Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Civil War Violence 20240714

Aaron is a native of michigan not far from lansing, did his undergraduate work at northwestern before spending time working in washington, d. C. And moved on to the university of virginia where he studied under gary gallagher. Book is entitled why confederates fought family and nation in civil war virginia. His most recent book, published by harvard, titled calculus of violence how americans fought the civil war. Just again published in 2018. Aaron, lsu is a great place for him. Aaron is a self proclaimed foody so has lots of places to select from in new orleans but today well talk about his book, which has received two recent awards including the Jefferson Davis award from formerly the museum of the confederacy, now the American Civil War museum in richmond. Lets welcome aaron sheehandean. [applause] prof. Sheehandean good morning. Thank you all. I will start by saying happy fathers day to everyone in the audience. Its a weird thing to spend sunday morning talking about violence, but that is what we will do. As he said, my book is called the calculus of islands violence, and so we will get right into it. This lecture has a tendency, as a friend said a long time ago, two ba 10 pound weight in a five pounds sack for 45 minutes, and the mic has been walked out so i have to stay on the podium, which is no fun for me because i have a tendency to pace so it will get channeled out hopefully. We know that the civil war was a terribly bloody and violent war. The new estimate now, and i think a reliable one, though its likely to go up, that david hacker gave us, 750,000 dead. He sort of recalculating and doing more demographic work to best this is a book really trying to explore the decisions that people on both sides made about when they could turn lethal violence on, what were the parameters of how the war could be fought . And im going to give you my conclusion up front here, and the conclusion of the book, the main argument of my book, is that the civil war was both bloody and violent, unimaginably violent for most americans coming into it, and at the same time, also restrained and a war that could have been, in fact, two or three times as many dead i would imagine, if certain things happened. So, i hope, right now, that may sound like a wishywashy conclusion, that says a little of this and a little of that but i hope by the end it sounds nuanced and sophisticated. I want to walk you through both sides of that, the ways in which the decisions that people make during the war facilitate in particular unnecessary violence. Obviously, war inherently involved violence and the laws of war ill talk a fair amount of the laws of war determine who that violence can be directed at and that is generally, according to the western laws of war, uniformed combatants. So, im not going to spend a lot of time talking about the technologies of war, although some of those are in the book, discussions of things like mines. But instead, the decisions people make about the boundaries of where thats drawn, how were irregular combatants treated, noncombatants treated, what sorts of pressure can be applied to people outside of regular uniformed combatants . Combatants. So the beginning of my talk will focus on two military elements, who can fight a war, and how do you fight a war. And then a couple of sort of cultural elements to determine whos inside the scope of lethal violence or substantial pressure. Then, ill turn to those elements that diminished or restrained the violence of war and then try to offer some concluding points about what looking at the civil war this way might teach us about military conflict in general and the civil war and American History. I want to start with the first question that americans were confronted with. Oops,y clicker is there it is. I have to go down. Im clicking the wrong way. The first question is over who can fight. And the Lincoln Administration is confronted with this almost immediately, because lincoln doesnt believe that the confederacy that secession is possible. He doesnt regard the confederacy as a real thing. You can sense him talking about the socalled Confederate States and air quotes and bunny ears he would be making. He refuses to acknowledge that secession is possible, that the confederacy exists as an independent state. Thats the game, and if he gives that up, hes lost from the beginning. He has lost the war from the beginning. So, the question happens, as u. S. Forces and these Confederate Forces come into contact, what is the condition of these men claiming to be soldiers of this independent state that lincoln doesnt believe is independent . And, as the New York Times suggests, the difference is substantial. Whats confederates want is to be declared public enemies. This is a journalist writing in the New York Times who described the difference between being a prisoner of war, which involves honorable restraint, and a captured traitor, for which you may be hung. It emerges really on the high seas first, that is there are confederate letters of mark issued by Jefferson Davis to privateers going out doing the work. The confederacy doesnt have much of a navy to start neither does the u. S. At the start of the war. Those men are captured three ships are captured. One goes to new york, one to philadelphia, and the men on those confederate ships, effectively confederate ships go , into regular criminal court. In fact, in new york, the judge says to the jury, you have to decide whether were in a state of war to determine the jurisdiction and outcome of this case, and you can imagine these men, that is the citizens of new york who end up on this case, thinking, i dont think thats my decision. Thats above my pay grade. The decision about whether were at war was taking place presumably at the white house or in some larger sphere. And, Jefferson Davis is observing this and growing more and more concerned, and the men who are held, held in new york at the tombs, the citys notorious jail and Jefferson Davis response to this is to take an equal number of u. S. Officers the highest ranking men who have been captured thus far, puts them in hard labor in richmond and says if the men captured on these privateers are executed, i will do the same to the men i have captured, issuing a retaliatory threat. I will talk about retaliation as it works within the laws of war later. Lincoln blinks in this instance. Lincoln recognizes, and this is an important restraint, though the larger question of who can fight