# How do you explain poor whites who fought for the Confederacy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 1, 2012, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526 "2012-04-01T23:45:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/21 "2012-04-02T14:37:01Z")
The way I see it, the poor southern whites were even worse off (in some ways) than the slaves. Because of the huge amount of slave labor in the South, their wages were depressed-why pay if a slave could do the work? Also, the fact that local education was paid for by property taxes meant that whites received an inferior education (the big slaveomners controlled the legislatures)-they had no desire to pay high taxes. That explains why literacy rates in the antebellum South were the lowest in the country. Finally, a slave was an asset-the owners had to feed and house them, whereas there was almost no support for poor whites. All of this was summed up by Mark Twain-he wrote about how the poor whites took up arms to defend a system that kept them in poverty and ignorance…its too bad they never made a common cause with the slaves.This might have ignited a revolt, which would have overturned the whole rotten system. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/22 "2012-04-02T14:43:55Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 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. I was just re-reading historian Bruce Catton last week. I think that he would concur with the above pretty firmly. He wrote about the poor, non-slaveholding whites being firmly against “Negro equality” – at least they felt they were better off then the slaves on some level, and they feared both the slaves’ physical vengeance and their competition for jobs and wages. And it’s pretty clear that the slaveholding classes – the planters and fire-eaters – deliberately fanned these fears. He quoted propaganda that was variations on “The Northerners want to marry [black slaves] to your fair daughters and give them your land and your jobs!” While there was certainly a lot of sectional loyalty and a direct response to the perception of having been invaded, do not discount a quite deliberate large-scale propaganda effort to stir up hatred and persuade non-slaveholding people to fight for secession. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/23 "2012-04-02T14:49:46Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > I was just re-reading historian Bruce Catton last week. I think that he would concur with the above pretty firmly. He wrote about the poor, non-slaveholding whites being firmly against “Negro equality” – at least they felt they were better off then the slaves on some level, and they feared both the slaves’ physical vengeance and their competition for jobs and wages. And it’s pretty clear that the slaveholding classes – the planters and fire-eaters – deliberately fanned these fears. He quoted propaganda that was variations on “The Northerners want to marry [black slaves] to your fair daughters and give them your land and your jobs!” I disagree, in part. I don’t think fear of black insurrection and violence had much to do with it. Many if not most poor whites lived in areas where blacks were a decided minority. I don’t think poor whites in these areas were exactly trembling in their boots over a black uprising. On the other hand, I do think there was fear of competing with blacks in the marketplace, and that fear was certainly exploited in secessionist propaganda. But again, I think the primary reason poor whites rallied to the Confederate cause was simple nationalism. Repel the invaders, that sort of thing. ---
**Author:** ![tullsterx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e9bcb4/32.png) [@tullsterx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tullsterx)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/24 "2012-04-02T15:31:20Z")
Why is anyone still interested in a pissing match concerning the US Civil War? It was about all of the above. Slavery, states rights and preserving the union. You can’t say it was about one thing or the other. The south seceded largely due to the federal abolition of slavery, and then the north took military action to preserve the union. To say it had nothing to do with slavery is obviously wrong. But, there were other factors involved. And I would say that a lot of the poor families that fought for the union were just “supporting the home-town boys” or defending their home. Also, I would like to point out that the issue of states rights was a much more heated issued then, than we can ever really understand today, where the federal government is such as established behemoth. But, of course, we still have that fight going on. . . ---
**Author:** ![gamerunknown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6bbea6/32.png) [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/25 "2012-04-02T16:47:48Z")
There are [casualties](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Southern_Strategy) in that fight though. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/26 "2012-04-02T16:54:59Z")
As many as a quarter of Confederate troops were conscripted. Did your friend mention whether his ancestor was a volunteer? ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/27 "2012-04-02T17:23:34Z")
> [@tullsterx](#): > > The south seceded largely due to the federal abolition of slavery, Note that there was not only NO abolition of slavery at the moment secession became reality, but the federal government was on record as denying any intent to abolish slavery. So no, that’s not what happened, unless the South led the world in time-travel science. Now the election of Lincoln, who had campaigned on a platform of not extending slavery into the territories, foreshadowed a long-term _marginalization_ of slavery…specifically, it implied that the South’s previous near-permanent stranglehold on Federal power, disproportionate to its population, would eventually become a _political_ (and not just a demographic) minority as new (non-slave) states would be admitted to the Union. So one could argue that the South seceded at the time that it did to forestall the perceived pending loss of the political dominance to which it had become accustomed. Indeed, that’s the argument I’ve come around to, after decades of reading on the subject. While I recognize that slavery was the major, minor, and in every significant way _real_ cause of the South wanting to _maintain_ that political dominance, which they used almost entirely to protect slavery, the precipitating event (Lincoln’s