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Book Review
| Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. 352. $34.95 (ISBN 0-8139-2309-3).
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| This long-anticipated, posthumously published study stands as a fitting tribute to the research skills and interpretive boldness of its author, Armstead L. Robinson, whose life was tragically cut short in 1995. Bitter Fruits of Bondage adds an impressive new voice to the chorus of historians who trace Confederate defeat in the Civil War to crippling issues of internal dissent and demoralization. In Robinson's analysis, the Confederacy broke apart along the fault lines of racial and class antagonisms and in the end "a class conflict based on the defense of slavery eroded the Southern will to national independence" (10). |
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First proposed thirty years ago, Robinson's thesis anticipated much of the recent research on Confederate defeat, most notably that of William W. Freehling in The South vs. the South (2001). Nonetheless, his study offers the fullest and most detailed examination of just how military, social, and legal themes intersected to produce waves of dissent and defeatism. It does so by focusing on the Confederate loss of its Mississippi Valley heartland by the end of 1863. |
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Confederate recruitment policies produced the first cracks in a unified war effort. Responding to calls from slaveholders concerned over the likelihood of slave unrest, especially in exposed coastal areas, the state governors refused to comply fully with the requisitions made upon them by the Confederate War Department. Their withholding of men and arms blunted the offensive capabilities of Confederate armies in the first year of the war and soon forced the implementation of a dual enlistment policy in which the Confederate Congress limited service to twelve months for those soldiers who provided their own arms but extended it to three years to those too poor to equip themselves. Confirmation of the yeomanry's initial impression that slaveholders would receive preferential treatment in terms of military service came with the imposition of a Confederate draft in the spring of 1862 that provided for the furnishing of substitutes that only the wealthy could afford to procure. By also allowing for the exemption of overseers, the draft served as a lightning rod for those who decried "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." |
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As Robinson makes clear, slaves outside the interior black belts were restless, politically savvy, and prone to flee behind Union lines from the very inception of the war. Deep pockets of Unionism persisted among the nonslaveholders in the Appalachian highlands and were the basis of Lincoln's strategy of divide and rule in the northern and western hinterlands of the Confederacy. The nonslaveholding majority of Confederate soldiers were quick to resent the inequality of camp life that resulted from the use of slaves as body servants by their comrades in the planter class. Robinson then shows how these racial and class fissures widened and deepened as he settles into the heart of his narrative that examines the inability of the Confederacy to counter major Union advances in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the delta regions in the lower Mississippi Valley. For all of the superior numbers and deeper resources of Union armies, he insists that the military failures of the Confederacy were attributable primarily to a lack of unity on the home front. Planters balked at impressment policies demanding that they provide slaves for labor on military fortifications and continued to plant cotton at the expense of food crops, thus contributing to food shortages that afflicted both civilians and soldiers. Tax policies that let the planters off lightly but fell heavily on nonslaveholders and smallholding yeomanry convinced more and more of the common whites that the sacrifices demanded by the war were not being imposed equally. Wherever they advanced, Union armies had the advantage of slave informants and spies and a fifth column of disaffected Confederates willing to cooperate with the Union invaders. Some of these whites were planters who placed self-interest above the Confederate cause by seizing the opportunity to sell their cotton for greenbacks; others were poorer whites desperate to escape the military dragnet of Confederate conscription and the increasingly onerous demands of tax agents and impressment officials. In a double blow to the Confederacy, its armies in the West were drained of much of their combat effectiveness by the chronic need to divert manpower to pacify political dissidents and round up draft evaders and by rates of absenteeism that rose as the war lengthened. By fully exploiting the spreading demoralization in the Confederate army camps and on the home front, Union commanders inflicted disastrous defeats on the Confederacy at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge in 1863 and solidified their strategic control of the Western theater. |
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To be sure, Robinson occasionally pushed his argument beyond his evidentiary base, but he presented a powerful case for including class conflict in any understanding of Confederate defeat. This is a book that all students of the Civil War will want to read. |
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| William L. Barney
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| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
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