exacerbates the problems of the war. But, lincoln recognizes that he has to effectively agree that the confederacy is an independent state, that in terms of how he treats those soldiers, that they will be recognized as public enemies and housed in prisons and given medical care if required. Thats a decision that hes forced into by the exigencies of war, and one place where we see real tension between how lincoln believes how the war should be fought not that he wants unrestrained war, but does not want to acknowledge the confederacy, but in this instance, he is forced to. We know how the story plays out, tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands of confederate prisoners and Union Prisoners of war held in confederate camps over the course of the war. And, after 1863 and the introduction of black soldiers and the collapse of the cartel that determines how to exchange prisoners, more and more prisoners subject to worse and worse conditions, and eventually, tens of thousands of unnecessary tests in union and confederate p. O. W. Camps as a result partly of this question over how you resolve and recognize who has the legitimate authority to fight a war like this in the 19th century. The confederates face this, as well, and they face this in the question of black soldiers. Black men are recruited into the u. S. Military. Some of these are free men of color, and some are enslaved men from places like where i am right now, the Lower Mississippi valley area, in the coastal South Carolina and florida. And then out in kansas, in late 1862, we know this story of enlistment. And, after the emancipation proclamation, the u. S. Army officially creates the usct, and those men are put in uniform as regular soldiers, according to the Lincoln Administration, and they are confronted by confederates who are reluctant to regard them as legitimate combatants. They say they cannot legitimately fight a war. So we dont have to accord them the status of public enemy. Jefferson davis first instincts is to encourage his armies to treat black soldiers captured as slaves in the act of insurrection, and to be turned over to state authorities and punished under slave rebellion. We heard patrick breens discussion of what happens to those people in his discussion of the nat turner rebellion. The laws in every Southern State are death for slave insurrection, so davis knows hes sending these men to their death. The Confederate Congress endorses a variety of measures on this front, and the confederacy begins this process although theyre almost confronted immediately by the fact that many of the men fighting in union blue are free men of color, had never been slaves, and the confederacy is reluctant, from the laws of war effective, to change the status of those men and put them into a position where they might be executed. And, davis, i think, recognizes whats coming, which is in july of 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues a public proclamation declaring that if the Confederate State Army executes u. S. Soldiers, and he doesnt distinguish between white and black, but he says if they execute or subject to hard labor u. S. Soldiers, then the u. S. Army will do the same thing in response for the captured confederates, and by this point, both sides have tens of thousands of captured p. O. W. s so the violence there has the real potential to spin out of control. And it doesnt, again, because davis respects this threat. Now, that isnt to say that black men experience a just war because they do not. The confederate policy shifts to that shifts to, in some respects, reflect the u. S. Position. The u. S. Position is there are no enslaved men in u. S. Armies. If there are men who had previously held the classification under law of enslaved, they have, by this point, escaped from their masters, they have come into a u. S. Refugee camp of the sort that amy taylor described yesterday, and then they have enlisted in the u. S. Army as regular men, so they are no different from white soldiers in that capacity. Once theyre in the union army, there are no slaves in the union army, so the confederacy has to recognize that. That being said, the confederate army, like the u. S. Army, is enormously decentralized, and in many interactions with black soldiers across the south, atrocities are committed and black men are refused the opportunity to surrender, and this happens famously at fort pillow. I have a fort pillow image coming up later. Sorry. It happens at fort pillow, poison spring, it happens at plymouth in north carolina. It happens in saltville in virginia, at the crater. We heard a little bit about this yesterday, about the battle that transpired at the crater. Those encounters certainly leave black men suffering an unjust war. That is, black men in uniform where confederates refused to allow them to surrender, where they dont offer quarter, they dont offer medical treatment to Wounded Soldiers and that happens over and over again. So, hundreds of black men die unjustly, unnecessarily, at confederate hands, over the course of the war. That total might have been much higher if the confederate state hadnt changed that policy to a slight agree, but that issue of who can fight is central. The other central issue here is over how you can fight and what legitimate war looks like. And the north here insists on regular, uniformed soldiers that if wars happen between states, they happen then with regular armies of chains of command, clear chains of command, men on in uniform on battlefields armed and responding to proper authority, so when a flag of truce is issued, men respond and stop fighting as theyre supposed to. The problems in the confederate response to that develop very quickly. And, this is thomas heinemans famous band of 10 order issued in arkansas in 1862 after the early 1862 battles against the union army, confederate army, mostly abandons arkansas and the confederate citizens of arkansas take it upon themselves, taking direction from thomas heineman, to organize themselves as he says in independent companies of 10 men, led by an elected captain to conduct guerrilla warfare without waiting for special instructions, and for the north, this violates one of the central tenets of just war doctrine and laws of war. The theory of just war, the philosophical enterprise begins arguably with st. Augustine and extends really through catholic europe, through the centuries as theologians debate the ways in which military force can be conducted within a christian framework. Those laws are then sort of put together by