The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederates Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (review)

The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederates Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. By William W. Freehling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 238. $25.00.)

William W. Freehling, holder of the Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and author of The Road to Disunion (1990) and Prelude to Civil War (1965) has weighed in on the fascinating and important question: Why did the Confederacy Lose the Civil War? Freehling's provocative response is that the defeat of the Confederate nation can be attributed to two interrelated groups: Southern white anti-Confederates and Southern black anti-Confederates. The context for the former is the South's failure to acquire control of the key border states of Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. Their manpower and industrial capacities would have strengthened the young nation immeasurably. Thus, the first parts of The South vs. the South are devoted to a careful examination of how and why the important non-seceding Southern Border States were secured for the Union early in the war. It was not easy. The loyalty of those states, as well as Tennessee, was up for grabs. The deciding factor, Freehling asserts, was a combination of canny political maneuvers by Abraham Lincoln and military victories in the West that kept these states firmly in the Union by late 1862.

That, however, is only half of the story. The other half is the willingness of the Federals to amass a force of black men from conquered Southern territory (most notably Mississippi and Louisiana) that provided the Union with an army of occupation. Black soldiers demoralized the Southern population and enabled the Northern military to concentrate its strength in the last year of the war. Freehling points out the "collaboration" inherent between slaves eager for freedom and the Union Army as an instrument (not always a willing one) of revolutionary change as it liberated hundreds of thousands of slaves from 1862-64. Indeed, by late summer of 1863 it was possible for Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to declare unequivocally: "Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected" (129). Added to the already large advantages the North enjoyed over the South in terms of resources, the 450,000 white and black men from slaveholding states in arms against the Confederacy proved to be a devastating blow almost impossible to overcome.

Still, the North could have lost the war. Home front morale was indisputably tied to battlefield victories, and those were mainly Confederate in the all-important eastern theater. Thus, it was entirely possible that the South could win independence by wearing down the Northern will to fight. Here, Freehling's analysis of Lincoln's leadership is enlightening. Lincoln managed to hold onto the loyal slaveholding states by stressing the importance of preserving white liberties and treading lightly on the slavery issue. He recognized the vital importance of uniting all whites behind the war effort, even if it meant delaying emancipation indefinitely. As the war ground on, however, Lincoln pressed for emancipation and black soldierhood as a powerful addition to the northern military capacity. Freehling has no illusions about Lincoln's lackluster commitment to racial equality. His point is this: that the Union could not have won the war without both Southern whites and blacks working against the Confederacy. By ensuring that this occurred, Lincoln brought down the Confederate nation and the system of slavery upon which it was built.

The South vs. the South originated in a series of lectures that were given at the University of Texas. Deliberately, Freehling's lectures and his book were a response to Gary W. Gallagher's argument made in The Confederate War and elsewhere that the Confederacy's white population was united behind Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. The CSA did not lose the war...