Why They Fought
Apr 29, 2011 Updates
Much has been said in newspaper editorials of late as to why the different sides and the soldiers fought in the Civil War. A much more accurate term other than Civil War is War Between the States, as individual states raised regiments to fight one another, and even different regions located inside states sent troops to fight one another.
A review of the political papers and speeches of the politicians of the time will tell you the reasons different states recruited and sent troops to fight in the conflict. After Fort Sumter was shelled, an outpouring of patriotism set up in the Union states, with President Lincoln’s call for volunteer soldiers. Governors of many Union states sent volunteer regiments to Washington. They did so by giving a colonel’s commission to prominent community leaders, experienced soldiers, or politicians in their state. The newly commissioned colonels would then raise a volunteer regiment for service in the U.S. Army, and these regiments would receive clothing and equipment, and then would be shipped by train down to Washington, D.C.
The reasons for their enlistment at that time was a fear that if the rebellion was not controlled, that the Union would break up into many different republics. Preservation of the Union was the primary reason that men in the North enlisted to fight the war. Soldiers from states in the old Northwest Territory held somewhat different views. They fought for the main reason of opening up the Mississippi River to commerce. They did not want New Orleans, Louisiana to remain a foreign port city. For this reason, they fought in the war to open up the Mississippi River to Union navigation and commerce.
Troops from the Northeastern U.S. primarily fell under the influence of abolitionist groups, and they fought mainly to free the slaves. Their prime motivation in serving in the Union Army was to free the slaves in the South.
Down South, most of the regiments on the Confederate muster books the first two years of the war were volunteer regiments. The men at that point in the war volunteered because of their patriotism at the time the Southern states seceded. Demands on army manpower soon required the Confederacy to enact a conscription law. In 1862, the Confederacy began conscription, and conscription continued in the South throughout the duration of the war. If you were male and able bodied, and if you were not a local sheriff, or were not in the local militia, you were required to serve in the Confederate army, or you would be thrown into prison.
One of the most significant reasons that southern men fought in the army or the militia was because their state had been invaded by Union forces. After invasions were made in various states, militia units were called up, and Confederate forces were deployed to meet the invasion threats posed. Even those men that enlisted in local militia units down South to avoid military service in the Confederacy often ended up on the front lines, fighting Union troops in Georgia and in Virginia. A significant reason for Confederate troops and militia to fight was because the Union Army had invaded Confederate held territory. McClelland’s invasion of the Peninsula in 1862 prompted the enactment of the Confederate conscription law. Many soldiers that would probably have stayed out of conflict altogether ended up fighting, because the Union Army had invaded their home state. This was especially true in Tennessee and in Georgia during Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign.
Different sections of states even had different allegiances during the war. In upstate Alabama, where corn was raised instead of cotton, there was a strong pro-union element. Winston County even went so far as to secede from the state of Alabama, and to call itself “the Free State of Winston.” Tennessee sent over 55 regiments to fight in the Union Army, despite the fact that it was a Confederate state. West Virginia broke away from Virginia in 1861, and later was admitted into the Union as West Virginia in 1863.
Eastern Maryland raised several regiments to fight in the Confederate service. Western Maryland remained loyal to the Union. Maryland did not secede from the Union because President Lincoln sent troops into Annapolis to prevent the Maryland Assembly from voting in an ordinance of secession. Kentucky remained loyal to the Union, but furnished many regiments that fought on both sides during the war.
In 1863, the Union enacted a conscription law, because of the horrific losses suffered by the Army of the Potomac on the battlefield. A male subject to the draft in 1863 could avoid the draft by paying the sum of $300.00, or by recruiting a substitute to take his place. This lead to the draft riots in New York City in July of 1863, and the complaint that it was a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.
Steven Harrell has practiced law in Perry, Georgia since 1989.
He is the author of The Unionist, A Novel of the Civil War and The Rifle Captain, A Novel of World War I. Both are available at Amazon.com, and Barnes&Noble.com. You may email him at sharrell@comsouth.net.