hugo groshuous, the dutch jurist, in the 17th century, but not yet codified. They will be in the lieber code, a formalization of the ideas of just war. The central part of that just war relies on soldiers being able to discriminate among those people on whom they would subject violence, and the discrimination here is, i will only subject to lethal violence those enemies in uniform and armed against me. Noncombatants, citizens, other people outside that scope, and uniformed enemies who have been wounded, who have laid down their arms, cannot be subjected to lethal violence. Guerrillas obscure all of this, and thats the central problem and the problem that lieber marks out in the lieber code. When guerrillas are organized independently, and they arent wearing uniforms and dont have a chain of command, captain is in bunny quotes, but even heineman knows this. This generates from the union what we would call today a Counter Insurgency strategy. Right . The union is going to fight a regular war on most of the battlefields, like gettysburg, and also they are going to have to combat an irregular war, what we would call in the 20th century, an insurgency. They didnt use that language, and they didnt call antiguerrilla operations Counter Insurgency, but for those familiar with the ways we have been fighting wars against irregular enemies in the last decade or dozen years, the union effectively mounts a Counter Insurgency. That Counter Insurgency comes under various headings. Mark grimsley gave us a way to think about this years ago, which is a hard war, a war that is increasingly destructive of resources in response to the irregularity of guerrillas, there is an effort to destroy the resources upon which those guerrillas withstand. William tecumseh sherman, who im happy to say is with the president of the institution i represent. Sherman had basically no visible presence in the commemoration wars of late. Were mostly talking about taking things down. Our commemoration wars are trying to get something named to william sherman. This is my pitch to the board at l. S. U. And they will not respond. [laughter] prof. Shennhandean sherman has within very nice oil painting in the mens room and on the third stall. [laughter] prof. Shennhandean thats really the best he gets at l. S. U. And so in sort of popular memory, his raids in georgia and South Carolina are the kind of pinnacle of a hard war approach that is the destruction of logistical resources necessary to sustain an army. And ill talk more about sherman a little bit later. Sherman gets credit for this. You know, georgia gets sympathy and South Carolina doesnt, even though theres more destruction in South Carolina. But, the hard war policy, actually, i think, has sharper edges to it in other places and i wanted to start with something from the Shenandoah Valley and the problem that Union Officers confront, in terms of how to punish and how to discourage and ultimately deter guerrilla warfare. And this is john pope, part of the famous orders he issued that to call him in his bluish language, a miscreant. This is part of the campaign as pope is heading out into virginia, and he says to the people of the Shenandoah Valley that, when there are operations that happen against lines of travel, the railroad or telegraph, they will be held responsible. The they here these are underlined by him, not by me they will be held responsible. Citizens will be held responsible, ordinary citizens, for the violence committed by guerrillas. Union officers confront this up and down the mississippi river, along both sides of the arkansas and mississippi side, into louisiana. Guerrillas, as heineman encouraged them to do, heinemans call probably brings out in arkansas 5,000 men who flood the banks. They snipe at union transports coming down the mississippi, and he actually says that. He says to shoot to kill pilots of transport and other vehicles. That is unarmed men. Many bringing supply personnel not in a state of war, not a legitimate target under the regular laws of war, but instead, theyre sniped at from the bushes, and its enormously hard for union forces to track these men down. They have to get a ship over to the bank, offload those men, and go off into a scouting party, by which point the guerrillas are gone by 45 minutes and are never recoverable. So, the response from the u. S. Is to increase the pressure, not lethal violence. He doesnt say were going to begin arresting and executing civilians who happen to live near where guerrilla events happen. But what he does say is the pressure of our Counter Insurgency will fall on the communities that sanction and support guerrillas. Guerrillas depend upon what historians today call a domestic supply line the material, the horses, fodder, food, and intelligence that guerrillas use to operate comes from regular civilians, and those regular civilians present a peaceful face as the guerrillas themselves do to the Union Officers in one moment, and the other, will sanction and encourage violence the union considers unjust. The escalation, the final moment of this policy, comes in general orders number 11. This is by far the strongest Counter Insurgency policy the u. S. Army has ever enacted, and certainly the strongest pressure applied by the u. S. Army to american citizens. So, the context for general order number 11 in missouri is the ongoing guerrilla conflict there, which seems in 1863 like it will spiral out of control. People like quantrill and bloody bill anderson, and i wont give you all of the story here, but suffice to say that they commit a raid on lawrence, kansas in on lawrence, kansas, in the summer of 1863, and while there, this is in retaliation for the collapse of the jail. In kansas city, they commit the worst single atrocity of the civil war, the massacre of lawrence. They take all of the adult men, defined men aged 15 and up, right at the boundary of the age where you become an adult. That is nearly taking children out. They line up about 150 adult males, and shoot them in the street and destroy much of the town and leave. This is the single worst in terms of scale, single worst atrocity committed against civilians in the war. And so the Union Officers in western missouri need to respond to this, and they are weighing a variety of options, and the option they come to is general order number 11, and general order number 11 offers 30 days for all inhabitants of 3. 