Why assume that only slave owners in the CSA could have been fighting for slavery?

Great Debates
1

There is an argument frequently made by neo-Confederate apologists which, as far as I can see, is never adequately challenged in the recurring debates about whether the Civil War was about slavery. Perhaps more should be done to shoot down this BS.

The argument seems to say that the CSA troops could not have been fighting for slavery since most of the boys in gray did not own slaves.

To turn the reasoning around, this argument seems predicated on the very questionable idea that anyone who approved of slavery would have gone on to buy himself a slave or two.

One southerner whose ancestors had fought for the CSA, with whom I debated on the Net, said angrily that his family in 1860 were dirt farmers who could not even have fed a slave if one had been given to them, and therefore his ancestor could not have been fighting for slavery.

It seems to me this argument is crap for a number of reasons.

First of all, we know how many slaves there were (about 4 million) but do we really know how many white households owned one or more slaves? Some estimates are as high as 40%, which means that slave-owners in the south were not exactly a tiny minority.

Secondly, even whites who did not own slaves had relatives and friends who did, so that “slave owners and their supporters” might well have been a majority of the population.

For example, Mark Twain’s father, a judge, appears to have only dabbled in slave ownership, but Twain’s uncle, on whose farm young Sam Clemens spent summers, had 20 slaves.

Twain fought for the Confederacy (albeit briefly) and later regretted that he had ever supported the cause of slavery. Interestingly, Twain does not use the modern excuses of wanting to defend states’ rights, or protesting some vague tariff, like today’s neo-Confeds do.

Regarding the support for the slave cause by poor whites who could never have afforded a slave, Twain says this:

…the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the “poor white” did detest the slave lord, and did feel his own shame. That feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances, was something–in fact it was enough; for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn’t show on the outside.

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Poor whites had been brainwashed into supporting slavery by a system of pro-slavery censorhip and info manipulation that had existed since at least 1840. Abolitionists were lynched, abolitionst pamphlets were kept out of the south by postmasters, and ministers of religion used the Bible to preach the God-given rightness of slavery. Luckily for them, the Bible contains abundant verses favouring human bondage. Anti-slavery ministers were quickly run out of the south.

It is probable that the vast majority of CSA soldiers in 1860 had never heard a single anti-slavery argument.

2

I think it’s connected to the idea that racism is about individual acts or beliefs, rather than institutional and social structures that everyone participates in. So unless someone is personally doing something blatantly racist, he or she is assumed to be not racist.

President Obama spoke on this general subject recently (though everyone just focused on him using the n-word). It’s one of the biggest obstacles to productive conversations about race in America, in my opinion.

3

The Southern “way of life” has never just been about slavery. It was also about preserving the belief system of negro inferiority and white supremacy. Slavery was just the most obvious manifestation of this belief.

Also, I’m guessing that poor white Southerners back then had a similar mindset to poor white conservatives today. I recently watched a documentary about a rural white couple dealing with poverty due to their unemployment. Food stamps and food pantries were keeping them and their kids afloat. But they were rabidly anti-Obama. The deal was this: Despite being at the bottom for so long, they genuinely saw themselves as only temporarily distressed. They firmly believed that they were just one phone call from catching a break, and then they would have the American Dream they’d been promised.

I’m guessing their ancestors had the same optimism. “We may be dirt farmers now, but one day we’ll be rich enough to get us a slave or two. Ain’t no nigger-lover president gonna take that dream away from us!”

4

I don’t think “brainwashed” is a good verb for the attitudes of poor whites. They were very much aware that the presence of an enslaved people prevented them from being relegated to the lowest rung of the social ladder. From that perspective they needed slavery to achieve or maintain their personal image that they were not trash. (Hence the term “white trash” coined by slaves to identify the poorest whites.)

That is why they supported the votes for secession. And, while Shelby Foote’s anecdote about the captured Rebel soldier*probably bears a lot of truth, it is also true that for the majority, they supported the political actions that led to war.
*When asked about the American civil war, Foote resorted to an anecdote. Early in the conflict, he used to say, a squad of Union soldiers closed in on a ragged Johnny Reb. Figuring that he did not own slaves,nor had much interest in the constitutional question of secession, they asked him: “What are you fighting for, anyhow?” The Confederate replied: “I’m fighting because you’re down here.” Foote regarded that as “a pretty satisfactory answer”.