Against Long Odds
Apr 15, 2011 Updates
In 1861, the Confederacy faced an uphill fight against the forces of the Union. The population of the seceding states was around eight million, with three million of those persons being slaves at the time. The population of the Union states was around 20 million. The Confederacy had no standing army, no navy, and only two mills that could mill and process iron and steel. Machine shops, coal mines and factories for the production of war resources were mostly located in the Union states. Rhett Butler’s comments about the South being unequipped and ill prepared for war in 1861 in the movie Gone With The Wind were very accurate.
The South was traversed by flat coastal plains and broad rivers that could be navigated, and would allow invasion by the navy and marine forces of the Union. Southern forts and installations were not fully prepared to defend against Union attack. Masonry constructed coastal forts that were formidable during the age of smoothbore cannon, would be proven to be obsolete against more modern rifled weapons.
There were few skilled mechanics and inventors in the South that could build and maintain factories for the production of guns and other war materials. There were few facilities in the South that could mill cotton into cloth for the production of uniforms, sails, or tents. The South had no uniform system of currency. There was no unified banking system to regulate currency in the South.
There were weapons available from armories that belonged to the U.S. that were seized at the time various states seceded, such as at Harper’s Ferry and Fayetteville, North Carolina. However, there was no ready supply of raw materials needed to mass produce firearms in the South at the time the war broke out. Many firearms available to some Confederate regiments at the outset of the war were old style smoothbore muskets that had limited range on a modern battlefield. Other firearms available were of the older flintlock type, that had to be modified later for use by the troops.
The Confederacy depended on volunteer soldiers from state regiments early on in the war. Conscription was not enacted into law until the spring of 1862. After casualties began to mount up into the war, a lack of manpower haunted Confederate authorities up until the conclusion of the war. Many letters written to Jefferson Davis praying for reinforcements during the war often went answered with the words “no other resource remains.”
The Confederacy had no navy to speak of. The Union acquired and built a vast array of freshwater and seagoing vessels to enforce a blockade of southern ports, and to seal off southern rivers. Many areas were effectively sealed off from the outside world after the blockade became more effective in 1863. The Confederacy was forced to rely on blockade runners to get weapons, uniforms, and medicines into the country.
Most of the miles of completed railroad track were laid in the Union states. The railroads in the Confederacy were poorly constructed, and were not well connected with one another. Some railroad lines in the South were even laid with different gauges of track, which prohibited trains from running off one line and onto another. The Union repeatedly took advantage of its far superior transportation system in its movement of troops during the war. The movement of troops during the siege of Chattanooga in 1863 was at that time the largest and fastest movement of troops by railroads in history.
Artillery in the Confederate states was vastly inferior to the artillery deployed by the Union armies during the war. Confederate guns were often imported from England, or captured from Union forces. Confederate ordinance was vastly inferior to Union shells. The quality of gunpowder in the charges was poor. Confederate shells often misfired, exploded prematurely, or spun over and did not strike its intended targets.
Confederate supply services were abominable. Confederate troops were not supplied with anything close to the basic amount of daily rations that would prevent soldiers from starving. They were also poorly supplied with equipment, uniforms, and most important of all, shoes. Confederate soldiers were required to march, campaign, and fight without being properly fed or properly supplied with clothing in all types of weather conditions. In contrast, the Union armies were the best fed and best equipped armies in the world at that time. The commissary command structure in the Confederacy was criminal at best, as the soldiers were underfed, ill clothed, and ill cared for, all during the war.
Union and Confederate forces occupied much of the same areas of Northern Virginia for prolonged periods during the Civil War. These occupations caused a severe shortage of food, supplies, and forage for the draft animals that pulled Confederate supply wagons and artillery. The Confederate invasions of the North in 1862 and in 1863 were mostly because Virginia was being scraped bare of forage for the animals, and food for the soldiers, and shoes for the Confederate soldiers. The battle of Gettysburg itself started when Harry Heth’s Confederate troops entered the town looking for shoes.
Yet in spite of all the inadequate supplies and hardships, the troops of the Confederacy managed to astonish the world by thwarting repeated Union invasions in Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee for several years. The Army of the Potomac failed in seven invasion attempts to capture Richmond or to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia. The South could win the war by resisting invasion from the North. It also had the opportunity to win the war by simply holding its army together, and by outlasting the will of the U.S. Government to continue the conflict more than four years. The war was the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. It was bloody because of disease and because of the primitive nature of battlefield triage at the time. It was also bloody because the commanders in the field did not fully understand the effect of modern rifled weapons. The war was also bloody because great generals such Robert E. Lee became determined early on in the war to conquer a peace through a decisive victory on the battlefield. It was against these long odds that the Confederacy began its struggle with the Union in 1861. Yet in spite of these odds, the outcome of the Civil War was a near run thing. When the South failed to conquer a peace on the battlefield, the Confederacy made the war last long enough to make significant numbers of citizens in the North demand a peace, and make efforts to put an end to the struggle.
