Tag Archives: south carolina

April 12 1862: The Civil War Begins

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April 12, 1861: Civil War Begins

Episode 15: Elemental Loyalties

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

In this lecture, Ayers describes the escalating sequence of events between Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861 and the attack by the Confederate States of America on Fort Sumter, the US bases in Charleston Harbor South Carolina.

During his inaugural speech, Lincoln promised not to support laws affecting slavery or to appoint abolitionists to federal positions. According to Ayers, he was attempting to buy time for Washington “compromisers” to find solutions for the North/South political impasse.

The next day, Fort Sumter commander Major Robert Anderson notified Lincoln he was running out of food. Lincoln, in turn, notified the governor of South Carolina of his plans to use a US naval ship to deliver food (but no military supplies) to the fort. He also indicated the US Navy wouldn’t fire on Confederate forces unless attacked.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, viewed provisioning US troops as an act of war. On April 12, 1861 at 4.30 am, he ordered Confederate militia* to to attack Fort Sumter, forcing the US troops there to abandon it.

After Lincoln called for US troops to defend Fort Sumter, Virginia seceded. Despite being a pro-Union state, fighting their sister slave states was out of the question.

According to Ayers, the North’s advantages in the Civil War were their greater industrial capacity, their more extensive railroads and ships (to distribute food, draft animals, and troops), and the eligibility of their entire male population for the draft (the majority of southerners were still slaves).

The South’s main advantages were their more experienced generals and the defensive nature of the war. As with the Revolutionary War, the South wouldn’t have to win every battle to wear out northern forces and prevail.

The North thought they could defeat the South quickly by adopting General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan. This called for Union forces to use the Mississippi River to divide southern forces and the US Navy to seal off southern ports from receiving foreign supplies.** The main weakness of this plan was the South’s long border with Mexico, which proved impossible to blockade.

During the first half of 1861, 700,000 southern men voluntarily enlisted for three years to fight for the Confederacy. Owing to high numbers of casualties and desertions (when troops went home to plant and harvest crops), the South initiated compulsory conscription in 1862. The North did so in 1863.

Women on both sides formed 200,000 voluntary societies to supply troops with food, clothes and other necessities. Although nursing injured troops was previously a male role, this responsibility shifted to women during the Civil War. Both Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton (founder of the American branch of the Red Cross) came to prominence for their role in organizing nursing volunteers. Northern women (the South exempted slave overseers to ensure adequate food production***) also replaced fighting men in tilling fields and in factories.

*In April 1861, Confederate troops were recruited for a 90-day tour of duty. Neither side expected the Civil War to last four years.

**Especially given support the Confederacy was receiving from Britain and other European countries. See The British Role in Triggering the Civil War

***Unfortunately as  inflation rose to 12% per month towards the end of 1861, southern farmers who previously grew food shifted to cotton production. Cotton could be stored and sold for a higher price once the war ended.

The film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/elemental-loyalties-and-descent-war

Just to let people know I’m moving to Substack and Telegram after several readers informed me I’ve been censored from WordPress Reader feed. The link to my Substack account is https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/. The link to my Telegram channel is https://t.me/themostrevolutionaryact I’ll continue to publish on WordPress as long as I’m able, but if my blog suddenly disappears you’ll know where to find me.

A Novel About Jim Crow

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some singSome Sing, Some Cry

By Ntozake Shangi and Ifa Bayeza

St Martin’s Press (2010)

Book Review

Some Sing, Some Cry is a novel tracing seven generations of a fictional African American family from slavery to the election of Barack Obama. The authors are sisters and the first half of the book is based on family oral history.

The novel’s matriarch originates from on an island off the coast of South Carolina and takes the name of a prominent plantation owner who has fathered children by both her mother and herself. The family are forced off their land when Reconstruction ends, migrating to Charleston.

The first half of the book is the strongest, with its poignant depiction of family members being stripped of their newly won freedoms as Jim Crow laws ban them from most occupations. To a large extent, the plot revolves around complex prejudices within the African American community against family members with darker skin. In one instance, the plantation owner kidnaps an light-complected male child and raises him as his heir. In another a “bright-skinned” uncle passes as Irish to evade trade union rules that ban Negroes.

The novel’s main focus is the role newly freed slaves played in the development of modern American music. The reader gets the strong sense that many Mayfield family members turned to working in minstrel shows, music halls and clubs when Jim Crow laws banned them from other occupations.

The sections dealing with the great northern migration, Harlem renaissance and birth of ragtime and jazz are also quite riveting. I came away with a totally new insight into the African American origin of the dance crazes of the “roaring twenties,” eg the “Charleston” and the “Black Bottom.”

This was also my first exposure to the extreme discrimination African American soldiers faced during World War I. Unlike white troops, they weren’t issued gas masks. Forced to improvise, they covered their faces with urine soaked rags to protect themselves against mustard gas.