of Congress.
But to win the war, they needed more than congressional majorities; they needed allies, and their natural allies in the struggle against the Slave Power were the nonslaveholders in the South as well as the North. “A privileged class has existed in this country from an early period of its settlement,” New York Senator William Seward declared in 1855. “The slaveholders constitute that class.” The irrepressible conflict over slavery was best understood as a “conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged classes of this republic.”
The rallying cry for the coalition of the unprivileged classes was “Union.” Lincoln went to great lengths to hold the Northern War Democrats in the coalition, even as they recoiled from the Emancipation Proclamation, by appealing to their Unionism. In the summer of 1863, in the aftermath of the Draft Riots, Lincoln made it clear that opponents of emancipation still had good reason to support the war. “You say you will not fight to free negroes,” he wrote in an open letter to War Democrats. “Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of War Democrats, unwilling to “fight to free negroes,” nevertheless fought and died to suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The same can be said of those Southern whites who remained loyal to the Union. The pages of antebellum Southern history are crammed with conflicts between the Black Belt slaveholders and the up-country yeomen. Those nonslaveholders brought decades of political hostility toward the planters with them into the Civil War, and hundreds of thousands joined the Union Army. When they went into battle, their bullets were as important in undoing slavery as those of the most ardent antislavery soldiers in their ranks.
Then, of course, there were the millions of enslaved people who constituted the Confederacy’s greatest internal enemy. As soon as the war began, slaves ran to the Union lines first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands. (Half a million were inside Union lines by the time the war ended.) Slaves fed the Union Army critical intelligence on the whereabouts of Confederate troops and supplies. At home, they disrupted the routine on plantations whenever the masters and their sons went to war….
No single element of this coalition—the antislavery Republicans, the War Democrats, the Southern Unionists, the self-emancipated slaves—could have succeeded by itself in destroying the largest, wealthiest slave society on earth, and yet each was indispensable to the success of the broader coalition. By naming a common enemy—the privileged class of slaveholders—the Republican Party was able to build and then steer a coalition of whites and blacks, racists and anti-racists, toward the systematic destruction of slavery. When the nonslaveholders of western Virginia petitioned for admission to the Union as a separate state, the Republicans in Congress required them to formally abolish slavery first. The hundreds of thousands of Southern whites and Northern Democrats who fought only to restore the Union were directed by their superiors to emancipate slaves as they marched through the South, whether they supported the idea or not. When slaves ran to the Union lines, the soldiers they encountered were under orders to admit them.
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I think the Europe in immigrants fresh from the 48 revolutions against royalty, saw the oligarcic class system of the slaveholders little different than the feudal system. I have a letter from a soldier in the 118th OVI who said if they didn’t destroy slavery of the black man they would soon enslave the poor white. Considering what happened with company stores he may well have been right. No one ever talks about free labor competing against slave labor either. The South was the China of the era.
A lot of whites knew that slavery drove down their wages, forcing them to sell their labor cheaper of what a slave labor would cost. The result was a lot of impoverished whites in the South, and plenty of workmen in the North that did not wish to be equally impoverished. Add that the plantation systme made sure that the best lands went to the planters, while the rest had to do subsistence agriculture on whatever land was left. There were plenty of people willing to go to war to get rid of the planter aristocracy, North and South