Slaves of the Confederacy
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
I am very glad that Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to a feature broadcast today on the Takeaway, on the Civil War, as listening to it soured my morning. (The Takeaway, for those who live outside its range, is a production of Public Radio International and WNYC.) The segment, for the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, of all occasions, was built around an interview with Stan Armstrong, who directed a documentary, "Black Confederates: The Forgotten Men in Grey," and the theme was how people don't realize how very many slaves fought for the Confederacy. That might be interesting, except that, as Coates has pointed out many times, the idea that they did so in any meaningful numbers, or as what could be called "soldiers" in the Confederate Army—rather than, say, forced laborers on fortifications—is a myth. I'll let Coates explain why; he's got the historians on his side.
But that history—and I haven't seen the documentary in question—is only the beginning of what is troubling about the Takeaway segment. The hosts, John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee, allowed the discussion to proceed as if slaves had a choice about accompanying their owners to the battlefield—as if the question of why they were in the Confederate camps was an emotional mystery, part of the strange intimacy of our peculiar institution, and not about chattel slavery enforced, as it routinely was, by violence. Instead, John Hockenberry asked about about the slaves' "motives," despite the hazards of war. Armstrong answered,
They were soldiers, part of a community that was the South, and they felt that they had an obligation to fight for the South.
How was that "obligation" enforced? One doesn't find out; instead, here's Hockenberry's followup:
Was it loyalty to the land itself? Loyalty to the institution of slavery?
Armstrong tells him that that's a great question, and that, while the Civil War is a hard one to figure,
the bond of the slave and, let's say, the slaveholder was really something else…. The loyalty to a slaveholder was something you can't really understand.
"Let's say, the slaveholder"? What is "holding" meant to invoke—walking hand in hand? Let's say we just call them slave owners, since that's what the law at the time gave them the power to be.
Perhaps Hockenberry was trying to acknowledge, in some backward way, that slaves were individuals with autonomy. They were, and not even slavery could erase that; read Steven Hahn's excellent book, "A Nation Under Our Feet," for more about the many ways slaves were actors, and not simply acted upon. (One of their steady actions was to subvert slavery, and help to win their own freedom; see Adam Goodheart's piece for the Times Magazine on how the arrival of escaped slaves behind Northern lines transformed the war.) But the denial of that autonomy—the preciousness of what was stolen from them—is one of the many things wrong with slavery, and that shouldn't be minimized, either.
When a second guest, who recalls his grandfather's stories of riding into battle with his owner and his owner's sons, explained that "the war was not about slavery," just about states rights and tariffs, Headley managed, "That's a hot topic," and
Even today you can start an argument by going into many places and saying that—which kind of argues to the point that the civil war is still with us.
"Going into many places"—like history departments, maybe. (In case it needs to be said: the "state's right" at issue was slavery; anyone who thinks that the principle was at issue should examine the strictures of the Fugitive Slave Act, which used federal power to try to force Northerners to be slave catchers.) At that point, the segment devolved into a set of musings on blacks who held slaves, or owned them, or whatever you want to call the practice that, a hundred and fifty years ago today, began, finally, to meet its end when the Civil War got under way at Fort Sumter.
Another way to mark the day: read Richard Brody's post on Lincoln and the movies.
Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.
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