Rico's rants: Civil War for the day

Rico says Daniel Sharfstein has a column in The New York Times' continuing series on the Civil War:

In February of 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men”. Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men”, Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union”.
The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the seventeenth century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.
Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that, when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife, and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people”, the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white; they were planters.
The Gibsons were hardly alone in their journey from black to white. Hundreds of families of color had gained their freedom in the colonial era because they had English mothers and, within a generation or two, they could claim to be white. Their claims were supported by law, which never drew the color line at “one drop” of African ancestry in the antebellum era. Most Southern states followed a one-quarter or one-eighth rule: anyone with a black grandparent or great-grandparent was legally black, and those with more remote ancestry were legally white. Antebellum South Carolina, though, never had a legal definition of race. “It may be well and proper,” a state judge and leading defender of slavery wrote in 1835, “that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.” Preserving the institution of slavery mattered far more than preserving the purity of white blood. As long as people who claimed to be white were productive members of society— in effect, supporting the prevailing order— it made little sense to mandate a stricter measure of race.
When the Gibsons moved west in the 1790s, they had money and land and slaves, but professed to know very little about their history, explaining a tendency towards dark complexion with vague accounts of Gypsy or Portuguese roots. They soon epitomized the manners and attitudes of the planter aristocracy. Randall Gibson grew up shuttling between a family mansion in Lexington, Kentucky, where his mother was from, and Live Oak, a sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where his father had sought his fortune. He knew the family’s slaves well and often asked after them in his letters home from Yale, referring to them always as servants. Gibson’s father, a Whig and longtime supporter of “the Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, gave significant responsibility to his slaves, hiring no outside overseers. Indeed, Tobias Gibson repeatedly expressed dismay at the institution. “I am in conscience opposed to slavery,” he wrote. “I don’t like it and the older I get the worse it seems.” Such sentiment provided an easy way for him to feel virtuous about his way of life; disliking slavery made him an enlightened master.
Enlisting in the Louisiana army represented a humbling new start for Randall Gibson. At Yale he had been lionized by his classmates, the flower of a select group of Southerners walking in the footsteps of John C. Calhoun and Judah P. Benjamin. Gibson had thought of himself and his peers as the nation’s great hope, an educated brotherhood that could guide the country through sectional crisis. The years that followed his graduation, however, were full of disappointment. He studied law, only to decide that he did not wish to practice. After traveling around Europe, he bought a sugar cane plantation near his father’s land, southwest of New Orleans, but could not make a profit and found the neighbors distasteful.
Almost as soon as Gibson returned to Louisiana from Yale, he embraced an uncompromising Southern position on slavery, declaring his opinions to be “as decided as if I were a member of Congress”. This was a predictable stance: without a fortune or connections to the primarily Northern-born merchant elite in New Orleans, Gibson could not afford to take an unpopular political stance. At the same time, he became convinced that “Southern society is based and its life and soul are staked upon the inequality of the races, not only its aims, its expansion and progress, but its very existence.”
Gibson’s position that war was necessary to preserve white supremacy reveals how racism flourished at the prospect of abolition. When slavery served as a broad proxy of black and white, there was little need to dwell on the purity of “white blood” and the finer points of racial difference. Only freedom required a hard line on race, to preserve the existing order. As the abolitionist chorus swelled in the generation leading up to secession, Southerners responded, in one Virginian’s words, by “rising up to promulgate the philosophical, sociological, and ethnical excellence of slavery”. In 1857, the Louisiana Senate considered a bill for the “prevention of marriages where one of the parties has a taint of African blood”. Had the bill passed, the racial status of countless whites would have been put in jeopardy. That it was proposed at all reveals a society that could not imagine such consequences. The South’s traditional flexibility on questions of race— the ease with which families like the Gibsons were able to assimilate into white communities, and the security that most people living as white had in their racial status— actually enabled white Southerners to embrace the idea of absolute, blood-borne racial difference.
If Gibson’s ideology demanded secession, more practical considerations motivated him to enlist in the army. Well before the presidential election of 1860, Gibson expressed doubts that the Union would survive and urged the South to “prepare for every emergency”, but his views did not bring the success that he craved. He ran for a seat at the state convention that would determine whether Louisiana would stay in the Union, but placed third out of four candidates. He had failed in business and politics. War seemed the only path left to a world that was bigger than cane fields and river levees. Ironically, when army life forced Gibson to confront the gap between his theories about race and how Southerners experienced it every day, the opportunity to serve trumped his ideology.
Soon after enlisting, Gibson was promoted to captain of an artillery company and then elected a colonel in the Thirteenth Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, ten companies totaling 830 men, mostly from New Orleans. They were, according to an aide, “as cosmopolitan a body of soldiers as there existed upon the face of God’s earth. There were Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Dagoes, Germans, Chinese, Irishmen, and, in fact, persons of every clime known to geographers or travellers of that day.” They wore “jaunty zouave uniforms,” drilled in English and French, sang songs in their native languages, speculated on their regiment’s unlucky number and lived a continuous “saturnalia” of gambling and drink.
Rather than dwell upon his recruits’ racial origins, Gibson focused on turning them into soldiers. As he worked with his officers in camp, he refused to subscribe to the gentlemanly romance of war. While many in his regiment predicted a glorious Confederate victory before they had finished their training, Gibson devoted himself to the study of military tactics. Without any experience in war, he knew that the army’s true weakness was a lack of “military men by education”, “scientific officers”, and “West Pointers.”
By late autumn, the regiment was leaving Louisiana for the war’s western front, marching as a band played The Girl I Left Behind Me. They reached Kentucky on the last day in November. Shrouded in snow and sleet, they camped on frozen ground and waited for the fight.