5

Can any sane person tell me that a man who volunteered to fight for the CSA did not at least suspect that he was supporting the perpetuation of slavery, whether or not he owned slaves himself? Look at the facts:

  • The slave states whose economies depended the most directly on slavery immediately rushed to secede from the union after the election of Abe Lincoln, who had made it quite clear that he loathed slavery, even though he was willing to tolerate its existence where it was already in place.

-Four of the seceding states (Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina) have left us formal declarations of secession in which slavery is cited over and over and over as their reasons. The vague arguments about states’ rights and tariffs are mentioned little or not at all in these documents.

  • Extant quotations by people like CSA Vice-President Alexander Stevens made it abundantly clear that the desire to protect and preserve slavery was the foundation of the secession movement.

Could any human being fighting for the CSA have been unaware that he was fighting for the cause of slavery, WHETHER OR NOT HE OWNED SLAVES HIMSELF?

I must make one concession, though. The fact is that the Confederacy had more draftees than the Union. The idea that all these dirt-poor early-day Dukes of Hazard joined the Confederate forces willingly and fought like demons is not entirely true. Jefferson Davis himself in his memoirs says that the CSA might have won if everyone had done their share. While there are not many records of anti-war southerners (they obviously kept a low profile) there were more than a few southern whites who knew that the war of secession was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”. Many moved west to escape the draft. And yes, we must admit that some draftees might have been against slavery but obliged to fight for the CSA anyhow. So there were SOME who may not have been fighting to preserve slavery.

6

I am curious why you are even posting this question. This board has a minuscule number of “States Rights” proponents, but I do not recall ever hearing the claim you are questioning. (Even Foote’s anecdote does not go that far.)
Do you have a citation for anyone holding that position?

7

I think the idea that only a small elite were in the slaveholding system is persistent. But slave holding was a little more broad based.
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html
In states such as South Carolina and Mississippi about half of all families had slaves.

Factor in that many non-slaveholding whites were artisans who made products for the planters, worked as foremen or other “management” positions, worked in institutions that served the slave economy such as banks or auction firms, or provided food crops for cotton plantations, the fact is that the majority of whites in the deep south were part of the plantation economy.

The slave patrol was another feature that tied most white southerners to slaveholding. Able-bodied white males were required to police the roads and towns, detain blacks without passes, and otherwise work to apprehend and return any suspected fugitive slaves.

A clear majority of southerners saw emancipation as a threat to their livelihoods and sources of income, status, and power in 1860. The main exceptions were hill dwellers and others who were more remote from the slave economy, in areas such as the Appalachians, Ozarks, and the Texas Hill Country - as well as the Red River Valley of Texas, which mainly supported Midwestern style grain farming.

The secession process was well-documented and took place in the clear light of day. Each state had a vote, and we can clearly see the results of these elections. Each elected convention made a clear case for why it let the Union, and the leaders of the Confederacy made it abundantly clear what they stood for. When Lincoln said, during his second inaugural, that “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war…” no one called bullshit on him in 1865.

8

If you mean the original question raised in my OP, I have no cite to offer you here, but I have debated with some people in the form of back-and-forth Youtube comments or other message boards, and yes, I have heard arguments to the effect that the CSA could not have been fighting for slavery because the majority of southern soldiers did not own slaves. I also heard a couple of southerners making that point on CNN when discussing the issue of the Confederate battle flag recently. So yes, I have heard the argument put forward. As I mentioned, another variant is “my family was so poor they could not even have been able to feed a slave if they had gotten one for free.” Sorry if I don’t have an actual quote to offer you. We can just drop this thread if nobody thinks it is worth discussing or if you think it is about a straw man…

9

If the north had told the slave owners that they could keep the slaves they had, but they could never own any more, the South would have rejected that offer. Their interest wasn’t in maintaining ownership of the exact slaves they had at that moment, their interest was in being able to continue to have the right to own slaves. And everyone fighting for the CSA had that right.

10

I can totally imagine that there soldiers who thought they were fighting to defend their town, county, and/or state, rather than for some ideology.

In a hundred years, when we’ve become more enlightened and emotionally detached from current events, perhaps we will understand the true causes of the Iraq War. And your future counterpart will insist that American soldiers knew good and well they were fighting for oil because HOW COULD THEY NOT KNOW. And they would be wrong.

