Connecticut's Surprising Civil War History

The high-minded cause of destroying slavery is what many of us think drew Connecticut and the rest of the North into the American Civil War, but that wasn't the dominant reason, according to Matthew Warshauer, the author of a new book about Connecticut and the war.

"We have this tendency to think that Connecticut was all abolitionist, and it wasn't," said Warshauer, whose book, Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice and Survival, was just published by Wesleyan University Press.

"Over the last 150 years, the South has been very defensive because the war has been placed in the context of the moral North thumbing its nose at the immoral, slaveholding South, when in reality much of the North was just as immoral or unconcerned over slavery and its outlook," he said.

Connecticut had plenty of abolitionists, famously including Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Prudence Crandall, who tried to start a school for black girls. The state also was where the Africans who were enslaved on the Amistad and took over the ship from their captors were eventually freed after a trial. Also, Abraham Lincoln won a solid majority of Connecticut's votes in the 1860 election.

But as Warshauer recounts in the book, Connecticut only gradually on its home turf, and didn't complete the process until 1848, when there were only a half dozen slaves left. The abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison once called the state "the Georgia of New England" for its hostile attitudes toward blacks.

Democrats who believed the South had a right to secede and that it was wrong to abolish slavery did well at the polls, and the state soundly rejected proposals to grant voting rights to blacks both before and after the Civil War.

"The simple truth is that in the 'land of steady habits,' one of the steadiest was a virulent racism," Warshauer writes.

Even many Republicans opposed only the spread of slavery into new territories (the "Free Soil" issue that became part of the party's platform), and they stressed to voters that the "Slave Power" of the South was a threat to a Northern economy built on the "Free Labor" of capitalism. One argument about "Free Soil" that appears to have resonated with voters was that it would be better not to have blacks transported to the West.

One Republican campaigning in Connecticut during the crucial election of 1860 took a "moderate" stance that distanced him from abolitionists, even while he favored stopping the expansion of slavery. He likened it to a cyst that doctors couldn't remove surgically because it might kill the patient. Instead he advocated containing slavery, making a compromise "as our fathers did; giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established, while we possessed the power to restrain it from going outside those limits."

That Republican, as Warshauer notes on page 45, was Abraham Lincoln.

Sectional rivalry was also a concern: If the South became too powerful, the interests of Connecticut and the rest of the North might be ignored or even opposed by the federal government. When the Emancipation Proclamation was eventually issued, it was promoted and accepted as a useful war measure, giving the North an advantage that might end the war sooner.

"Few of the state's some 55,000 men who marched to war did so with the goal of black freedom," Warshauer writes. "Nearly half of Connecticut's population was steadfastly opposed to fighting the South."

But the great motivating factor for many, perhaps most who marched off to war was patriotism or nationalism—the idea that the Union, one of the world's only democracies at the time, must be preserved. "One simply cannot underestimate the power of nationalism and the patriotic response to the call to duty when the nation is threatened," Warshauer writes. "It goes beyond the complexities of policy, arguments over westward expansion, and issues of states' rights ..."

The Northern response to the attack on Fort Sumter was similar to the nation's response to the Sept. 11 attack in 2001: shock and an overwhelming patriotism, together with an urge to fight in the nation's defense.

An enormous proportion of Connecticut men of military age went off to war. A total of 47 percent of males between the ages of 15 and 50 went into uniform. Among the state's 8,627 black residents, 78 percent of black males between the ages of 15 and 50 entered military service, and the state formed two regiments.

The state's soldiers were spread throughout the conflict so that some were present in every major military engagement of the war. Of the 55,684 Connecticut men who went off to war, 5,354 were killed in uniform. Others returned home with wounds that often included missing legs and missing arms. Many were psychologically shattered.

Warshauer, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, said the book came out of a graduate class three years ago in which he asked students to concentrate on the state's role in the war. They found such a wealth of material from old newspaper accounts and other sources that Warshauer picked his best five students and "spent a year doing really in-depth research and a lot of conversation, and that's where the book came from."

Although the volume focuses on the state's role in the Civil War, the book also provides details about Connecticut history regarding slavery, race, civil rights and attitudes about race from colonial times and before the war, as well as in its aftermath.

"I wanted to write a book that would be of value to scholars—and that's why all my notes were beefed up—and I wanted to make sure the scholarship was solid," Warshauer said. "But I wanted to make sure someone who's a smart reader—they don't even need to know anything about the Civil War—can pick it up and understand what was going on nationally and in Connecticut."

The war is important for the general public to understand in large part because it provides important insight into political and social questions today, said Warshauer, who is the co-chair of the "Connecticut Civil War Commemoration Commission" and organizer of Central Connecticut State University's "Commemorating the Civil War: Connecticut Connections," a conference held this Friday on the university campus.

"We're still arguing over issues of states' rights and the power of the federal government—what's constitutional and what's not," he said. Those debates go well beyond, for instance, whether the federal government has a right to mandate that individuals get health insurance.

"We cannot possibly understand the legacy of race and the issue of being an African-American in today's society," Warshauer said, "without understanding this broader history."

Editor's note: For another article on Matthew Warshauer and his book, see