election) in effect caused them to see that their influence would, at some point in the future, no longer predominate. They’d been all for compromise when compromise meant “we get our way on the important stuff.” But when it no longer worked that way, they chose to take their ball and go home. It’s a fair question whether they had _ever_ believed in sharing power – they stayed only as long as they knew they were winning. Now, if you’ve been following the program so far, you’re probably wondering “what’s the sense in withdrawing from a political union _while you’re strong_ just because you fear one day you won’t be strong? Won’t that immediately result in your not having any influence at all?” Yes, that’s exactly what happened. Immediately after returning to their seceded home states, Southern congresscritters wrote to Washington to propose meetings to “amicably settle questions of property” (mainly meaning Federal forts and arsenals in the seceded states). They got very little reply – because the Northern congresscritters were busy admitting Kansas to the Union, passing bills for “internal improvements,” and pushing through a lot of legislation the Southern members had been resisting for years. Just as the Soviets would learn one day when walking out of the UN Security Council meeting (the US immediately rushed through a resolution involving the UN in the Korean War), when you leave the table, the other side usually jumps at the chance to push through whatever you’ve been opposing. . ---
**Author:** ![Valteron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f17d59/32.png) [@Valteron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Valteron)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/28 "2012-04-02T18:46:28Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > As many as a quarter of Confederate troops were conscripted. Did your friend mention whether his ancestor was a volunteer? No, he did not. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/29 "2012-04-02T18:56:09Z")
> [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > …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. Oh, the poor white Southerners instituted Jim Crow? Nope. Those laws were a reaction to the [Populist movement](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_org_populist.html)–in which white & black workers were working together. Any variety of prejudice is ugly. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/30 "2012-04-02T19:03:50Z")
People sometimes join armies for reasons having very little to do with whoever that army happens to be fighting at the moment. Some people join an army because it’s a way to get paid and fed. Sometimes you even get benefits after you’ve served. I could see that being attractive to someone who was very poor, even if they didn’t really care one way or the other about slavery. ---
**Author:** ![Valteron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f17d59/32.png) [@Valteron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Valteron)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/31 "2012-04-02T19:18:08Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > 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. There seems to be something downright irrestible about nationalism compared to class interests. The former seems to trump the latter every friggin time. An earlier poster mentioned that the poor whites should have made a common cause with the slaves against the system that was exploiting them both!!!:rolleyes: Yeah, right. When donkeys fly! It is in fact downright uncanny how easily the upper classes can use nationalism to get the lower classes to ignore their own interests. The same thing happened again in Germany **AFTER** WWI . Nationalism had lost traction with German workers because of the horrrible effects of the war (not many people realize how much starvation there was in Germany between 1914-18) and by the late teens and early 20s, the Communists/Socialists DID appear to be moving the workers back to an international viewpoint. This is one reason the officer class in the German Army paid for people like Corporal A. Hitler to learn to become gifted orators for nationalism. Indeed, Hitler constantly stated that his objective was to “nationalize” the masses. In other words, stop thinking of yourselves as workers and come back to thinking of yourselves as Germans. George Orwell also noted with great despair the lack of international class solidarity by British workers, who did not lift a finger to help Republican Spain when it was being crushed by Franco. ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/32 "2012-04-02T19:49:23Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > As many as a quarter of Confederate troops were conscripted. Did your friend mention whether his ancestor was a volunteer? Whereas only about five percent of the Union army consisted of conscripts. The Confederacy also had a far higher rate of desertion, though I don['t remember the number off hand. Clearly someone was very unhappy with the war. ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/33 "2012-04-02T19:52:49Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > People sometimes join armies for reasons having very little to do with whoever that army happens to be fighting at the moment. Some people join an army because it’s a way to get paid and fed. Sometimes you even get benefits after you’ve served. I could see that being attractive to someone who was very poor, even if they didn’t really care one way or the other about slavery. Well, if he joined the Confederate army to get fed, he joined the wrong army. Adventure was one reason both Northerners and Southerners joined. Bear in mind that everybody expected a short and not very bloody war, not the cataclysm that actually happened. Never underestimate the allure that a military uniform can have for a young man. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/34 "2012-04-02T20:08:49Z")
> [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Well, if he joined the Confederate army to get fed, he joined the wrong army. Yes, but I’m not sure it was too much better on the home front in the Confederacy. Inflation was a big problem- there’s a reason why Confederate money is worthless today. Of course, armies fighting near where you lived wouldn’t have helped, either. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/35 "2012-04-02T20:35:01Z")
