This is particularly useful in revealing political divisions or disputes within a state, although it takes some practice with the online query system to generate maps properly. More:Court clears way for removal of Confederate statue at the center of deadly Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. 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This is the single item this section of "Truth about Confederate History" actually got right: Delaware was one of three states (along with Kentucky and Mississippi) that initially rejected the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery and did not ratify it until after the start of the 20th century, by which time the amendment had long since become part of the Constitution. Black Confederate soldiers likely represented less than 1 percent of Southern black men of military age during that period, and less than 1 percent of Confederate soldiers. Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and. These are people who are truck drivers and who are nail technicians and nurses aides., I had zero emails that were classified., The Congressional Budget Office says 90% of the revenue generated from the new IRS agents will come from people making less than $200,000 and the revenue generated will be $300-plus billion., Democrats are voting to add an army of 87,000 IRS agents who will target middle class taxpayers and conduct at least 1 million more audits each year. Some states had far more slave. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. Danny Lewis is a multimedia journalist working in print, radio, and illustration. Lee's army numbered 90,000 at its strongest and was organized into state-specific regiments and brigades, with about 55 percent of its men coming from the Upper South. However, those slaves had been purchased by Julia's father, Frederick F. Dent, and there is no record of his ever having transferred ownership of them to Julia without such a transfer, neither Julia nor her husband Ulysses would have had legal authority to free them. While Joe Glatthaar undoubtedly had a small regiment of graduate assistants to help with cross-indexing Confederate muster rolls and the 1860 U.S. Census, there are some basic tools now available online that will allow anyone to at least get a general sense of the validity of his numbers. In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people. Although the New Jersey legislature passed a gradual emancipation measure in 1804 and permanently abolished slavery in 1846, the state allowed some former slaves to be reclassified as "apprentices for life" a condition that could be considered slavery in all but name. In July 1861, the two armies were nearly equal in strength with less than 200,000 soldiers on each side; however at the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. ", stated on April 6, 2023 in a video shared on Facebook. 801 3rd St. S They viewed theinstitution of slavery asthe white supremacist foundation that theSouthern way oflife was built on. 4 . Southerners across the Confederacy, from Texas to Florida to Virginia, civilian and soldier alike, were awash in the institution of slavery. NOT in the North! But while looking at history through the eyes of the defeated can provide a more nuanced view of a conflict, it can also be used to try and obscure any wrongdoing on their part as well. Slavery played no role it the coming of the war, they say; how could it, when less than two percent (four percent, five percent) actually owned slaves? In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. But it's simply not true in any meaningful way. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. Enjoy exciting benefits and explore new exhibitions year-round. Large numbers of indentured servants did indeed emigrate from Ireland to the British colonies of North America, where they provided a cheap labor force for planters and merchants eager to exploit it. "Thus," Glatthaar notes, "volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population." In short, Confederate volunteers actually owned more slaves than the general population. Fact Check: What Percentage Of White Southerners Owned Slaves. The Union led corn production with 400 million bushels compared to the 250 million bushels in the Confederacy and 150 million bushels in the Border States. Others included mechanics, 24 percent; laborers, 16 percent; commercial, 5 percent; miscellaneous, 4 percent; and professional occupations, 3 percent. If you only focus on who technically owned slaves, though, abetter metric would be to evaluate the proportion of slave owners in the 15 states where slavery was still legal in 1860, Arizona State's Schermerhorn said. Cookie Settings, Restoration of Library of Congress image by Adam Cuerden via Wikicommons, mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil Wars Most Persistent Myth (Civil War America), Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, What We're Still Learning About Rosalind Franklins Unheralded Brilliance. Upon Custis' death in 1857, Lee did not "inherit" those slaves; rather, he carried out the directions expressed in Custis' will regarding those slaves (and other property) according to his position as executor of Custis' estate. Unlike other museums on the war, well focus our lens through the Southerners eyes because their perspective, which was once placed side by side with the Northern view, is now completely absent. As one reader wrote in aletter to the editor to the Columbia Daily Heraldin response to Powell's article,"Maury County is at a crucial point in its economic development. In the wake of the June 2015 racially motivated shooting that left nine people dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the renewed debate that event prompted about the propriety of displaying Confederate flags on the grounds of the South Carolina state capital (and elsewhere), a long-circulating article advertised as dispelling "falsehoods and inaccuracies of Confederate and Southern history" attracted renewed interest. The ideology has been used to whitewash slaverys role in the Civil War for generations. Its true that not every white person in the pre-Civil War South owned slaves. The Proclamation, in effect, turned Union armies into armies of liberation, functioning as a funnel through which newly freed men could enlist in one of the black regiments that were filling up quickly throughout the North as well as in occupied parts of the Confederacy. Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didnt fight the battle because of slavery. As their shattered command fell back following their repulse, scores of camp slaves made their way out from the cover and protection of the woods in search of their owners and to assist the wounded. Just as the firing ceased late on July 2, Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander was pleasantly surprised to see his servant Charley on my spare horse Meg & with very affectionate greetings & a good haversack of rations. Alexander recalled, Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.. The stat itself is slightly off:Census Bureau data from that period shows about 1.4% of free people owned slaves in 1860. In this retelling, the South is more Gone With the Windthan Free State of Jones,casting the Confederate soldiers as trying to preserve their cherished, chivalric way of life instead of defending plantation owners'reliance on slavery to keep the local economy going. The Union was attributed with having 40 million heads of livestock compared to 35 million in the Confederacy and only 10 million in the Border States. For the men from the Confederate states, Tinkler said the pattern is clear. 526, designating April as Texas Confederate History and Heritage Month. But that provides no evidence that all of them owned slaves, either directly themselves or through their families. Moses then followed a Confederate brigade back to Winchester, Virginia, before heading home with his owners personal effects to Swainsboro, Georgia. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Lieutenant Sidney Carters wounding at Gettysburg cut his life short, but before his death he requested that his camp slave, Dave, take everything he had and bring it home, where each item would be offered as a parting gift to his family members. The purpose of the museum is to tell the story of the Confederate Soldier, Sailor, and Marine and it will provide facts for everyone to make their own mind up about the war. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property some 400,000 acres formerly owned by Confederate land . In 1865, Moses made the long journey back to Gettysburg with McLeods brother-in-law to bring the body home. The census also reported the percentage of families that owned slaves in each state. Your membership is the foundation of our sustainability and resilience. David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994. It is thus possible to compare the number of slaveholders in a given state to the numbers of families/households, and get a rough estimation of the proportion of free households that owned at least one slave. Specifically, we'll be assessing the statements from "the Truth about Confederate History" reproduced in the shaded box below, which claim to be separating myth from fact (while doing anything but): FACT: Entirely untrue. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. This was . These men performed a wide range of roles for their owners, including cooking, cleaning, foraging and sending messages to families back home. The Union had 1.1 million factory workers, while the Confederacy had 111,000 and the Border States had 70,000. Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860? That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. While no known evidence exists that the armys slaves assisted in kidnapping of roughly 100 men from towns such as Chambersburg, McConnellsburg, Mercersburg and Greencastle on the eve of the famous battle, it is very likely that those ensnared and led south would have passed camp servants and other slaves whose essential presence in the army helped to make their capture possible. When it comes to reparations, one of the consistent arguments against them is that there were actually not very many white slave owners in the U.S. Very few accounts exist today of black men marching with Confederates in the heat of battle at Gettysburg. However, we do know where slavery was common and where it wasnt, and the Union soldiers in question came from places where it wasnt. "It will be seen that the disloyalty of West Point was not as great as is generally supposed. 1800 I Street NW In the vast majority of cases, each household (termed a "family" in the 1860 document, even when the group consisted of unrelated people living in the same residence) that owned slaves had only one slaveholder listed, the head of the household. New York Gov. It records basic data about the free population, including names, sex, approximate age, occupation and value of real and personal property of each person in a household. The answer to the question of why the Northern states didn't outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War is an obvious one: it simply wasn't possible. While slavery was not the only cause for which the South fought during the Civil War, the testimony of Confederate leaders and their supporters makes it clear that slavery was central to the motivation for secession and war, Horton writes. We did not hear from him. