On May 14, 1863, the Army of Tennessee, under Generals Grant and Sherman, seized Jackson as the Confederate army retreated in disarray. Grant ordered the city's "strategic assets" burned, and in hours, much of Jackson burned to the ground. This is why Jackson has the nickname "Chimneyville," because the fire spared little but brick chimneys, which stood like tombstones after the blaze. This was only the first of three times Jackson burned during the war.
It was a war crime, one of many committed by both sides in that brutal war. We must never forget the thousands of innocents who died in the Civil War, the weak and defenseless who could not run fast enough. Whether Jacksonians supported the war or opposed it, all suffered the horrible consequences of secession.
It was the same for my hometown, Lawrence, Kan., which was burned to the ground three months later by a Confederate ruffian from Missouri named William Quantrill. Kansas is the state where the Civil War began, with a guerilla war in the east between pro-slavery "ruffians" and abolitionist "jayhawkers." Kansas is where John Brown, who would later lead the attack on Harpers Ferry, became a terrorist.
On Aug. 21, 1863, my paternal grandfather's grandfather, 9-year-old Charley Matthews, was playing in the family yard, three miles east of Lawrence. When Charley saw the riders, he climbed a tree and listened as his mother told Quantrill that all the men were in town. Quantrill and his cavalry rode away, and soon smoke began to rise from Lawrence. One of Charley's older brothers was killed and another wounded, along with hundreds of others, some of them butchered in front of their families.
In "bleeding Kansas," the war over slavery was always a civil war, rather than a war between the states. In Kansas, the Civil War began in 1856.
The Civil War was born in the Midwest, and Midwesterners ended it. It was not Yankees that defeated the South. It was Midwestern men like Grant and Sherman, both from Ohio. The president they served was from Illinois.
Lincoln had decided that the war was so horrible that it had to end by all means, even if it meant totally devastating the South. That very July, the two armies at Gettysburg suffered 51,000 casualties in just three days. The following fall, Lincoln ordered Sherman's March to the Sea, and five months later, the war was over. (At least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War.)
We often hear that only a tiny percentage of whites held slaves, but that was not true of the Deep South. Nearly half of all white Mississippians owned slaves: of 63,015 white households, 30,943 of them held slaves, according to the 1860 census. There were more than 436,000 slaves in Mississippi, or 55 percent of the total population. In Hinds County alone, 1,421 white households held 22,363 slaves, the highest slave-to-master ratio in Mississippi and the ninth highest in the South.
Is it any wonder that Jackson burned?
When we remember the Civil War, we must always think first of the 4 million slaves who were freed by it.
States' rights was never anything more than a fig leaf for the right to hold slaves. How can one speak of states' rights when 55 percent of Mississippi's population could not vote? Those 436,000 slaves were counted as 261,600 Americans under the 3/5 compromise, even though they could not vote, thus boosting Southern representation and ensuring the survival of slavery.
Certainly, Mississippi's legislators thought the Civil War was about slavery. In the Articles of Secession, they began, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." They wrote, "By an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun." They were outraged that they might lose "property worth four billions of money." (Click here to read the Public Eye's story for the Articles of Secession.)
The war was not a fight over principle. It was not caused by northern financial interests, even if they benefited from it.
It was caused by the vanity and evil of white men who thought they had the right to enslave people who were black. The better among them were almost decent, though we must remember that even an "enlightened" master like Thomas Jefferson did not free his slaves until after he died. The worst among them inflicted tortures beyond polite description.
Opposition to slavery was a religious movement before it was a war. My father's church, the American Baptist Church, split with the Southern Baptist Church over this very issue. There was a great religious awakening in the North and the Midwest, a horror at the horrors of slavery.
It is an important moral decision whether we regard the Civil War as a war between the states or a civil war. Racism is always a question of what you choose to see, and only the latter acknowledges that 436,000 Mississippians opposed slavery.
The myth of the loyal slave who stayed to fight at his master's side, endlessly recycled in romantic melodramas like "Gone With the Wind," is made absurd by the fact that hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted their masters during the war. More than 180,000 of them became Union soldiers.
If it was only a war between the states, all African Americans are made silent and consigned again to the evil of Confederate rule. Look at your African-American neighbor, even if you live in a gated community far from Jackson's dreaded west side, far from the destitute descendants of the slaves who were "freed" into poverty. Do you really think he wants to be a slave?
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