CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The American Civil War not only was a series of monumental struggles on the battlefields, it also was a revolution behind the lines – a profound upending of the social order that played out in the South through the four years of the war, says University of Illinois historian Bruce Levine.
The battles get the attention, and likely will again as the U.S. marks the war’s sesquicentennial starting with the April 12 anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter.
But the social and cultural revolution in the South that the war triggered was just as dramatic and ultimately more important, said Levine (pronounced La-VEEN), who is working on a book on the topic due out next year.
From the war’s first shots, this “second American revolution” began fracturing the wealthy, confident, and seemingly solid South along its social fault lines, and weakening the institution of slavery, according to Levine, the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of history and a professor of African American Studies.
It would bring down a powerful and arrogant slaveholding elite that had imposed its will not only on the South, but also to a large extent on the nation as a whole, Levine said.
Most non-slaveholding whites would support the war at the start, and many to the end, Levine said. But many others, starting especially in hill country areas of the South, would gradually come to see the struggle as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” he said, and some areas would actively rebel against the Confederacy.
Thousands of slaves would be freed by the war, and recently freed slaves would make up most of the 200,000 black men who would eventually serve in the Union army or navy, Levine said.
Just as important, however, the chains were loosened on many more who remained in bondage, he said. With many masters and other white men gone off to war, and the Union army sometimes just a county or two away, many Confederate slaves gained new bargaining power. That led even many slaveholders to recognize that “this was ceasing to be slavery.”
“The Civil War is a revolutionary war,” Levine said. “It is a war that not only, by virtue of the North winning, puts an end to slavery, it’s a war that also puts an end to slavery in the course of being fought,” Levine said.
And the ironies are many.
“The South went to war to save slavery and believed slavery would help it win the war,” Levine said. “But instead of being a source of strength, slavery turns into a source of weakness. And by embarking on this war they destroy slavery far faster and more radically than would have happened if they had stayed within the Union and fought this out with purely peaceful methods.”
Levine’s book tentatively is titled “The Fall of the House of Dixie,” inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Like Poe’s house, the South of 1861 looked solid and imposing at the start of the war, but the stresses of the conflict widened existing cracks, eventually causing the house to crumble, Levine said.
“All these bonds of loyalty and unanimity that everybody claimed were so strong, cease being so strong,” he said. “It wouldn’t have happened if there weren’t these blows being struck against the walls from the outside, but the walls are fracturing along lines of internal weakness that have always been there.”
Levine places much blame for this miscalculation on the slaveholders, especially the wealthiest who owned hundreds of slaves. “Having this kind of absolute power over human beings has a profound effect on shaping who these people are, and think they are, in their relationships with everybody,” he said. “There’s a tremendous arrogance and self-confidence and aggressiveness.”
In a war being fought to save the institution of slavery as a whole, Levine said planters would often fixate on their own narrow, individual interests. They would refuse to lend or even rent their slaves to the army to help build fortifications, would refuse to pay taxes, refuse to plant needed food crops instead of more-profitable cotton.
“You see in the diaries of some of the major planters their ferocious resentment at the Confederate government for presuming to interfere with their rights as absolute masters,” he said.
Southern masters had gone to war in the first place because slavery was at the center of their vision of the good society, Levine said. They believe “this is the way things should be.” Taking this away “doesn’t just pull the economic rug out from under them, important as that is. It pulls the cultural rug, the intellectual rug, the political rug out from under them as well.”
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