Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

bought by military victory, time to persuade slaveholders and nonslaveholders that each served the other’s best interests, time to make the kind of mistakes in finance and domestic policy that all politicians must make when they attempt to invent a regime on untried blueprints. But time was not on the side of the Confederacy, and the hands pushing the clock were attached to soldiers in blue.

CHAPTER NINE

WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Willard Glazier was a lithe, sharp-witted nineteen-year-old when he enlisted in the 2nd New York Cavalry in 1861. Starting out as an ordinary private, he soon climbed the ladder of promotion, and at the end of August 1863 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant for Company M of the 2nd New York. That was where his promotions ended. In a skirmish at New Baltimore, Virginia, on October 19, 1863, Glazier’s horse was shot from under him, and he was captured by Confederate cavalry.1

Just as neither North nor South had been prepared to wage war, neither had been prepared to deal with one of the major encumbrances of war, the keeping of enemy prisoners. Both governments quickly constructed elaborate exchange systems to get enemy prisoners off their hands and to retrieve their own soldiers. But the exchange systems were cumbersome, the personnel needed for running the system were sorely needed elsewhere, and more often than not the improvised prisoner camps degenerated into slow-moving pools of maltreatment, humiliation, hunger, and death. Glazier got a taste of this early on, when the Virginia militia who shoved him along the road from New Baltimore to Warrenton neatly stripped him of his watch and his overcoat, then dumped him into Libby Prison, a converted tobacco warehouse that had become Richmond’s principal holding pen for Union officers. There Glazier languished until May 1864, when Libby Prison was closed down and the inmates piled onto trains that would take them further South. Glazier then bounced from one prison camp to another in Georgia and South Carolina until he was finally delivered to a camp near Columbia in November. There Glazier and a friend slipped into a column of paroled prisoners who were leaving the camp and made off into the woods.

Then began the most curious part of Glazier’s adventures. Without food, weapons, or even decent clothing, Glazier and his friend somehow had to find their way to Union lines from deep within rebel territory, and they had not the faintest idea of how to do it. Nevertheless, Glazier had some unsuspected allies, fashioned for him by the war and emancipation, and he recognized those allies as soon as they came down the road he was standing on. Those allies were, of course, black slaves, for in spite of the conventional wisdom up to 1863, the slaves had known all along that the war and the Yankees meant freedom, and now Willard Glazier was about to have a similar epiphany on that Carolina road. The slaves walked by him, eyeing Glazier and his friend suspiciously. “I reckon deys Yankees,” remarked one. “Golly, I hope to God dey is,” replied another. Glazier took his chance. “We are Yankees and have just escaped from Columbia,” he pleaded. “Can’t you do something for us?” The slaves stopped and laughed. “Ob course,” they replied eagerly, and one added, “I’ll do all I can for you, marster.”2

So Willard Glazier, Federal officer and prisoner of the Confederacy, became the ward of the most powerless class of people in the American republic. With black slaves as his providers and guides, Glazier and his friend were passed surreptitiously from one plantation to another. Eventually Glazier and his friend met up with two other bands of fugitive Yankee prisoners, and all them were moved by night with slave guides and sheltered by day in huts and barns. One slave family found and repaired a boat to get them across the Savannah River; another slave resoled Glazier’s worn-out shoes. Twenty miles north of Savannah, on December 15, Glazier blundered into Confederate pickets and was recaptured. Four days later he slipped away again and found his way once more to “the hut of a negro.” Occasionally he was even able to beg a meal from a hard-eyed white farmer’s wife who held no love for Confederate conscription agents and tax gatherers. A free black family near Cherokee Hill, Georgia, found him a guide named March Dasher, another free black who at last guided Glazier to Federal lines in northern Georgia on December 23, 1864.3

As a white male and an officer, Glazier was the embodiment of a social order in which white men held power and ruled over submissive white women and black slaves. But the chance of war had inverted those relationships: Willard Glazier found himself powerless and completely dependent on the leadership and goodwill of black slaves and farm women. That same chance determined Willard Glazier’s story over and over again throughout the war years, for the Civil War imposed on American society as much social disruption as it did physical destruction. Within that disruption, for one brief and bloody historical moment, an entirely new way of ordering race and gender within a republican society became possible.

BY THEIR OWN STRONG ARMS

After more than a century, nothing disenchants the romantic image of the Civil War as a crusade for freedom and against slavery more than the realization that white Northerners were less than enthusiastic about the Emancipation Proclamation, although emancipation helped fend off the possibility of outside intervention in the war and provided nearly two hundred thousand extra soldiers and sailors to help win it. Even among Northerners who genuinely believed that slavery was an evil, emancipation was celebrated largely for the way it redeemed the reputation of a white republic and not as a down payment on the way to civil equality to African Americans. Emancipation cured the problem of slavery, but emancipated African Americans were a problem to be dealt with in quite another way.

Even Abraham Lincoln appeared to many blacks to have signed