Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free PDF Page B

loose the slaves to rape, murder, and pillage. This goes a long way in explaining why fewer than one in three Confederate soldiers came from slaveholding families. To them, it wasn’t to keep slaves that they joined the army, it was rather to save their homes and families against the notion of slaves gone wild. 6
    Meantime, the Northern press was pouring fuel on the fire bydamning southerners as brutal lash-wielding torturers and heartless family separators. By the time hostilities broke out, neither side had much use for the other. One elderly Tennessean later penned this sentiment: “I wish there was a river of fire a mile wide between the North and South, that would burn with unquenchable fury forevermore, and that it could never be passable to the endless ages of eternity by any living creature.” With talk like that it’s a wonder the war didn’t start earlier.
    The new alignment of political parties ultimately ensured a 40 percent plurality victory for Lincoln. 7 With the inclusion of Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859) as free states, the southerners’ worst fears were about to be realized—complete control of both Houses of Congress and the White House by free-state, antislavery politicians.
    Much of the Southern apprehension that Lincoln would free the slaves was misplaced. No matter how distasteful he found the practice, the overarching philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include forcible abolition by the federal government, probably for the simple reason that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it at the time. By then, though, southerners’ mistrust had degenerated into such a caustic fog of hatred, recrimination, and outrageous statements that most in the South simply did not believe Lincoln when he promised he had no interest in abolishing slavery where it already existed.
    However, like a considerable number of Northern people, Lincoln was decidedly against allowing slavery to spread into new statesand territories. By denying slaveholders the right to extend their boundaries he not only would have weakened the slave power in Washington, but over time it would have almost inevitably resulted in the voluntary abolition of slavery, since sooner or later the Southern land would have worn out from overfarming with cotton.
    The southerners weren’t sticking around to find out. In short order, pugnacious South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by eight other Deep South states that were heavily invested in cotton. After South Carolina drove Federal forces from Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor, Lincoln called for the other states to produce 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, which resulted in further secession. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy rather than fight against their fellow southerners.
    A Southern woman was heard to lament at the time that “Because of incompatibility of temper … we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a
‘separation a l’agreable,’
as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.”
    That was not to be. During the early months of 1861 Lincoln was able to quell secession in several of the so-called border states—including Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—by a combination of politics and force, including suspension of the Bill of Rights. But by the spring of 1862 it was painfully apparent that the “horrid fight for divorce” could not be avoided. To be sure, there had been fighting and killing in 1861, but with the exception of Bull Run and a few others most of those actions were in the nature of skirmishes that did not rise to the dignity of a “battle.”
    That was the reason why on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, tens of thousands of boys in blue were encamped at PittsburgLanding, and tens of thousands more dressed in gray or butternut were stealthily marching toward them through the deep Tennessee woods. Everyone knew that