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. Kathy Hochul wants quarantine camps and imprisonment if youre suspected of having a disease. West Virginia fell somewhere in between because it split off from Virginia in 1863 to join the Union. Only in Delaware, a state which was far from being undeniably a "Northern" state: depending upon the criteria used, one could justifiably have pegged Delaware at the time of the Civil War as being Northern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, or some combination thereof. It is true that slavery was not unique to the South: Both during the colonial era and after independence, slavery existed in areas that now comprise what we consider "Northern" states. From 1854 to 1859 Grant managed his father-in-law's farm, White Haven, where a number of slaves lived and worked. The state of New Jersey was something of an outlier. Doing so is clearly designed to make that form of property seem marginal. Historians, though, say that statistic is hugely misleading since it both wrongly factors in the entirety of the non-slave-owning states and ignores that families owned and had power over slaves, not just one individual adult. Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not available due to incomplete and destroyed enlistment records. In addition to McPherson, we reached historians Robert Tinkler at California State University-Chico and Gary Gallagher at the University of Virginia. So you can stop basing your hate for an entire race for the actions of a mere 1.6%, the 2019 Twitter post says. Likewise, many of the people fighting for the Union were far from paragons of virtue themselves. "Check it out.". This is an extremely common argument among Confederate apologists, part of a larger effort to minimize or eliminate the institution of slavery as a factor in secession and the coming of the war, and thus make it possible to maintain the notion that Southern soldiers, like the Confederacy itself, were driven by the purest and noblest values to defend home and hearth. Data from another direction also throws Baldwins figure into question. Joseph T. Glatthaar, in his magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia, lays out the evidence. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a law to allow black men to serve in combat roles, with the provision "that nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which said slaves shall bear toward their owners," i.e. In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved. TheLost Cause lament is ill-conceived, however. Gettysburg may not have been the great turning point of the war for Lee and the Army of Northern Virginiathe army would go on to fight for close to two more yearsbut the Gettysburg campaign did signal a crisis of confidence in soldiers belief in their slaves unwavering fidelity. #FHTE In 1860, 1% of white southern families owned 200 or more human beings, but in states of the Confederacy, at least 20% owned at least one and in Ms and SC ran as high as fifty percent." Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. Just last weekend, groundbreaking began on the site of the museum dedicated to continuing a long-discredited myth about the beginnings of the Civil War: the Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Kevin Levin writes for his blog,"Civil War Memory". It's true that in an extremely narrow sense, only a very small proportion of Confederate soldiers owned slaves in their own right. In the eleven states that formed the Confederacy, there were in aggregate just over 1 million free households, which between them represented 316,632 slaveholdersmeaning that just under one-third of households in the Confederate States counted among its assets at least one human being. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9. 3 at Maricopa, Arizona, polling sites. She has been a frequent contributor to History.com since 2005, and is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! When Lees three corps of infantry, numbering roughly 70,000, crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania, they encountered clear signs that they were no longer in friendly territory. Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com. As far as slavery goes, every museum on the war is currently obsessed with the subject. As a crude analogy, how many PFCs and corporals in Iraq and Afghanistan today own their own homes? When you search for context the context very quickly arrives in terms of what was actually going on.. Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. Two years later, that number had . More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. Using total population as a reference point also includes babies and children, for example, said Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. Thats slightly different from the 1.6% in the July 11 Facebook post. Conversely, only 30 percent of soldiers in the Army of the Potomac were farmers or farmhands. All three historians told us that the number of men on the Union side who owned slaves was quite small. Lee went on the offensive for the following two days but failed to crack the Union defenses. (Note: these links often don't run run the map-generating scripts properly, so be patient and click gently.) The size of Union forces in January 1863 totaled over 600,000. As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. that black soldiers would still be slaves. At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union. The nations 1860 census counted a bit under 1.6 million men of military age (18-45) in slaveholding states. The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days.". According to Mackey, the 1 percent figure is misleading and needs to be understood. IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. The real Biden was executed for his crimes long ago along with Clinton. