How do you explain poor whites who fought for the Confederacy?

Great Debates
1

In this sesquicentennial of the American Civil War (Sept 22 will mark the 150th anniversary of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation) I have been hearing lots of debates from neo-Confederate revisionists who want to pretend that the conflict had little to do with slavery.

Now I more than suspect that this theme per se has been debated into the ground, so we don’t have to rehash it all unless you want to.

But there is one argument I got from one person on the Internet that makes me wonder. He points out that his family fought for the Confederacy, but that they were so poor that they could not even have accepted a slave if one had been given them, because they could not afford to feed him (or her). In fact, some kindly black house slaves from a local plantation used to take pity on his family and, with the permission of the master, used to bring these poor whites table scraps. I am not just talking about the situation at the end of the war when the whole South was starving. These people used to depend on this kind of charity long before the war.

In fact, they were materially worse off than the house slaves, who probably ate very well and had good clothing and a roof over their heads.

My southern friend seems to be making the argument that the civil war could not have been about slavery if his “po’ white trash fambly” fought so firecely for the South.

I have made the point that although the majority of southerners did not own slaves, the actual power in the CSA was firmly in the hands of rich people who had a heavy investment in “human machinery”.

Jefferson Davis himself admitted in his memoirs that the South could have won if everyone had done his part. This makes me suspect that even he knew that a lot of poor southern whites knew it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”.

This leads me to wonder if the South actually DID vote to secede in any democratic sense. After all, of the total population of about 9 million in the Confederacy, about 3.5 million were slaves who did not vote. Of the remaining 5.5 million whites, probably half were female. The right of adult males to vote varied by state, but I read somewhere (and cannot verify) that most had property qualifications that eliminated all but about 10-20% of males. . . . . in other words, the rich.

Does anyone have the total figures on how many people voted for secession in each state compared to the total population of the state?

Sooo. . . . . .

DID poor southern whites strongly support secession and fight for the CSA, and if so, why?
DID non-slave-owning whites support slavery, and if so, why?
Does the participation of poor whites in the forces of the CSA “prove” that the war was not about slavery?

2

By 1860, every state had abolished property qualifications. Pretty much every white male citizen over 21 could vote.

3

Of course not, any moreso than the participation of poor whites in the GOP proves that they are looking out for the best interests of the poor.

4

If that is so I stand corrected. But the fact remains that the people who ran the Confederacy appear to have been almost all slave-owning upper-class.

5

In the PBS documentary The Civil War, a historian relates an anecdote where a Union soldier asked that question of a white-trash Confederate POW, and the answer was, “'Cause y’all are down here!” State and regional consciousness was still more important than national consciousness in a lot of minds (or the war could not have happened); they saw what they saw as their homeland being threatened by what they saw as foreigners. It was that simple.

As for slavery, most Southerners of all classes hated and feared Abolitionists like 1950s conservatives hated and feared Communists. The reason the poor whites did not want the boat rocked was because they lived in fear of the blacks among them just like the slaveowners did – fear that if the boot ever were eased off their necks just a little, they would rise up like the slaves in Haiti, and start killing all the white people they could catch, as in that rebellion. Southern whites lived with this fear at all times, every day.

6

The poor whites fought because they had been invaded.

7

That is, white Southerners did. Whatever opinions the blacks might have had, they were wise to keep to themselves.

8

Well why didn’t southerners push to peacefully emancipate and integrate the slaves into society before the rest of the country had to set their human rights violating asses straight? Why live in fear of the bomb when you have the power to defuse it?

Surely poor southerners knew you don’t generally kill your neighbor.

Also, how about the bigotry known as Jim Crow? They were free, seems like if you’re scared of them rising up, you wouldn’t needle them. You’d want them to feel like one of you and yours. In fact you’d make them one of you and yours. You don’t rise up and kill your friends. You have BBQs with them and cook outs, and emotionally support each other, and all that good stuff.

Instead the south carried out it’s bigotry into living memory when yet again the rest of country had to set their retarded asses straight. If it wasn’t in inexcusable malice it was inexcusable stupidity.

9

Many did, yes, because up until the Civil War, most Americans’ primary loyalty was to their State, rather than the United States. The poor whites will have seen it as a “your State” vs. “my State” conflict, and, regardless of what it was about, supported their State.

They were in direct competition, economically, for jobs with the “free (as in no-cost) labor” the slaves provided. However, slavery was, to them an unquestioned institution – just the way things are. If you asked them, they would never have conceived of the idea of living side-by-side peacefully with all those former slaves, so they would have asked you “Well what the hell we gonna do with all them slaves? And who the hell will pick the cotton?” They aren’t going to actively resist the institution of slavery, for the very simple reason that they will have been unable to imagine what the alternative would be like.

Not a bit. The South seceded at the instigation of the political classes, for political reasons, and the poor whites went along out of State loyalty, trusting their political classes to do the “right thing”. The political classes went to war over slavery. All other issues, while real, were a direct economic consequence of the differences between slave and free economies. Even if “tariffs” was the primary issue for southern politician X, the tariff issue was only an issue because it affected a slave economy differently than a free one. Pick any other issue they fought over. At heart, that issue was only important because of slavery. And the poor whites fought for their State, regardless of the issues.

