Why is Heather Cox Richardson so intent on adding to the known sins of the Confederacy a list of fabricated ones?
Why is Heather Cox Richardson so intent on adding to the known sins of the Confederacy a list of fabricated ones?
O ne of the most effective methods of propaganda is to smuggle in untruths under the wings of some true statement. Heather Cox Richardson has the most popular history newsletter on Substack. It is a big platform, and Richardson’s credentials as a professional historian give her a veneer of authority in telling people about our past. That sort of platform ought to be used responsibly. What follows is an example of doing the opposite.
Richardson’s July 3 post included the following passage (emphasis mine):
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to guarantee that Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish would be permanently locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
Now, Richardson has one large historical truth to work with here: while Confederate soldiers may have fought for many things, the historical record is very clear that the defense of slavery was the central driving force behind secession, and therefore behind the Civil War. The state resolutions of secession said so in no uncertain terms. Richardson also nods here toward a broader philosophical debate: Abraham Lincoln led the Republican Party in giving the Declaration of Independence and its principles a central place in the nation’s Founding and philosophy, while most of the Confederate leaders followed John C. Calhoun’s effort to displace the Declaration’s place in the Founding.
More questionable is her rhetorical use of “southern white men.” Yes, men voted for and ran the Confederate government and army, just as men voted for and ran the Union government and army. Men wrote and enacted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, too. The 19th century was a man’s world. Anyone reasonably conversant in Confederate history, however, could tell you that southern white women were quite supportive of secession and war (albeit with the same sorts of divisions in sentiment as the men), and could frequently be found prodding the men to go further. Fire-eating southern women are a familiar staple of histories of the conflict. There were female Confederate spies and a female militia in Georgia, among the variety of roles played by women loyal to the Confederate war effort.
Where Richardson breaks free of the actual history of the Civil War era is with the preposterous claim that “southern white men went to war” for the cause of oppressing “Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish.” Regular readers know that I am a great partisan of Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and their generation of Republicans, and no fan of the Confederacy. But this is simply a tendentious reading of the history. Let’s take these one at a time.
Native Americans: Native American tribes, not for the first or last time, were divided in their approach to the Civil War, and some fought for each side. But most of the tribes that retained some measure of independence were in Union territory. The bulk of tribes that took an active interest in the war saw the Union as the greater threat. Significant portions of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations fought on the Confederate side in the war — not the first time that the Native American tribes of North America backed the wrong horse in a conflict among whites. Many Cherokee were significant slaveowners themselves. Other tribes such as the Seminole and Creek were well-represented on the Confederate side. The Cherokee leader Stand Watie, commanding a largely Cherokee force, was a general in the Confederate army — in fact, he was the last Confederate theater commander to surrender after Robert E. Lee and Joe Johnston had laid down their arms.
Other tribes clashed with the Union without formally allying themselves with the Confederacy. A major Dakota Sioux uprising in Minnesota between August and December 1862 took advantage of the Union’s distraction with the Civil War. The Dakota War resulted in the expulsion of the Sioux from Minnesota. Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in American history, hanging 38 Sioux leaders, and did so only after winnowing the list of death sentences by issuing the largest mass clemency in U.S. history to that time. On the other hand, it was Union troops in 1864 that committed the horrific Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, of Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers. And after the war, it was the Radical Republicans who penned a 14th Amendment that excluded tribes from the guarantee of birthright citizenship, and it was Union Army leaders such as Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Custer who prosecuted the Indian Wars in the West, sometimes with exceptional brutality.
None of this is to suggest that the Confederate leaders were benevolent in their approach to Native Americans. But disagreement over the fate of Native Americans was not at all what Confederates were fighting for, and if anything, the tribes might have been better off if the Confederacy had won — a view reflected in their behavior at the time.
Chinese: Chinese immigrants were nearly unknown in the United States before the California Gold Rush of 1849. Drawn by the lure of gold and the catastrophic toll of their own civil war at home, they built up a significant presence in California by the early 1850s, with some 25,000 Chinese in California by 1851. Chinese immigration was a significant source of tension in California, but the Chinese communities in Confederate territory were extremely small. There were, in fact, some Chinese Americans who fought on each side of the war. Chang and Eng Bunker, P. T. Barnum’s famous “Siamese Twins” (who were actually Chinese) lived in North Carolina, and two of their sons fought for the Confederacy.
The anti-Chinese movement in California was largely the work of the Know-Nothing Party, which won the governorship in 1855. The Know-Nothings mostly merged into the Republican Party in the late 1850s; while Lincoln was warmly pro-immigrant, much of his party was not. The first Republican governor of California, Leland Stanford, was a loyal Unionist who gave a belligerently anti-Chinese diatribe in his inaugural address. It was largely Republicans in the post–Civil War era who pushed restrictive immigration laws to cut back on Chinese immigration.
