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. Though most crossed the Atlantic willingly, some Irish men and womenincluding criminals as well as simply the poor and vulnerablewere sentenced to indentured servitude in Ireland, and forcibly shipped to the colonies to carry out their sentences. South Carolina's decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds renewed debate over the Civil War. The census also reported the percentage of families that owned slaves in each state. Had that happened, it is hard to see how the Confederacy would have been able to fight at all. Many of those white families, who couldnt afford enslaved people, aspired to own slaves as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. that black soldiers would still be slaves. We are excited to tell the stories of our ancestors through their own words and deeds. The nation's 1860 census counted a bit under 1.6 million men of military age (18-45) in slaveholding states. 2023, A&E Television Networks, LLC. 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. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series at the University of Minnesota. 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. 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. 526, designating April as Texas Confederate History and Heritage Month. Where did legalized slavery still exist in the North in 1861? The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. It was not about slavery, these advocates say, but about the right to secede from the Union. NOT in the North! Slavery was illegal in all but 15 states by 1860. 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.. White officers in the Confederacy did indeed bring enslaved people to the front during the Civil War, where they cooked, cleaned and performed other labors for the officers and their regiments. The ocean is "flat" and "contained" by land features that jut up from a flat (not spherical) earth. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far fewer (20 percent of families in Arkansas). Southerners across the Confederacy, from Texas to Florida to Virginia, civilian and soldier alike, were awash in the institution of slavery. In addition, since publishing the story, Mike Landree, the executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, responded to the story, and we asked him a few questions about the museum. Free African-Americans and fugitive slaves in Adams County (including Gettysburg) and surrounding counties fled with the news of Lees advance. 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. Those were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Advertising Notice The U.S. Coast Survey map calculated the number of slaves in each county in the United States in 1860. They were up to their necks in it. 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. Walking the Gettysburg battlefield today, its easy to imagine the Union and Confederate armies dueling for control of the Pennsylvania town and its surrounding picturesque fields and rocky hills for three days in July 1863. For one thing, it was temporary; all but the most serious felons were freed at the end of their contracts. The documentary 2,000 Mules proves Democrats cheated on the 2020 elections., Immigrants illegally in the country are treated better than military veterans., Kari Lake has gone on the record saying she supports Arizona's complete abortion ban. 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. Some eagerly awaited reunion with their own families. "Check it out.". Southerners who didn't ownslavesaspired to one day become slave-owners themselves one day. South Carolinians in Lieutenant General James Longstreets First Corps witnessed the women of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, appeal to their enslaved servants to run off and seize their freedom. Enjoy exciting benefits and explore new exhibitions year-round. We did not hear from him. Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and. The closest we can get to that figure is an estimate that 300,000 men from states that allowed slavery put on the Union blue uniform. Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didnt fight the battle because of slavery. By the end of the first day, Confederates had achieved the upper hand as the Union army established a new defensive line south of the town, with Confederates taking up a position opposite along Seminary Ridge. The Confederate Congress played a role in that. (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances. The Confederacy led tobacco production with 225 million pounds compared to 110 million pounds produced in the Border States and 50 million pounds produced in the Union. If other museums refuse to provide that balance, well do so. Congress passed a bill authorizing equal pay for Black and white soldiers in 1864. So in theory, there were slaveholders from Union states and slaveholders from Confederate states that could have fought on the Union side. No credible documentation records Grant as having said such a thing, and he was only ever in a position to emancipate a single slave, which he did back in 1859. ), 'The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! I think any museum is designed to challenge people to learn for themselves, not present a slanted storyline to accept without question. William T. Sherman had many slaves that served him until well after the war was over and did not free them until late in 1865. "This pecksniffery even went so far as to find the state of Delaware rejecting the 13th Amendment in December of 1865 and