Yet another case of Lincoln legend vs reality

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce Levine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Add this to your Civil War reading list. I'm going to give a long review, but one that nonetheless still just gives the backbone of the book.

Lincoln once said that “somehow” the war was about slavery, even though most the North, including him, denied it at the start.

Most of the 11 Confederate states’ ordinances of secession admitted it, though. So, too, did the Confederate Constitution.

So, Bruce Levine starts there, in “The Fall of the House of Dixie.” (You know this book is good, beyond that, when Eric Foner is among those named in the Acknowledgements.)

As in, starts right there on page 4, with states from the 1860 US Census. But, we're putting that at the end of this expanded and edited version of my Goodreads review to get the problematic Lincoln legend, of the likes of mainstream Civil War authors and auteurs like Steven Spielberg, versus the reality, up top.

Details of Census numbers on slave ownership will be at the bottom.

Of the many other things in this excellent book, one more needs to be cited. And, that's the one we're going to move up top.

And, that is Levine’s documentation of Lincoln’s war-long reticence over land redistribution. Reconstruction would of course have gone better with him still alive. He would have reacted to the Klan, Knights of the White Camelia etc. much more rapidly than Andy Johnson. Example? The Second Confiscation Act of 1862 gave him the formal right to seize not only slaves of disloyal owners, but their other property. However, and as Levine notes, AT LINCOLN’S INSISTENCE, on the death of said rebels, all property except their slaves would revert to their heirs. Rich Northern whites might pay to rent it under such terms; poor blacks couldn’t afford to touch it.

In a related matter, in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s beginnings, Lincoln ignored Salmon Chase’s cries not to allow its new state government to pass “as a temporary arrangement” special laws governing the newly freed slaves as a “laboring, landless and homeless class.”

Levine doesn’t tackle the colonization issue, but the two paragraphs above should refute the likes of David Reynolds and James Oakes about just how high-minded Lincoln was, or was not, about the future of freed slaves after Jan. 1, 1863. Was he continuing to evolve? Yes. Might have continued to evolve further, had he lived? Yes. Did he also, as I have noted to those two gentlemen, likely discuss the colonization issue with Spoons Butler the day before his assassination? Yes.

So, Lincoln's "rosewater," already being implemented in Louisiana (and West Virginia, and bits of remnant Virginia) before he died, if carried over into Reconstruction, probably would have left freed slaves almost as high and dry as did Andy Johnson.

Yes, Lincoln would have given them more physical protection. But, in all likelihood, he would have offered them little more satisfaction on land. After all, Grant didn't do anything after he succeeded Johnson. And, to the degree he faced the issue as president, or jokingly in a militia unit during the Black Hawk War, Lincoln never really showed an understanding — or rather, never really showed a willingness to look behind the white stance — on American Indian land issues, either.

Was Lincoln our nation's greatest president? Yes. Was he 5-star? Only if we're grading on a curve.

One lesser thing to note. Levine also shows how racist Sherman was, up to the end of the war. Grant, and many other non-McClellan Northern generals, had at least moderated racism they had in 1861. Not Unc' Billy.

And now, back to the other main part of the book's original, and where Levine started: The 1860 US Census and slave ownership.

In all 15 slave states, 1 in 4 whites were slaveowners. (Levine later notes that in the 11 seceding states it was 1 in 3, so adjust the below accordingly.)

The typical master owned 4-6 slaves, he says. But, that was just the bottom rung of the highly capitalistic slaveowning South.

One in eight Southern masters had 20 or more slaves, and thus officially counted as “planters” according to the Census. The math says that’s 3 percent of Southern whites. In the seceding states, about 5 percent.

Next tier? The “ten thousand families” that owned 50 or more slaves, and now it gets more fun because Levine starts naming names. Allegedly “good master” Robert E. Lee and his wife were here; he and Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee inherited 60 slaves with their Arlington mansion from her father, George Washington Parke Custis. (And that name should remind you of Lee’s connections.) As for the truth on Lee's brutality level toward slaves, it's not just modern research that shows this; one of his own freed slaves "gave testimony" in 1866, information used by modern researchers. Edmund Ruffin is in this group. So are two couples cited extensively in this book.

Next tier? The 1 in 15 planter families who owned 100 or more slaves, or 3,000 families. Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs were among this small group.

The semifinal cut for Levine? Those owning 250 or more slaves. Davis’ brother Joseph is here. So is Howell Cobb. So is the vile James Henry Hammond and the incendiary Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. As is James Chesnut Sr., father-in-law of noted Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.

The final cut? 500. Here, the father of the wife of one couple in the 50-plus class is here.

Add in, on the photo plates pages, the 1860 Census map of slave ownership percentages by county, and we’re good to go with the basic story.

Levine, lumping 1861 and 1862 together, does a yearly overview of the North’s military progress combined with the South’s reaction, much of it from people named in the various levels of slave ownership above. “Poor whites,” whether slaveless or the 4-6 class are also cited in detail. So are the two most states-rightists governors, Joseph E. Brown and Zebulon Vance, along with others noting the Confederacy’s internal contradictions.

Those contradictions culminate when Davis pushes a version of Patrick Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves in exchange for (limited) freedom. Besides the argument that this would shatter the Confederacy’s basic operating principle, Levine notes that some planters still rejected the idea that slaves could fight. Others, on the other hand, thought they would — and for the Union, as soon as you gave them a Southern gun.


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