By Bruce Levine
Random House, 439 pages,

(BAnQ)

Extraits dans Google Books

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Critique du Wall Street Journal

The slave-holding American South was a plutocracy built on a monstrosity.

A self-perpetuating elite that derived both its material worth and self-worth from its dominion over millions of stolen Africans, the planters conned themselves into believing that their flogged chattels were devoted to their benevolent masters and that their “peculiar institution” would survive any Yankee challenge. Slaves, proclaimed South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond in 1858, were “happy, content . . . and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”

Three years later, most of the slave states rebelled, the newborn Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, igniting the Civil War,

In 1858, writes Mr. Levine, there were nearly 60,000 Americans who owned at least 20 slaves. Three thousand men owned 100 or more, and one Georgia planter boasted 1,500 human chattels spread over several properties. In all, there were four million slaves in the states that would form the Confederacy and elsewhere in the Union and its territories.

From the beginning of the rebellion, slave interests called the shots. Of the 50 delegates from the deep South who met in Montgomery, Ala., in February 1861 to explore secession, 49 were slave owners, 21 of them planters. The millions of Southerners from the hill country and the border states who couldn’t afford slave labor or had no need for it on their hardscrabble farms were unrepresented. This fundamental conflict of interest would undermine the Southern cause, shape the destiny of the rebel army and ultimately contribute as much to the fall of Dixie as Lincoln’s blue host.

None of this was clear to most people at the start of the war. Southern aristocrats were certain that their slaves would stand with them and that their martial young men would obliterate the ragtag Northern armies poised on their borders—in a month or two at most. Initially, Lincoln’s aim was simply to restore the union and bar the further spread of slavery.

A few knew better. The most prescient was Frederick Douglass, the vibrant ex-slave turned abolitionist orator. “The Negro is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns,” he said in 1861. “The inexorable logic of events,” he predicted, would drive Lincoln to make the eradication of slavery the spear point of the war.

That is indeed what happened. Early Confederate victories at Bull Run in 1861 and 1862 and elsewhere forced Lincoln’s hand. First, slaves were declared “contraband of war”—not freed but ruled to be enemy property eligible for seizure by Union forces. By July 1862, Congress had ordered that slaves of rebel owners “shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.” The president himself declared: “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

The slave owners undermined their own cause. Even as their armies bent under fierce Union attack, they refused to lend their slaves to build defenses or toil behind the lines. Instead, they “refugeed” tens of thousands across the Mississippi to Texas, out of easy reach of Union forces. They allowed planters’ sons to buy their way out of serving and resisted desperate measures by Jefferson Davis’s government to raise food and other supplies from the plantations. To the end, they refused to give guns to their slaves and press them into combat, even after Lincoln armed the freed slaves and other blacks and formed them into effective regiments.

By the end of the war, a third to a half of the Confederate army had deserted, and more than 300,000 Southern whites were fighting for the Union.

Within a generation, the remnants of the Southern white aristocracy found common cause with their poor white brethren to subjugate the blacks once more through Jim Crow laws that thwarted the newly liberated. It would take the better part of another century of struggle to make fresh progress in redeeming Lincoln’s original promise.

Mr. Levine recognizes how the South defeated itself more effectively than the zeal and industrial might of the Union. “A war launched to preserve slavery,” he writes, “succeeded instead in abolishing that institution more rapidly and radically than would have occurred otherwise.” Or, as South Carolina plantation mistress Mary Chesnut lamented: “Our world has gone to destruction.”

Levine’s conclusion is that the war began over secession but that slavery was the cause of secession; the two issues cannot be separated.

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Critique du Dallas News

The pre-war South was an impressive collection of people (12 million), resources (remarkably fertile farms that supported huge crops of sugar, hemp and tobacco), land (850,000 square miles, as large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Spain combined), economic impact (its cotton accounted for half the nation’s exports), and wealth (the nation’s dozen richest counties per capita were all southern) ­­— a region formidable enough, South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond would say, “to make an empire’’ that might “rule the world.’’

This was a collection of financial and political power that rivals any of our own day, when complaints about the influence of the “one percent’’ are rife. The 50 leading Southern planters each owned more than 500 other human beings. They lived what Gertrude Thomas, a North Carolina plantation mistress, called the “life of luxury and ease.’’

Consider this: Eight presidents owned slaves. About half the state legislators in most of the Confederacy were slaveowners.