5 western missouri counties and the options that citizens are given are two. You move out of your domicile, and you take up residence near a u. S. Army base. I take the oath of loyalty, and youll be protected or you move out entirely and youre on your own. In either case, about 20,000 people from this region are expelled from their homes, and nearly all the homes and facilities in these three counties are destroyed. It is an enormous policy in terms of the size and the scope. In many respects, it looks a lot like the trail of tears. The u. S. Army has turned this kind of pressure on noncombatants before, but only in indian wars. And i would suggest that theyre kind the reverberations here are particularly unsettling for white settlers who had gone to missouri, partly because the u. S. Army had expelled native people, and now, the army is deploying that same strategy against white settlers. This is the famous painting by george caleb bingham. A every single american u. S. History textbook is required to use his the count vote to talk about antebellum democracy. He served in the state legislature in missouri. He felt general order number 11 was horribly unjust and that its pressure on particular unionist civilians in missouri was terrifically counterproductive. So after the war, this is 1868, he uses his brush and gets the last word in on the tyranny that is general order number 11. Thomas ewing, the general who issues the order, hes on horse back. William tecumseh shermans step brother, for those keeping score , and a dead civilian on the ground and more destruction off, it is a little dramatized, but the scale of destruction in general order 11 is dramatic. And, this policy, i would submit, is a policy developed with the laws of war in mind as a way to apply nonlethal pressure to this problem of guerrillas. That is the problem created by the confederates refusal to fight the war the way the war should be fought. And, as Henry Halleck says, a policy that is consistent with those ways of fighting that we know from western european history over the preceding centuries. In fact, partly what halleck and lincoln are thinking about is what is emerging along the kansasmissouri border is a revenge expedition led by angry kansans who are mapping and the governor of kansas, in fact, calls kansans up saying we assemble at the border, ride into missouri, and begin killing and burning, and lincoln is very worried about what that would look like. So, lincoln and halleck sanction general order number 11, despite the scope it contains, in order to curtail a yet more bloody and more irresponsible and unrestrained action from this irregular force accumulating on the border. Ewing and halleck, to their credit, write to the governor and say stop stoking these fears. Were not going to allow kansans to come into western missouri and commit violence or military acts on their own. These are the two sort of military issues who can fight and how do you fight that generate a great deal of unnecessary violence as they manifest through the war. I want to talk quickly about a couple of cultural elements here. The first is the language of righteousness. Both sides indulge in this, particularly ministers. But politicians, as well. Its a language of righteousness that infuses the war and the violence of the war with a sacrilegation. Making the violence holy and apparent to imperative. Cain and abel is one of the parables that northerners use to talk about the politics of the affair going, that this is a kind of betrayal of a family, family of the union, that southerners created, and in response, what you have here is a call really for unrestrained if youre fighting people who exercise only fiendish malignity, you dont need to offer them much in the way of charity or compassion. This is common on both sides, both northern and southern ministers, and the newspapers in particular encourage a rhetoric of righteousness, of moral indignation that is quite dangerous to control because of the way that it spreads. Theres no question that the sharpest issue distinguishing who suffers just violence, that is regular soldiers on battlefields, from who suffers unjust violence is race. That black soldiers in the union armies who fight across the continent experience a much less just war than regular soldiers do. This is one of many images at the time that ran at the time at fort pillow. Fort pillow draws enormous northern attention. The u. S. Congress sends an Investigatory Committee that gathers evidence and takes testimony. Theres plenty of testimony from confederates, as well, describing what happened and being very clear about the way in which confederate troops singled out African American soldiers for execution, rather than allowing them to surrender. And mark neely has made this argument, as well, that when the war happens between white men, the violence tends to be less awful, and certainly more necessary in that sense than when the war happens between white and black soldiers, and i want to make that point so that were clear. One less cultural point here, which is to think about the ideology to the sort of violence people sanction in war. These are the two most famous or well known white abolitionists from before the war. One, john brown, known for his willingness to engage in violence. The pottawatomie massacre in kansas in 1856. This is him, and his sons murdering free soil, im kansans inlavery the dispute in the territories. Brown, filled with that righteousness, an Old Testament figure and the raid on Harpers Ferry as the culmination of this. William garrison is more typical of most white abolitionists, coming out of the second grade awakening, out of evangelical Reform Movement of the 1830s and he is deeply committed to pacifism. So deeply that, during the mexican war, when garrison sees a soldier on his way to mexico whos enlisted from massachusetts, he writes to a friend, i saw a soldier on the street today in uniform and recalled as though i had seen a snake. He said i have such opposition to the military that its a visceral sensation, a physical a physical allergy he has to inoculate himself against to see men in uniform yet once the civil war begins, garrison and other abolitionists are confronted with a terrible dilemma. Do they sanction military violence on this massive scale to accomplish the outcome theyve been striving for for i. Which theisputes to republicans were antislavery. Emancipation is not on the horizon in 1860. In the regular election of lincoln as president. And by 1862 its on the horizon. But part of the way that will happen is if the war goes on long enough and is fought with enough vigor that the u. S. , that lincoln, whos been reluctant on this, is