The Chernobyl Option
Apr 1, 2011 Updates
Four Fridays ago, at around 3:44 local time, a 9.0 level earthquake struck on the sea floor east of Sandai, Japan. The earthquake was high up near the ocean floor, and it caused a huge tsunami to sweep over the coastline nearby. Entire cities and towns and fields and countryside were swept up in this terrible tsunami. The disaster killed over 10,500 people, and over 12,000 persons are missing, and are presumed dead. Many victims were swept out into the sea.
Over 400,000 Japanese persons are now homeless. To compound this disaster, the tsunami cut electrical power at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station nearby. Backup generators were rendered inoperative as well, and the controllers at the power station lost the ability to pump and retain water on uranium fuel rods inside the reactors, and at the spent fuel ponds nearby.
Here is a summary of the damage done at this power station: There are no less than six reactors at the plant. The shielding or buffering material that protects the reactor cores and cools the cores is thousands of gallons of fresh water. When the earthquake hit, the plant lost all electrical power, which prevented the water pumps from pumping fresh water onto the cores. The diesel backup generators also failed, which meant that the fuel rods were in a position to overheat, if the level of water shielding the uranium fuel rods would fall below certain levels. Reactors 4, 3, 2, and 1 sustained damage to the reactor building. Reactors 3, 2, and 1 experienced a partial meltdown of the fuel rods. There was also an increase in the temperature of the spent fuel rods in all six of the nuclear reactors. When fuel rods began to overheat and burn, they produce caesium -137. This radioactive substance disburses into the atmosphere, and ends up polluting the ground, air, and water around the plant. This substance also causes thyroid cancer in infants and children, if the children are exposed to sufficient quantities of the material.
Once the fuel rods overheat to a temperature well above the boiling point of water, the water vapor becomes hot enough inside the reactors to create hydrogen gas. The hydrogen gas inside some of the units exploded, causing damage to several of the reactor buildings. Officials believe that a partial meltdown has occurred in some of the reactors already. This explains the great release of vapor, heat, and radiation from some of the reactor buildings.
For days, plant officials, and later Japanese firefighters have been dropping water, and later spraying sea water onto the reactors, in an effort to cool down the fuel rods. Their efforts have only been partially successful, as smoke and radiation have spewed from reactor unit number 3 for days. This radiation has contaminated the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean, and has contaminated spinach crops and milk in surrounding areas. The water in Tokyo is so radioactive, it is no longer safe for infants to drink. Japanese residents are making runs into stores for bottled water.
The Japanese Government has evacuated 200,000 residents from a 20 kilometer radius around the stricken nuclear plant.
The Tokyo Power Company has successfully run electrical power cables back into each of the reactor units at the plant, and the workers there are in the process of inspecting the motors and water pumps inside each plant in order to determine if the freshwater pumps on the cooling systems can be engaged. Reactor unit 3 remains a problem, though, as material there continues to burn and smoke, and radiation continues to spew out into the sky. A private utility is calling the shots here, and their decision making is infected with the for profit motivations of a private company. At some point, the Japanese Government should grab the bull by the horns, and make the hard decisions needed to deal with this crippled reactor.
In 1986, when the graphite based reactor at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union blew up, President Gorbachev made a tough but necessary decision. He ordered tons of sand, boride, and cement to be dumped on the reactor from helicopters. This essentially entombed the reactor, and it stopped the spread of radioactive material into the surrounding countryside. If Japanese officials fail to stop the spread of radioactive material from this plant, their indecision will end of costing Japanese children and young people for years to come, as they develop thyroid and other cancers from the radioactive contamination that is going unchecked up into the atmosphere from reactor unit number three.
Steven Harrell has practiced law in Perry, Georgia since 1989.