did not ratify it (13th Amendment / free the slaves) until 1901!". Each slave is listed by sex and age; names were not recorded. That distinction might make no difference to Baldwins argument, but it makes a big difference in the underlying math. Enslaved and free black people provided even more labor than usual for Virginia farms when 89 percent of eligible white men served in Confederate armies. Baldwin gave many reasons to back up his conclusion, but a reader asked us to examine one in particular: Slavery was not the pivotal reason for the war because thousands of slave owners supported the North. As more Confederate monuments were being removed in the South this month, an old claim seeking to downplay the extent of slave ownership began to recirculate online. About 5% of people in those states were considered slaveholders, the data shows. (Maryland had to be kept in the Union by any means necessary, else the United States capital in the District of Columbia would have been completely enclosed within Confederate territory.) Some of these men were briefly held as prisoners in Union prison camps. a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States, Decades-old essay about Declaration of Independence signatories is partly false, Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor at Arizona State University. Thus, 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. The Antietam Campaign took place in Maryland, a slave state at the time. Although stories of these impressed workers and camp slaves have been erased from our popular memory of the war in favor of mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, their presence in the Confederate army constituted a visual reminder to every soldier slaveowner and non-slaveowner alikethat their ultimate success in battle depended on the ownership of other human beings. Baldwin said that 300,000 slaveholders fought in the Union army. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. Slave-owners were greatly disconcerted by the desire of the enslaved people they held captive to flee to Union armies, . The post came a day after a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of a violent white supremacist rally in 2017. MSJE, as it is called, showcases the culture and heritage of the Jews who lived in the 13 southern states over a period spanning some three centuries: from colonial America through the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and up to this day. Carter wanted it known that he was willing to die and that he talked to the clergyman about dying . The 642,427 total Union casualties have been divided accordingly: The 483,026 total Confederate casualties have been divided accordingly: Of the 211,411 Union soldiers captured 16,668 were paroled on the field and 30,218 died in prison. But the general scale shows how Baldwins figure stretches belief. 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". In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolinas delegates cited an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed Black men to vote. We strive for accuracy and fairness. Others included laborers, 9 percent; mechanics, 5.3 percent; commercial, 5 percent; professional occupations, 2.1 percent; and miscellaneous, 1.6 percent. (Some of the former Confederate states did eventually ratify the 13th Amendment after its passage by Congress, because they were required to do so as a post-war condition of regaining federal representation. 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. The statement attributed to Grant about not his freeing his slaves earlier than December 1865 (when the 13th Amendment was adopted) because "Good help is so hard to come by these days" is almost certainly an apocryphal one. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. "Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didn't fight the battle because of slavery. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. Using total population as a reference point also includes babies and children, for example, said Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. Failing this he directed some negroes to go and gather items that might improve our comfort. Matt Butler, assistant surgeon of the 37th Virginia, had a horse shot out from under him and was wounded in the foot on July 2 as he tended to fallen Confederates. I encourage readers to consider if our concept of 'Old South Charm' relies on the racist mythology of the Lost Cause, will that not hinder Maury Countys 'New South Progress' in the 21st century?". When you search for context the context very quickly arrives in terms of what was actually going on.. The percentage of population that owned slaves in the south is in single digits. Casting the Confederacy as a honorable force standing strongagainst Northern aggressorsis a willful misreading of the historical truth that the institution of slavery was at the core of the Civil War, as George Washington University professorJames Oliver Horton reiteratesin a National Park Service history. St. Petersburg, FL As we researched this, we found that Baldwins statement was vague on one key point -- he didnt say which states the slaveholders came from. He is the author of numerous articles and books about the Civil War, including Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil Wars Most Persistent Myth. This was . stated on November 8, 2022 election night coverage on Fox News: stated on November 1, 2022 a town hall event: stated on October 26, 2022 a newspaper interview: stated on October 25, 2022 an Instagram post: stated on October 9, 