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery made it extremely difficultand terrifyingfor white Southerners to imagine life alongside a Black majority population that was not in bondage. The chance that a few thousand slaveholders fought for the Union, rather than the 300,000 as Baldwin said, does little to keep this statement in the realm of reality. Of course the states had slaves and it was written into the Confederate States Constitution. By the fall of 1862, Lincoln had become convinced that acting to end slavery was a necessary step. As historian and public librarian Liam Hoganwrote: There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of race. The enduring myth of Irish slavery, which most often surfaces today in service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes, has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries when Irish laborers were derogatorily called white slaves. The phrase would later be employed as propaganda by the slave-owning South about the industrialized North, along with (false) claims that life was far harder for immigrant factory workers than for enslaved people. Misinformation about the antebellum South, the Civil War, and the practice of slavery in the U.S. is rife on the Internet. In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a . Free African-Americans and fugitive slaves in Adams County (including Gettysburg) and surrounding counties fled with the news of Lees advance. A museum must present facts to visitors, which may even challenge their own beliefs, so that they will want to go do their own research. Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto, he noted, and is quite active in looking up hidden property.. More a practical wartime measure than a true liberation, it proclaimed free all enslaved people in the rebel states, but not those in the border states, which Lincoln needed to remain loyal to the Union. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. Get the latest History stories in your inbox? Even as some enslaved men escaped North, the retreat by the Army of Northern Virginia would have been disastrous without the support of its camp servants. Removal of the wounded took on a renewed urgency through the late afternoon and evening of July 3, following another failed assault along the center of the Union line. . Captain William McLeod of the 38th Georgia, meanwhile, died before the retreat, but an enslaved worker named Moses took steps to bury McLeod on a farm nearby. Recently, reparations activist and Duke professor William Sandy Darity disputed this on Twitter. Some of these men were briefly held as prisoners in Union prison camps. For many tourists, no visit to Gettysburg is complete without retracing the steps General Robert E. Lees Army of Northern Virginia, those Confederates who crossed the open fields toward the Union line on Cemetery Ridge on July 3 in what is still popularly remembered as Picketts Charge. Once safe behind where the Union lines held strong, however, few turn around and acknowledge the hundreds of enslaved people who emerged from the woods to render assistance to the tattered remnants of the retreating men. Kevin M. Levin South Carolina's decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds renewed debate over the Civil War. U.S. public schools don't teach the Declaration of Independence. In 1860, slavery was still legal in 15 of the 33 U.S. states, and slaves represented nearly a third of the population in those slaveholding states. I think any museum is designed to challenge people to learn for themselves, not present a slanted storyline to accept without question. Baldwin said that 300,000 slaveholders fought in the Union army. Chemtrails are being put into the atmosphere and are trickling down into soil and water, becoming the real cause of disease., "There is no Biden presidency. Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy. | Advertising Notice Virginia had the largest population of enslaved African Americans of any state in the Confederacy, and those slaves responded to the American Civil War (1861-1865) in a variety of ways. Your Privacy Rights Cookie Policy Farmers comprised 69 percent of the civilian occupations in the Confederacy. For many Confederate officers who were separated from their servants as a result of the battle or the confusion of the retreat, disappointment awaited them, as it did Captain Waddell of the 12th Virginia, who rejoined his unit on July 8 only to learn that his servant Willis had run off with his personal baggage. Mackey is an educator, a retired U. S. Air Force officer and a former human resources manager with a global company. Here are county maps for all eleven Confederate states, with the proportion of slaveholding families indicated in green -- a darker color indicates a higher density: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, All States. Prior to, during and even after the War of Northern Aggression.". Either way, even though legislative efforts to abolish slavery in Delaware had been unsuccessful, by the time of the 1860 census 91.7% of Delaware's black population was free, and fewer than 1,800 slaves remained in the state hardly a condition supportive of the notion that "many" Northerners owned slaves. This material may not be reproduced without permission. In the immediate aftermath of the battle and continuing throughout the Confederate armys retreat to Virginia, other camp slaves and enslaved men, however, abandoned their posts. We are excited to tell the stories of our ancestors through their own words and deeds. Slaves also were rented out. A rich mans war, but a poor mans fight became the cry of many southerners of modest means.". The Confederacy included the states of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.