The House Of Dixie: Civil War Revolution

Una storia politica e ideologica della guerra di secessione, che sfiora appena, ma con sintesi soddisfacente, gli aspetti militari. L’evento viene visto e qualificato come una seconda rivoluzione americana, la prima dovendosi identificare con la guerra di indipendenza. La tesi di fondo è che la questione della abolizione della schiavitù fu davvero la causa della guerra, non nel senso che ne sia stata l’immediata bandiera, ma nel senso che il prevalere del partito repubblicano abolizionista, sotto la guida di Lincoln, mise in pericolo il senso di sicurezza che le élites schiaviste del sud nutrivano nel perdurare del modo di produzione basato sul lavoro servile (modo di produzione antico, in un contesto di sviluppo ormai rigoglioso del modo di produzione capitalistico, per usare delle categorie marxiane) e ne determinò la secessione, per reprimere la quale il nord si indusse alla guerra. Ma in corso d’opera quelle idee maturarono e l’evento si trasformò in una vera e propria rivoluzione, intesa alla piena emancipazione degli afroamericani dal giogo della schiavitù. Per chi, come me, abbia letto, in argomento, solo questo (ma non si ometta di leggere il libro in correlazione con il pregevole e commovente romanzo storico di Sue Monk Kidd), non vi è modo di formulare delle obiezioni a questa visione delle cose, che appare persuasiva e sorretta da citazioni di discorsi, memorialistica e pubblicistica dell’epoca. La guerra, accanita e sanguinosa, ha lasciato lacerazioni profonde, esplose a partire dall’assassinio Lincoln, ma esse sono state a poco a poco riassorbite, in un modo che non può non suscitare ammirazione per il dinamismo veramente democratico della società americana.

Some civil war histories look at the military battles and others look at the political battles. “The Fall of the House of Dixie” is a civil war history that looks at the social fabric of the south — an interesting idea. I was disappointed, however, that by page 200 author Bruce Levine had not developed much new material. Luckily it was around that point when the book really took off and became a worthwhile read.

It’s not news that there was some degree of class struggle between poor southern whites and rich planters. The civil war was, it was said, “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”. Even in the north the policy allowing people to buy substitutes allowed the wealthy to avoid battle. Levine, however, goes beyond this to show that much of the southern planter class was clearly obstructionist and damaged the southern war effort. In a war to protect slavery, for example, many wealthy southern slaveholders refused to supply requisitioned slaves to help in support roles and claimed exemptions to keep their white overseers on the job.

I think that today it would be hard to imagine that someone would prefer slavery over freedom, but Levine provides plenty of evidence showing that many slaveholders honestly believed that their slaves were 100% loyal and preferred to live a life in bondage. He supplies quote after quote, taken from contemporaneous southern diaries, including that of the famous Mary Chestnut, in which slaveholders talked about how much they believed their slaves loved them. Levine follows this with even more evidentiary quotes by southern masters expressing shock and outrage when their slaves bolted for freedom at the first opportunity. The lesson here is, I guess, to be careful about believing your own propaganda.

Even though the Union Army praised the invaluable military intelligence and other assistance that self-freed slaves brought with them, I knew there were many instances where freed slaves were mistreated by Union soldiers. I was surprised, however, by the callous manner they were treated by General Sherman. Levine describes a shocking incident from December 1864, after the fall of Atlanta. Many newly freed slaves were following Sherman’s army when they came to a creek near Savannah. The soldiers crossed using portable pontoon bridges. Once the soldiers had crossed, Sherman ordered the bridges be pulled up. This left refugee families trapped between icy, raging waters in front of them and vengeful Confederate soldiers closing in behind them. Hundreds were killed by rebel soldiers or by drowning as they tried to cross on their own. As Levine writes, “To put it mildly, Sherman’s army sent out mixed signals to their black would-be friends and companions. But still they came.”

The book explores the idea that, by the end of the war, many slave owners were reconciled to rejoining the union, and even to the abolition of legal slavery, but held great hope that the north would allow them to create social conditions that would keep their former slaves in a form of serfdom, of economic bondage — the effect of slavery without actual slaves. The south was successful. For a detailed examination of how the south accomplished this goal see Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Levine’s book is an examination of the unraveling of the southern social fabric, which he compares to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The book is interesting and informative, but I’m only giving it 4 stars because the first two-thirds of the book broke little new ground.

With the skill of a surgeon, Professor Bruce Levine has written the most incisive and detailed account of why and how the Southern states seceded to form the Confederate States of America that I have ever read. He begins with a very well documented description of the ante-bellum South and describes how the peculiar institution of slavery was at the very foundation of Southern life, socially and economically. He describes the anger, the consternation and the panic the Southern slaveholders felt when that institution was threatened. He describes the hubris of men like the extremist Edmund Ruffin, who felt that secession was the ONLY way to go. Indeed Ruffin had been agitating for secession as early as the 1840’s and is alleged to have fired the first shots of the conflict(at Fort Sumter). And finally, Professor Levine dismantles the myth that the South was solid and united behind the idea of war and secession by telling the little known story of the poor and non slaveholding Southerners who formed the majority of the CSA, and who began to deeply resent fighting what they saw as a rich man’s war.

Notwithstanding the complaints of the one star reviewers, this book is not a hatchet job on the South or southerners. Prof. Levine not only writes with great skill, he writes with a just-the-facts detachment of a journalist…and he backs it all up with 100 pages of notes at the end. Even the great Abraham Lincoln does not come away unscathed. His vacillation and tendency to lead from behind on the issues of emancipation and equal rights for the slaves and freed blacks is revealed with painful honesty, and with no “Great Emancipator” sentimentality whatsoever.

I took several things away from this incredible book. One was the sobering realization that the Civil War was probably inevitable, despite the recent revisionist insistence that it could have been avoided. Both sides-North and South, fatally underestimated the will and determination of the other. Both sides paid dearly in terms of lives lost.

And in the case of the South, their downfall meant the devastation of burnt destroyed cities, the humiliation of military defeat, and most shocking of all for them, the loss of a cherished and deeply embedded social order that had been unthinkable just ten years earlier.

GREAT read.