2022 an interview on CBS News' Face the Nation: stated on September 27, 2022 a campaign ad: stated on September 22, 2022 a Secretary of State debate: stated on September 8, 2022 a campaign ad: stated on August 28, 2022 an interview on CNN: stated on August 10, 2022 an interview on Fox News: stated on April 24, 2023 in una publicacin en Facebook: stated on March 1, 2023 in a social media post: stated on April 23, 2023 in an Instagram post: stated on April 24, 2023 in an Instagram post: stated on April 16, 2023 in a Facebook post: stated on April 20, 2023 in an Instagram post: stated on April 12, 2023 in a Facebook post: stated on April 21, 2023 in a Facebook post: All Rights Reserved Poynter Institute 2020, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It was a mobilization effort that he called "astonishing.". Enlistment strength for the Union Army is 2,672,341 which can be broken down as: Enlistment strength for the Confederate Army ranges from 750,000 to 1,227,890. In 1865, Moses made the long journey back to Gettysburg with McLeods brother-in-law to bring the body home. Conversely, the Proclamation highlighted even further the degree to which the Confederate Army represented a force of enslavement. Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not available due to incomplete and destroyed enlistment records. Townsend had a brief passage about the number of West Point graduates who remained loyal to the Union. History has been skewed, and many times in society today many people try to make those soldiers out to be something they are not, said Tennessee state senator and SCV member Joey Hensley said at the groundbreaking, Powell reports. 3 at Maricopa, Arizona, polling sites. More:How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States. So you can stop basing your hate for an entire race for the actions of a mere 1.6%, the 2019 Twitter post says. Well provide these facts and allow the individual the opportunity to make up their mind as to what they believe.". The number ascribed to Confederate soldiers as a whole variestwo percent, five percentbut the message is always the same, that those men 150 years had nothing to do with the peculiar institution, they has no stake in it, and that it certainly played no role whatever in their personal motivations or in the Confederacy's goals in the war. And during the fierce early days of the war when the South was obliterating the Yankee armies! But theres no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Black soldiers fought under the Confederate banner against Union soldiers. The U.S. had 395,216 slaveholders at that time, so about 1.4% of free people were classified as slave owners in the 1860 census, according to data archived by the Integrated Public Use. If it refers to individual states, then it is false: all the Northern states (again, with the arguable exception of Delaware) had abolished slavery well before the start of the Civil War. But, as James W. Loewen writes for The Washington Post, it certainly wasn't just the slaveholdingelite who fought to maintain slavery. 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. "Among those Southern whites who did own slaves, even in the Unionist border slave states, many supported the Confederacy, and fought for it.". In recent years, othermuseums have popped up across the United States that present their own ideological visions as the truth,likethe Creation Museum, established in 2007, which attempts to present spiritual belief as scientific fact. Mark Kelly voted against the Keystone pipeline, which caused higher gas prices., "40% of the folks who have student loans do not have a college diploma, four-year diploma. Data from another direction also throws Baldwins figure into question. To adherents of the Lost Cause,a term coined as early as 1866,the Confederacy fought to uphold the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, advancedby leaders who were "exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force," according to the site Civil War Journeys. 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. IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. The "Twenty Negro Law", also known as the "Twenty Slave Law" and the "Twenty Nigger Law", was a piece of legislation enacted by the Confederate Congress during the American Civil War.The law specifically exempted from Confederate military service one white man for every twenty slaves owned on a Confederate plantation, or for two or more plantations within five miles of each other that . Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts.". Whats the truth? As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. The claim that only 1.6% of U.S. citizens owned slaves in 1860 is MISSING CONTEXT, based on our research. As the Civil War progressed, desertion amongst Confederate soldiers infected the Confederate Army like a poisonous cancer. West Virginia fell somewhere in between because it split off from Virginia in 1863 to join the Union. "In October 1862, Congress amended the Conscription Act with what became known as the Twenty Negro Law, a provision that exempted from the draft one white man of military age on plantations with at least 20 slaves," Tinkler wrote. Fortunately, one of the leading Civil War historians, James McPherson at Princeton University, knows Townsends work and told us that he included the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860? The average fraction of slaveholding families was about 11 percent for those Union states, while in the Confederacy, it was about 40 percent. A Note to our Readers