One more reason poor whites fought for the Confederacy: It was a chance to **fight.** Whom or why were matters of secondary importance. Southern American culture is much more martial than Northern; more Southerners than Yankees have served in the U.S. Army in every conflict but the Civil War, and, in opinion polls, Southerners **always** are more likely than Northerners to support/demand military action. You can read all about this in [_Vietnam: The Necessary War,_](http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Necessary-War-Reinterpretation-Disastrous/dp/0684842548) by Michael Lind, drawing heavily on [_Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed) by David Hackett Fischer and [_The Cousins’ Wars,_](http://www.amazon.com/The-Cousins-Wars-Religion-Anglo-America/dp/0465013708) by Kevin Phillips. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/36 "2012-04-02T21:00:01Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > 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. Partisan sniping aside, I’d say you might be onto something and it’s possible poor white folks still supported slavery for the same reason poor white folk support tax cuts on big businesses, abolition of the “death tax”, flat taxes and so forth right now: sure, \*today \*they might not even own the shirt on their back… but they’re going to strike it big aaaaany minute now ; and then by gum they’ll want to own slaves ! ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/37 "2012-04-02T21:02:01Z")
I don’t have any insight into white Southerners during the war, but the comments about them fighting against their own interests show some bias. People don’t act against their interests, even if they act against what you think is in their interest. Interests are very subjective–which are vital, versus merely important or utterly unimportant, differs from person to person. You’ll fail to understand someone if you don’t understand what’s important to them. Don’t jump to the conclusion that what you consider important matches theirs. ---
**Author:** ![Valteron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f17d59/32.png) [@Valteron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Valteron)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/38 "2012-04-02T21:04:47Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > 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. [Cite](http://ngeorgia.com/history/secession.html). So Georgia wound up seceding against the wishes of a majority of its voting citizens. Here is another interesting fact. Georgia’s population passed 1 million residents for the first time in 1860. Census figures that year indicate that more than 591,000 of those residents (56 percent) were white, and nearly 466,000 (44 percent) were black. So about 600,000 whites in the state in 1860. Now then, assuming that men over 21, women over 21, and persons of both sexes under 21 each made up roughly one third of the population, that means there could have been 200,000 votes cast for or against secession. But in fact, adding the numbers in the quote above, only about 84,000 white male Georgians voted, out of 200,000? Even if you set the number of white males over 21 at a mere 160,000, you still get a partcipation rate of only about 50%. Did the others not consider it an important enough issue to vote upon? How democratic is it that the fate of 1 million Georgians was decided by the votes of 41,717, who represented barely 4% of the population and did not even represent a majority of those who voted? Also, the fact that whites were nearly outnumbered by blacks in the state overall (and actually outnumbered in some areas of the state) gives us another insight into the southern fear of a black uprising set off by aboloitionists and “meddling Yankees”. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/39 "2012-04-02T21:18:18Z")
> [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Adventure was one reason both Northerners and Southerners joined. Bear in mind that everybody expected a short and not very bloody war, not the cataclysm that actually happened. Never underestimate the allure that a military uniform can have for a young man. I get the impression that people were more likely, before the World Wars and Vietnam war of the twentieth century, to think of war as a glorious thing. They didn’t have TV or the internet- they weren’t seeing the dirt or the blood and guts, or reading tweets or blog posts in real time from people actually fighting the war. They probably had had a very different idea of what war was like than we do now, and that’s not even taking into account the very real differences between what war is like now and what it was like then. There are probably people throughout history who have joined the military to get away from their families or their sucky jobs. I bet being a poor farmer in the antebellum South was up there on the suck-o-meter, as jobs go. Poverty doesn’t generally improve how families get along now, all else being equal, so there’s not much reason to think poor families always got along then. Obviously, those types of motivations have little or nothing to do with why a particular war was being fought. People have always fought in wars for lots of reasons. Some of those reasons had to do with the larger reason why the war was being fought, some didn’t. You can’t infer the validity of the larger reasons for the war from an individual’s decision to fight in the war. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2012, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526/40 "2012-04-02T21:46:14Z")
> [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Whereas only about five percent of the Union army consisted of conscripts. The Confederacy also had a far higher rate of desertion, though I don['t remember the number off hand. Clearly someone was very unhappy with the war. Yes, although I think that’s a function of population as much as anything else. The North had a much larger pool of able bodied men to draw volunteers from, and with greater industrialization I think it’s reasonable to infer that there was a larger proportion of those men who could pick up sticks and join the army. If you’re a farmer, you can’t just leave to fight a war; by the time you get back, your crops will be gone. It’s also worth noting that Northern conscripts were on the hook for one year. The South conscripted men for only three months at first, thinking that the war would be over quickly once the European powers got involved (particularly after the first Bull Run). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-explain-poor-whites-who-fought-for-the-confederacy/617526.md?page=3)