compelled into emancipation. So what we find is a curious inversion. People like garrison and other white abolitionists who are theoretically committed to pacifism, wind up being the most vigorous advocates of a hard war. Theyre the ones that want an army moving with power across the southern landscape, destroying those social relations. Theyre not calling on the wanton killing of slaveholders but they want slavery destroyed and doing so requires vigorous war. I put this out partly because we tend to think in a postworld war ii era that the alignment of hawks and doves is necessarily that the hawks in favor generally of u. S. Military power are the political conservatives and the doves are the political liberals and that sort of fits but here we have political liberals like William Garrison who are the hawks and the political conservatives, the Democratic Party of the north, wind up being the doves. The democrats are the ones in the north who make arguments about the laws of war and want proper oversight of the army and arent eager to see emancipation happen as part of the hard war policy so i would suggest this teaches us theres no necessary alignment between your ideological position and where you stand on military force. What is important is what the war accomplishes and the case of the civil war shows as a community of people dedicated to progressivism and liberal values and see a war that might facilitate those and are willing to sanction war in a way that is surprising. Try to uplift us for a moment to talk about those things that restrain and bound violence of war. This is aclasia potter, a number of northerners who make the observation about the weird inversion of ideological inversion that happens as a result of the war. So i want to talk about this guy, francis lieber, who weve heard about already so far. Lieber is german born, comes to the United States in the 1830s and serves as a professor of law in South Carolina and like all good academics is constantly wrangling, trying to maneuver his way into a better position and gets his in 1860 when he comes north to take a job as professor of law at columbia. He is certainly the smartest, most well read of probably anybody in the United States or north america at that point on the laws of war, on the philosophy of nations. And he makes himself available, as i say, again, aggressive self promotion to the state department and in 1863 they agree that it would be a good idea if he writes a compendium , not of the laws of war. Henry halleck published a 1,000page book on the law of nations and law of war in 1861. Its ponderously footnoted and unusable. What lieber does, he was also a good academic, old brains, what lieber does is create the origin of todays rules of engagement. If you know that as u. S. Service members go into combat, they carry a plasticized set of instructions about the rules of engagement that determines the ways in which they can function in a variety of contexts. This begins with lieber framing in 148 sort of short little bullet points, not heavily footnoted but very specific, when you occupy a town, places with scientific instruments or hospitals need to be protected, universities need to be protected. That was observed maybe more often in the breach. U. V. A. Was protected, university of alabama didnt fare so well and neither did v. M. I. But in general those laws are sharp and specific and one of the important points is that means that after 1863 there is a clearer set of rules for determining and assessing conduct than there was in 1861. That is to say that the war doesnt inevitably grow worse and worse. In fact the imposition of a structure to hold men accountable for how they behave as soldiers is present in a way after 1863 that was not present at the wars start. So why do places endorse this . I would argue both the north and south, the confederacy never issues a code but they draw on the same concepts and deploy them at the ground level with their armies in much the same way. Both do so for similar reasons, partly because they want to attract european support. This issue of having global sanction for your nation is essential for both of them. And part of the way you attract that sanction, particularly for the confederacy, part of the way prove to the world that you are a modern sovereign state is you make war the way you are supposed to make war. According to the laws of war inline with the european tradition. Confederates are promoting the restraint that they exercise and the atrocities that the u. S. Armies commit. An order 11 figures prominently. An effort to say we are following the rules so we have a bona fide status. As states. And they are doing so because they want their armies to respect their values. This is a letter from a confederate private, james anderson, who came out of new orleans and moved west and enlisted in Confederate Forces. He is serving as a guard at andersonville. He is concerned enough to write his president to say that we have guards here who think that shooting men approaching the line will make them big men. He says this is not how we make war, i make this statement to you, Jefferson Davis, knowing you to be a soldier, statesman, and christian, and he repurposes the golden rule. We should do as we would be done by, that is the way to fight war, that is to say there is a strategic reason for this, you observe the laws of war because you want, as a soldier and potential captive to have the same protections offered to you as well. According to northerners, this stopped happening in 1864, when images of soldiers are released to u. S. Authorities and released as 90 pounds of crystalline bones. These horrific images, harpers weekly gives us a sense of how these get translated into woodcuts, the newspaper cannot print photographs. But they circulate extensively in the spring of 1864 and there is a sense of outrage about northerners for whom the agreement of protecting prisoners, though many confederates died in union p. O. W. Camps, they regard this as a gross violation of war and compel the u. S. Senate by february of 1865 it about the retaliations resolution, that the u. S. Senate is considering endorsing policies that will mirror those of confederate prisons in terms of food supplies, health, access to water, and protection like in andersonville, with the goal that confederate pows will look the same way. There is a vigorous debate that crosses a weird partisan and ideological line, its proposed by a republican. Ben wade, one of the most eager fighters, but its charles sumner, his