In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people. Nonetheless, the 1860 census recorded only 18 slaves in all of New Jersey. A second, separate schedule records the name of each slaveholder and lists the slave he or she owns. Chuck Baldwin, a fundamentalist pastor and columnist, made this case in a recent essay that appeared on his website and many others, including a fan page for Fox News Megyn Kelly. Those inaccuracies have since been corrected. #FHTEIn 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.. Since none of the Northern states had rebelled against the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them. If Confederate Major General William Dorsey Pender worried about his camp servant named Joe, he Pender did not share it in what would prove to be his final letter home to his wife. . They swam in it, and no amount of willful denial can change that. 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. Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. Privacy Statement 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. To avoid confusion as to the source of the factual errors, and to prevent any misunderstanding about Levin's credentials, we have removed the pragraph. The largest group was the Irish, followed by Germans, British, French, Poles, and Canadians. The total population in Sharpsburg in 1860 was around 1,300. If 300,000 Union soldiers were slave owners, it would mean that somewhere in the ballpark of three-quarters of the available slave owning men put on the Union blue. There is a bright side to the story of the Lost Cause: after generations, it appears to be fading. Very few accounts exist today of black men marching with Confederates in the heat of battle at Gettysburg. Danny is based in Brooklyn, NY. In the navy about one-third of the officers came from slaveholding States, yet remained faithful to the Union; while one-eighth of the Union army, or 300,000 men, were contributed by the Southern States.". 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. In 1865, the Union won the war. This myth, that the Civil War wasnt fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. Lee went on the offensive for the following two days but failed to crack the Union defenses. The upland residents of what became West Virginia fit the same mold. ". The 1860 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules lists one-hundred fifty enslaved persons and 50 slave owners in Sharpsburg, Maryland. 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. According to the U.S. Census of 1860 about 25% or one in every four households, in the South owned slaves and about 7% of Confederate soldiers owned slaves and according to the same U.S. census 2% of free Southern blacks owned slaves in 1860. State-by-state, we applied that percentage to the total number of military age males. Confederate soldiers were optimistic about the prospects for the survival of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery well into 1864. . She's called it a great law., Katie Hobbs voted for allowing a baby who survives an abortion that the hospital would refuse medical care and allow the baby to die on a cold metal tray.. Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. Most of these soldiers were farmers and the vast majority had direct contact with 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. PolitiFact and Snopes have previously evaluated similar claims that popped up in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Two years later, that number had not changed dramatically for the Union Army but had dropped to about 200,000 for the Confederate Army. Absent the body, news that a soldier had been comforted in his final hours and had prepared himself for death reassured family members that their loved one experienced what 19th-century Americans understood as a Good Death.. By the fall of 1862, Lincoln had become convinced that acting to end slavery was a necessary step. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! 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. They fought the battle defending their homelands againstan invading army.. Below is a condensedexcerpt from his e-mail: "Thank you for reaching out to us and I am glad to provide some additional information. He has become an expert on the U.S. Civil War and writes a blog called Student of the American Civil War., Policing, Enforcement, and Justice (Information Forthcoming), Media Communications: Narratives of Inequality, DITE Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics, Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute, The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, NEW NSF GRANT AWARDED TO COOK CENTER RESEARCHERS FOR COVID-19 PROJECT, From administrators to animals, heres who you need to know at Duke. Although renowned Union general William T. Sherman was rather conservative on the issue of slavery (he was far from an abolitionist) and did not believe in equal rights for "negroes," there is scant evidence that he ever owned any slaves he certainly did not own "many," nor did he own any during the course of the Civil War. As long as the Southern slave states remained in the Union, their aggregate Congressional representation was sufficient in number to block the passage or ratification of any law or constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Our first installment dealt with the history of the Confederate flag; in this second installment, we examine "facts" asserted in a section of "the Truth about Confederate History" about the practice of slavery in the U.S. and its eventual abolition.