11

Even if it was accepted as true I’m not sure how it matters. Cannon fodder don’t get to decide what they fight for. That’s up to political leaders and war planners. For example, something like two million American military members served in Vietnam. How many of them could even find Vietnam on a map before the war? How many do you think really cared about containing communism in SE Asia, or about South Vietnamese independence?

12

Sorry, your analogy does not work because there is one major difference between the two wars.

The US government did not admit in black and white and in unequivocvally clear speeches by its leaders that oil was the reason for the war.

This is completely different from the Civil War. The Confederate States obligingly produced declarations explaining their secession in at least four existing documents, and these documents, voted upon and approved by the states in question, make it 100% clear that a desire to preserve slavery is their chief and almost sole motivation for leaving the Union. Then there are speeches by people like Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stevens and confederate government member Benjamin Judah who once again make it clear that slavery is what it is all about.

This is what I can’t believe about modern Confederate apologists. The evidence is there in black and white, but it’s like talking to a wall. Yes, some Confederate soldiers may have felt they were fighting for mom and apple pie, but nobody with a normal intelligence could be unaware that they were above all fighting FOR slavery in defence of a new country, the CSA, that had been founded to maintain slavery. Nobody could have been unaware of that fact.

After the war was lost, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but it did not abolish mom or her apple pie, now did it?

13

You’re assuming that everyone was well-informed back in those days. A lot of people were illiterate and unexposed to media outlets–especially Confederate draftees. If their preacher or the town mayor told them the war was about protecting “our way of life”–without actually saying what they meant by that–it wasn’t like that draftee could tune into MSNBC or Fox News to find out the “truth”.

Do you think the majority of Confederate conscripts and draftees heard these speeches and read all the declarations of war?

I can imagine that some soldiers understood that slavery was the proximate cause of the war (just like 911 was the proximate cause of the Afghanistan War), but also believed that the root cause was more complex. “If the Yankees try to stop us from having slaves, what’s next? They gonna force us to treat 'em like people too?” A case of the non-fallacious slippery slope argument. It’s kind of like how many people would be willing to take up arms against the US for repealing, say, the 2nd Amendment, even if they don’t particularly care about the 2nd Amendment. It would be the principle of the thing motivating them to fight, not really the thing itself.

14

You have to remember that governments don’t always reflect the country they govern. Look at Congress; over forty percent of them are lawyers. In the nation as a whole, less than one percent of Americans are lawyers.

In the pre-bellum south, the equivalent would have been slave owning. While a lot of southerners didn’t own slaves, the people who were running the southern states were virtually all major slave owners. They decided to secede and declare war. The rest of the south just went along with this out of a sense of loyalty.

15

Judah Benjamin.

I’m currently reading a book about Lincoln’s assasination, so this jumped out at me.

16

I sit corrected. Thanks.

17

As someone who finds both sides of the American Civil War almost equally repugnant ---- its partly the tendency by some to try to paint the North as fighting to end slavery when the documentation is that preservation of the Union was the chief cause, if you will pardon the word, for the average Yankee soldier - and a majority number of the political leaders as well. But in that debate, its the Northern revisionists who become the brick wall. So we end up with, as we sometimes do in history, a perpetual stalemate.

And a lot of interesting threads for Great Debates. :smiley:

That entire war, and especially the peace, was so badly handled by both sides that it could just be a wound that will never disappear altogether. At some level you just get used to it.

18

I disagree. The United States government, including the Lincoln administration and Lincoln himself, were always clear that their primary goal was to restore the Union. I haven’t encountered the revisionists you claim are saying otherwise.

But either way, I disagree with your claim of moral equivalency. It doesn’t matter whether the cause was to restore the United States or to abolish slavery, the United States held the moral high ground on both issues. And in addition, the United States held the moral high ground due to being the country that war was declared upon.

19

I think Lincoln’s POV was that if he didn’t save the Union, tyrants would use that to say that democracy doesn’t work and tyranny is the only effective answer. This to him would have been worse than slavery; better only some should be free than no one should be free.

20

You Europeans may have forgotten this or it was not included in your history books but the USA fought a Civil War over this and hundreds of thousands died to settle this unjust act.

In the US slavery was abolished (:-