He is the author of The Unionist, A Novel of the Civil War and The Rifle Captain, A Novel of World War I. You may view his weekly column at stevenharrell.com. You may email him at sharrell@comsouth.net.
Another Middle East War
Apr 1, 2011 Updates
Over fifty years ago, the United States and its allies supported the installation of strong dictators to rule countries in the Middle East. As long as the dictator was friendly to the U.S., anti-Communist, and sold petroleum products to U.S. oil companies, that was OK with the U.S. Government. Many of these dictators have been in power in excess of thirty years. Most of these leaders base their power support on the oil revenues generated by their nations. They retain power indefinitely, and free elections in their nations are nothing less than a joke. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and of the press are nonexistent. The legislature and the courts of such countries sit at the will of the strong arm ruler. The rule of such leaders is hereditary, and the economics of the region is not trickle down in the least. The rich get richer, and the poor struggle on without any hope of upward mobility.
The Middle East is filled with unemployed and underemployed youth that are literate and well informed about democratic society in the Western nations through the internet, and some of these people decided they had had enough of their situation, and they began ad hoc revolutions in various Arab countries. Tunisia overthrew its ruler, and then the mobs in Egypt revolted. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, was forced out of office by revolutionaries in that nation. Other protests in Yemen and Bahrain were met with deadly force. The latter nation used soldiers from the House of Saud to crush rebellion there, even though innocent people were shot down in the streets.
In Libya, though, the democracy protestors grabbed weapons, and began a civil war to overthrow their evil dictator, Colonel Muammer Gaddafi. Gaddafi responded by ordering soldiers that were loyal to him to attack their fellow countrymen with planes, tanks, and artillery. He began to crush the rebels with the military power of his armed forces. Civilians were gunned down on the streets indiscriminately. France and Great Britain and other NATO countries, though, saw this civil uprising as an opportunity to get rid of Colonel Gaddafi once and for all, and they took the cause of “humanitarian relief” to the United Nations, where they were able to persuade the U.N. Security Council to order a no-fly zone established over Libya.
The U.S. and NATO then began to fire missiles on Libya, and began to bomb military targets in Libya around the clock. The U.S. has deployed A-10 tank killing aircraft and AC-130 gunships to the region to help destroy Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery. Rebels in Libya that were losing the war, have begun to retake cities and towns that they had lost to government forces before the U.S. and NATO got involved in the conflict.
President Obama has tried to convince the American people that the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya was done only for humanitarian reasons. I say he insults our intelligence. NATO and the U.S. saw an opportunity to rid themselves of an evil terrorist supporting dictator, and they have used this civil war as a pretext to get rid of him.
Considering the fact that we are trying to extricate ourselves from Iraq, and we need to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan, I consider this a blunder on our part to intervene in Libya at this time. If we really want to get rid of Colonel Gaddafi, why not send over a couple of crack rifle teams and assassinate him? Why do we have to get into another war to benefit our defense contractors again when we are running such a mountainous budget deficit? How many of the rebels in Libya that we are helping today were yelling “death to America!” five years ago? Could our involvement over there have something to do with the fact that Libya is a major oil exporting nation, and exports over 1.5 million barrels of oil per day?
Maybe we need to look inward at ourselves, and remember some of the wisdom of Senator William Fulbright. If we could spend a fraction of the resources we spend making war in the Middle East on some sort of solution to our energy problems, wouldn’t we be a whole lot better off? We should take some of the government funds that we are now spending on Middle East wars, and develop a workable distribution system for hydrogen fuel for our trucks and automobiles. Maybe then, our young people would not be sent to die fighting some other two-bit dictator in that part of the world. If we could perfect hydrogen fuel into a working distribution system, none of the politics of the Middle East would apply to our way of life.
Then, all the crazy people in the Middle East could turn the place into a sheep and goat trail, and maybe then petroleum products would become obsolete. Until then, another U.S. president will send U.S. military personnel into harm’s way without a good reason for doing so, and will get us involved in the affairs of another Middle Eastern nation.
Steven Harrell has practiced law in Perry, Georgia since 1989.
He is the author of The Unionist, A Novel of the Civil War and The Rifle Captain, A Novel of World War I. Both are available at Amazon.com, and Barnes&Noble.com. You may email him at sharrell@comsouth.net.