Stanford’s views would soften in later years as he came to rely on Chinese labor for the Central Pacific Railroad, the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad. The politics of Chinese labor could be complicated: “At a Chinese Labor Convention held in Memphis, Tennessee in 1869, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest pledged $5000 to bring in 1,000 Chinese workers.” Frederick Douglass, in response, was suspicious of the motives of Southern planters seeking cheap labor. Douglass advocated welcoming Chinese immigrants over the long term, but was realistic about the barriers that large-scale Chinese immigration would face anywhere in America:
Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particular race or nation. It is met with not only in the conduct of one nation toward another, but in the conduct of the inhabitants of different parts of the same country, some times of the same city, and even of the same village. “Lands intersected by a narrow frith, abhor each other. Mountains interposed, make enemies of nations.” To the Hindoo, every man not twice born, is Mleeka. To the Greek, every man not speaking Greek, is a barbarian. To the Jew, every one not circumcised, is a gentile. To the Mahometan, every man not believing in the prophet, is a kaffe. I need not repeat here the multitude of reproachful epithets expressive of the same sentiment among ourselves. All who are not to the manor born, have been made to feel the lash and sting of these reproachful names.
There is little reason to think that the status of Chinese immigrants was significantly worse in the Confederacy than the Union, or that this was in any way a motivating factor in what the South fought for.
Mexicans: Confederate foreign policy can fairly be charged with being anti-Mexican, in the sense that the Confederacy was sympathetic to the French invasion of Mexico, while Lincoln’s government supported Benito Juárez in his resistance to the French. As the war progressed and southern ports were blockaded more effectively, the Southern war effort became more dependent upon running weapons through French-controlled Matamoros. After the war, some Confederates fled to Mexico and sided with the French-installed Emperor Maximilian, while the Union Army’s arrival in force at the border helped pressure France to evacuate.
Mexican Americans, however, are another story. Mexican Americans in south Texas, for example, were heavily pro-Confederate. Confederate colonel Santos Benavides, a former slave catcher, defeated a Union cavalry expedition in March 1864 and remains a local hero in Laredo to this day, where there is a school named for him. Again, keeping Mexican Americans down was no particular project or goal of the Confederacy’s grievances with the Union.
Irish: The large-scale immigration of white ethnics — mainly Irish and Germans — between the 1830s and 1850s was one of the underlying causes of the Civil War, mainly because they settled disproportionately in the North, exacerbating the North’s growing advantage in the House and the Electoral College. The North and West in general had a proportionally much higher foreign-born population than the South in 1861. That meant that the North and West also had a lot more internal tensions over immigration; the Know-Nothing Party’s political base was almost entirely outside the South. It also meant that there were a lot more foreign-born officers in the Union Army.
The Irish served on both sides of the war in significant numbers. The Irish Brigade in the Union Army, of course, was the most famous manifestation of that. Sheridan was the son of Irish immigrants; Confederate general Patrick Cleburne was born in Cork. The Irish were the largest immigrant group in the South in 1861, and they served in the Confederate cause as ardently as most other Southern whites — indeed, without the same disorders as the New York draft riots of 1863. Not for nothing is the protagonist of Gone With the Wind a woman from an Irish Catholic family.
Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Semitism, would be a hallmark of the later Ku Klux Klan, in the South but also in places such as Oregon and Indiana. It is, however, anachronistic to see the Irish and other white ethnic groups as particular targets of discrimination in the Confederacy relative to their status in the North. New Orleans was heavily Catholic, and social mobility in the city was quite fluid for many groups. Judah Benjamin, virtually the only American Jew in public life to neither renounce his faith nor convert to Christianity, served as Confederate attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state in turn. Probably the worst example of Confederate violence against white ethnics was the Nueces Massacre of August 1862, conducted in Texas against German immigrants. But the Germans were targeted mainly for forming a pro-Union militia rather than out of pure ethnic bias.
Mid 19th-century America was a violent place, and one in which racial and ethnic tensions and bigotries were rarely far from the surface, whether in the North or the South. It was also the freest place on the planet at the time — except for slavery. That the Confederacy fought for slavery, while the North came around to eventually exterminate it, is more than enough to indict the Confederate project and vindicate the Republicans who led the Union.
Why is Richardson so intent on adding to the known sins of the Confederacy a list of fabricated ones? This line may offer a hint:
Just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against the idea of equality, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
It’s always today’s politics with progressives; that is the round hole, and every square peg in the history books needs to be jammed into it by means of a usable “just-so” story. White Southern men are today a heavily Republican group, so the past must be made to set them at odds with everyone — even people who chose to bear arms on their side of the war. Honest history is always more complicated than that.