republican colleague , who says this is not retaliation. It is barbarism savagery, and , not the way the u. S. Fights its wars. The retaliation provision is voted down by the u. S. Senate, but it is one of those dramatic moments where we come to the possibility that the war could escalate dramatically and doesnt. One place to see how retaliation works out, and i will offer a minute or two on retaliation as part of a lost war in the lieber code, it is recognized as the harshest part of the laws of war. Retaliation is not revenge, its a recognition that your enemy has outstripped the laws of war and violated them. It gives you, the opponent, the opportunity to respond in exact kind. That is that they executed one of your officers you could execute one of their officers. You dont execute a civilian. It has to be proportional in terms of classification of people and in terms of the numbers. If they execute one unjustly you may execute one unjustly. Retaliation is a way of diminishing the cycle of violence, by making that counter retaliatory move you say to your enemy i have leveled the field and i make sure it goes no further. This happens all across the landscape. Again, because of the decentralization of these armies. Individual commanders make these decisions about using retaliation to diminish and discourage unjust violence on their own, without having recourse to washington. This happens in the Shenandoah Valley. John mosby, 43rd cavalry battalion, a regular enrolled commander, but his unit operates irregularly and was effectively a guerrilla. He said he wasnt 10 we can have this debate later. But his forces are hard to catch and that frustrates custer, who im embarrassed to say, is from michigan, and in this case what he does is respond to the execution of one of his officers, at the time theres a wide consensus that a Union Officer had been captured and injured, and they did not want to take him. So they shot him and there are confederate witnesses and military witnesses to this. In response to this. Custer takes six men and hangs , them in front royal. This is in late 1864, again, it is a disproportionate response. One of the six isnt even a soldier, but a young man from front royal who rode with the confederates out of town. It was a gross violation. Mosby knows, hes a smart man, the only honest x confederate after the war who said of course we fought about slavery, i dont know what were arguing about thats what you fight about and thats what we did and i dont see why its a big deal. And what he said to custer in a public letter is that your execution was unjust and i am executing six Union Prisoners that i have, make sure this does not happen again. And it doesnt. One of the cycles that you could see spiraling out of control, and we imagine would if you killed one and the enemy killed six and you kill 18 and you kill 50, instead, in the civil war, it stops. Retaliation works in this context to diminish violence. Grant and sheridan are the commanders over custer, there is nothing in the record from them but one could sense a latent frustration that he has exceeded his capacity and that mosbys response was a lawful and proper response to what happened and diminishes the violence. Two more points and i will wrap up. The single most important factor limiting violence in the civil war is the decision of enslaved people to seek freedom, rather than revenge. The discussion we had yesterday about nat turner, and the violence with which he behaved in 1831 when he was using violence as a tool to break slavery is extraordinarily uncommon in the civil war itself. Amy taylor talked about the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who seek their freedom and come to freedom through the u. S. Army contraband camps over the course of the war. Maybe half a million or a seventh of those enslaved in the south, those come to freedom and rarely stop to commit violence against whites, which had been the fear not just a confederates who were anticipating another haiti with the language the Lincoln Administration is using, but even union people. Salmon chase, the most vigorous abolitionist in lincolns cabinets, he says we have to be careful of emancipation because if we incite violence or insurrection there will be bloodshed and it will be on our hands. There is a great deal of reluctance to endorse emancipation for this reason. But in the event that enslaved people who freed themselves during the war, moved to freedom. This is not a passive action, the act of escaping is fraught with peril it takes great bravery and courage to make that happen and some physical stamina. The decision to withhold violence, to not cut the throat of your master on the way out and not set fire to the house as you leave is an act undertaken i think for strategic reasons, white southerners have a monopoly on violence and they know the patterns of white people. We heard from Professor Green about the response to nat turner, about the dramatic over response by white southerners, 200 black virginians killed in the next month or two over the state, accused of being in league with nat turner, when obviously they had no connection to him. They know that response, that tendency towards overreaction. And there is now a long tradition by 1860, a century or more of afro christianity which seeks salvation but sees no purpose in exacerbating unnecessary bloodshed. In fact what white southerners , prophecy and what they think will happen, never happens. There is no question that the u. S. Civil war is the greatest slave rebellion of the 19th century and the most successful one because it winds up helping destroy slavery. It is not the revolution like southerners anticipate. There was none of that violence that happened that they imagine. I would dispute that haiti happens the way they think. The assumption about haiti is of a landscape drenched in blood. That decision diminishes the violence because you could imagine enslaved people who had risen up had each killed a white person. You are talking about another 500,000 dead. Most of the violence is anticipatory violence by white guerrillas and regular soldiers who are committing violence against enslaved people, trying to seek their freedom. Not the other way around. This seems to me to be an overlooked point about the dynamics of the war that limits the violence in enormously. The civil war does not develop into a race war. The one that many people were expecting. Last is politics. In the north, lincoln has a divided government. He has democrats to deal with. The confederacy abolishes