These are all just MHO, and I’m no expert. Take 'em with a grain or two of salt.

10

People fought in the Civil War for the same reasons people fight in most wars. Because their government tells them to.

It’s hard to say what percentage of the southern white population supported secession. In most states the decision to secede was made by legislatures and special conventions which may not have been representative of the general electorate.

11

Interestingly some in the south remained loyal. West Virginia, for example.

12

Of course not, any moreso than the participation of poor blacks in the Dems proves that they are looking out for the best interests of the poor.

See what I did there?

13

Yeah, bigotry is awful, all right.

14

I recall that the motivation was mostly in the vein of southern identity and propaganda to stir up sentiments of “Those damn Yankees are trying to tell us what to do…We formed this Confederacy…Now, they’re coming after us.”

Also… Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma were *claimed *by the Confederacy, but were mostly loyal to the Union and largely remained in Union control. In Kentucky for example, an unelected splinter group declared the state to join the Confederacy, but the elected politicians in Frankfort were either pro-Union or pro-neutrality.

West Virginia (then northwestern counties in Virginia) split from Confederate Virginia to join the Union in 1863 after the Wheeling Convention petitioned President Lincoln for statehood. The region that became WV was not nearly as reliant on farming and slave labor compared to the rest of the South. Prior to the Civil War, the northwestern Virginia voters and delegates did not have much influence in the far away Virginia General Assembly in Richmond. The Union sympathy and presence of Union troops in what is now WV during the war caused the regional division to boil over.

15

Not so hard to say in Georgia. Georgia held a secession convention. You either voted for a secessionist delegate or an anti-secessionist delegate. Surprisingly, a very thin majority of voting Georgians voted for anti-secessionist delegates (42,744 to 41,717) however, because of the distribution of those votes, a majority of elected delegates were pro-secessionist. (Sort of like the way Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the Electoral College.) Cite. So Georgia wound up seceding against the wishes of a majority of its voting citizens.

Nevertheless, once secession happened, and particularly once Virginia was invaded, there was a pronounced rally-round-the-flag effect. If you had asked most Confederates why they signed up (well, those who weren’t drafted) the answer would have been “To repel the Yankee invaders!” or maybe (the irony being lost on them) “For liberty!”

16

Which would be an entirely reasonable reason to fight were it not for the fact that the South started the war by opening fire on Fort Sumter before which there was no ‘invasion.’ I’m not ascribing this sentiment to you, but it’s disturbing how often the Civil War is still seen as the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ in the South. Even more disturbing is the cognitive dissonance of those who will grudgingly acknowledge this truth and in the next breath continue to insist the war was caused by Lincoln’s aggression.

17

Yes; you created a false comparison. It would only work if the North was attacking with the goal of slaughtering poor white Southerners. The Republicans are deeply bigoted and the enemy of blacks and other minorities, and have been for decades; voting against them is simply a matter of rational self interest for any of those minorities regardless of how they feel about the Democrats.

18

Fallacy known as equivocation. From Executive Order 11063 to the ACA (average lifespan of black US citizen six years below that of a white one), the Democrats have demonstrated they’re acting in the interest of poor black people.

19

Coming forward 150 years, I’m impresed by the the poor people who are against health care reform because it’s unAmerican - fantastic achievement of indoctrination.

20

The two most important aspects of the situation have already been noted, but I will cast them in a slightly different way: class and (for lack of a better term) “nationalism.”

Poor whites very often felt a need for slavery. It was the one thing that kept them from being considered the “untouchables” of the South. That, in fact, is where the phrase “poor white trash” originated; it meant someone who was so lacking in class or social position that only their white skin prevented them from being the lowest of the low–a black slave. No matter how badly they might have been scorned, there was always one group of people who were held in lower regard.

In a biographical sketch of Rosa Luxemburg I once saw, I noted the reactions she and other Socialists expressed at the beginning of the First World War. They had spent over ten years rallying workers to their parties and encouraging those workers to oppose the build-up to what many foresaw as the coming European war and encouraging their members to begin considering themselves citizens of Europe instead of their individual countries. In rally after rally, their membership grew while those points figured prominently in the reasons for that growth in membership. In the few weeks following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, their correspondence reflects a great sadness that their efforts had come to nothing as their membership abandoned their parties in the thousands to enlist in the armies.
A loyalty to the state in which one lived, (whether a European nation or a U.S. state), was a very strong emotion that created a movement that overwhelmed any serious considerations of the consequences of war.

It should also be noted that the overwhelming propaganda of the South promoted the idea of the rightness of slavery for decades. Not only in newspapers, but in public oratory, (a much more popular medium of entertainment in those days). Having grown up hearing nothing but the need for slavery, (couched in terms of providing the South with its only successful export cash crops of cotton and tobacco, providing “good” homes for blacks who (supposedly) would not otherwise be able to take care of themselves, and providing security to prevent “savage” blacks from running amok across the countryside if freed), the typical poor Southerner was unlikely to consider the arguments from “outsiders” that there was anything wrong with slavery. It would have been considered the natural order of things and any effort to abolish it would have been perceived as an attack on that natural order.