parties or party labels. They abolished party labels, thinking that abolishes parties. It does not. It does mean politics configures itself different in the confederacy. Lincoln is subject to partisan critique throughout the war. The democrats seized criticism of lincolns administration because they believed the war should be softer and more gentle. That it should not affect slavery. The democrats take advantage of that. There is continual partisan pressure to diminish that violence. There is the bigger political goal, which for lincoln, is reunion. He needs to conduct a war with the bare minimum amount of violence in order to reunify the country. If there is a general order number 11 in every state and these accumulate and gather over time, he makes reunion impossible. Lincoln is continually triangulating about what level of violence is necessary to achieve the outcome, which is the destruction of the confederate armies and their inability to fight in order to begin this process of cultural reunification, some of which takes decades even with all of the measures that i have discussed that the union adopts as ways to curtail that violence. In what ways does this matter . This framing of a war that is both of malice and charity, not one or the other. He talks about charity at the end but the war was fought with a great deal of malice. It means our war was not exceptional. Most civil wars look like this. Most civil wars have both restraint in them and extreme violence. It is important to observe the civil war does not move in a linear fashion. The violence does not necessarily escalate perpetually. This is a model that we map under almost every conflict. As enemies fight one another and grow more and more bitter, the violence will escalate. We see this in world war ii in the pacific theater. In war without mercy, there is an inevitability to that. It compels people into more and more violence. I think the civil war contradicts that. What we see are cycles of violence, like in the Shenandoah Valley, where custer executes six men unjustly. That cycle winds back down. It escalates and then it deescalates. This is partly because of the scale of the war. People take steps consciously to regulate how they behave over time. There is a lever code libra code in 1863 that was not there in 1861 that provides a structure for punishing people who violated. I have material on the book of Sexual Violence and assault against women. Those are punished with great vigor by the union army, took particularly once the structure is in place in 1864 and 1865, we see a great deal of punishment for Union Soldiers on those scores. Two more points. One is that states matter. Lincoln acknowledges this implicitly. It is much easier to contain the violence and destruction of war properly when youre dealing with another state. When youre dealing with a stateless entity, it is hard to do this. I will make the terrifically unpopular stance of going with the states. Dare i even advocate nationalism as something that forces people to commit themselves to monitoring and policing the actions of that state, in a democracy, as both these places were, when the army goes out, it is us. The actions that it takes reflect our values and democracy. We cannot hide behind an emperor or kings. 19th century americans know this and they are invested in the ways in which that war is fought. It is a part of how they function. You do not have that when you are dealing with stateless entities. There is no just war. Was the civil war a just war . Yes or no . Vote here, i would not vote. The civil war is both just and unjust. Every war contains elements of malice and charity. What that tells us is the importance of paying careful attention. Knowing there is a likelihood that our troops and our enemies troops are going to violate the customs of how war should be fought and how our job as citizens is to correct for that. Pay careful attention and try to make sure there is less malice and more charity. Thank you. [applause] we have 10 minutes for questions. We will start on the left. Gary smith from connecticut. What were the numbers of colored troops who found their way into confederate prisoner of war camps. There are not good numbers on this. There are black prisoners. How many black prisoners were there . We know there were black as black prisoners of andersonville. If any of you are teachers, there is a book about this that is magnificent. It is a hard read but it deals with this question. Hundreds do. We do not know how many dont. I was trying to keep track and i was finding moments when a platoon of 12 soldiers is captured. There is an attempted escape and they are all killed. Sometimes that happen. They often tried to escape after being captured. It is weird when all 12 of them are lined with bullet holes in the back of their heads. It does not look like the escape got far. In short, we dont know. Hundreds, probably thousands do not make it into prisoners of war camps. But we dont know how many dont. Thank you. Stan from massachusetts, i am curious heard there is lots of evidence of confederates showing restraint for Union Soldiers in not shooting them when they could such as in petersburg. I have seen a lot of information about confederates during the time and afterwards jumped the justifying the murder of africanamerican soldiers. Have you run across any remorse for not shooting them . There is not a great deal of remorse. The newspaper dives right in and Jefferson Davis calls it a heroic victory. Jefferson davis was never one to hold from a bad cause. His take on emancipation was that it was the blackest crime in all humidity. This is called going all in. If you are going to be wrong, be wrong on a biblical scale. There is not a lot of public remorse. There is a testimony from Achilles Clark who writes about portillo. He writes to his sister, saying this is what happened. It is clear he thinks this should have happened. Should not have happened. He says brains could have been scooped up from any quantity from the schools being bashed in. No, i have not seen a great deal of that. There is a tendency to say it did not happen and the union has over dramatized it. We were just trying to take the fort and that was an accident. Not a clear reckoning with that among that wartime generation. There is plenty of evidence from people who talk about it. There are private correspondence, there are people that say this is not how we should hate. Confederate soldiers, like Union Soldiers, regulate themselves all the time. There are many who write back in the burning of chambersburg. It is easier to put a size that than the treatment of black soldiers because it is not quite such a third rail. Kristin from fairfax, virginia. In regard to your discussion on retaliation, did you find evidence of the Confederate Military and Political Leadership acknowledging missouri guerrillas response to the j hawkers, Union Militia along the western border of missouri . They are the kansas guys who come over to western missouri. If there is anywhere you dont want to be, it is living along the kansasmissouri border. The jayhawkers are coming into missouri and the confederates are going back. There is a sense that the confederates justified this. They do not use the word retaliation because it is more like cycles of revenge. An escalating series of revenge cycles would be in this place. What i was surprised about was how deep awareness of it went. There is an amazing letter from Hannah Johnson who was born from enslaved parents and she is a free woman of color living in upstate new york. Her son fights in the 55th massachusetts. She writes to lincoln in the mid summer of 1863 before he issued this retaliation provision and she said we need to retaliate. She spells it out in the letter. She is not saying to lincoln that we need to kill white soldiers but we need to make them know that they cannot kill ours. Even at that citizen level, they understand that retaliation is a feature of war that ensures balancing in order to restrict the overall violence. Both sides are aware of that. Sometimes, they use the language sloppily and the kansasmissouri border would be one of those. They are framing it as you started it and we are getting back. This had been going on since the mid1850s. Dennis doyle from illinois. Professor, have you seen in your research on the civil war where an officer or enlisted man or a group of soldiers refuse an order based on their own ethics or morality that they refused a command or order to commit an act of violence . What would repercussions have been if they did do that . Been if they did do that . Thats a good question. I did not. The short answer is i did not see anything explicit like that. There are times where orders get countermanded. The most famous is an issue on violence against native people. The sioux uprising in minnesota, the pope and the town fathers of minnesota want 300 of the men involved to be executed. It is the largest execution in American History and shocking on its scale. That is one of those places where there is an intervention. Part of what happens after 63 is the appointment of the judge advocate general. They can review these. Review punishments, mostly. At least review the way in which the union army is how it exercises it against men in its care. There are mutinies that happened. This happens in a couple of places. Most famously in jacksonville, florida at the very end of the war. Black soldiers, the mutiny and execution rates are higher for blacks and whites. The violence that is being committed, they took up arms. They are justified in doing that. It is not actually a mutiny in the classical sense. There are six of them who are executed for mutiny and their bodies are buried at fort clinch on the atlantic coast. More within the army then across the army in that way. John from washington, d. C. Are there any examples of the opposite occurring . In other words, mistreatment or execution of confederate prisoners of war by black troops . There is certainly a great deal of unnecessary death of confederates held in Union Prison Camps in general. Charles made this argument most strongly in the book while in the hands of the enemy. The apparatus is set up with a kind of malignant intent that produces unnecessary deaths. The union has less excuse than the confederacy because they have the resources to care for people in the way that the confederacy is more strapped. I dont quite see this as intentional. There is a deal of malign neglect. There are isolated incidents where, particularly after fort pillow after the mississippi river, where blacks who engage with whites shout no surrender. A man famously writes to washburn and says i have heard a report that the black soldiers in memphis went on been did need and took an oath to offer no surrender and this is a gross violation of the terms of war. I will respond in kind if my men encounter these people. He writes back and says i did not hear that happened. If it did, i am glad it did. Your men do not deserve quarter. That is not how the war was conducted. There are moments where i think this happens along the mississippi river. In general even with them at , each other, that does not produce a cataclysm of violence. Our popular view of the end of the civil war is that we are exceptional in that there is very little retaliatory violence after the war. Putting our civil war into the context of others, how accurate is that popular view . It is 100 accurate. This is partly my next book, which is setting the u. S. Conflict in the context of others around the world. I am not getting all the way to the Paris Commune but that is a useful story. The Paris Commune of 1871 is a workers revolt and an enterprise. Paris is going to make itself independent. The National Army suppresses that. At the end of that, they killed probably 25,000 people in the streets of paris. Bodies were lined up. There are famous photographs of this and of those who fought on behalf of the coming. Commune. 25,000 were killed just there. Nothing remotely similar. In the United States, henry was killed. Champ ferguson is killed for war crimes. There is a handful but there are no treason prosecutions. Bill blairs book on this talks about the rapid shift of sentiment in the north to sympathy. In the context of the rest of the world, you dont take prisoners, you close that city up and you let it ferment for weeks or months. Until 10,000 people are dead of calera, and then you take the city. Nothing like that ever happens. There is enormous restraint demonstrated. In that respect, the u. S. Civil war is quite exceptional and one that we might look back to as a model for how to treat people. One more. I think we are actually all done. I will talk to you in just a moment. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. [applause] this weekend on American History tv. Today at 4 00 p. M. On real america, the 1919 silent army film, motor convoy about a transcontinental track from d. C. To san francisco. At 8 00, Herbert Hoover and his world war i relief work. 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