Race and Class in the Confederacy
Note: This essay deals with topics such as slavery, white supremacy, and segregation. If those topics make you uncomfortable proceed with caution. A quote is used using dated language. The author chose to censor the n-word used by a Confederate soldier.
Introduction
Before the main point of this essay is dived into, it must be first cleared up that secession and the Civil War as a whole were primarily caused by the issue of slavery. The expansion and strengthening of slavery were the primary political topic that enraptured the nation in the lead-up to the war. States’ rights were inseparable from the issue of slavery at that point. In South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union it is clearly stated that “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations” and have “enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute” laws that protect slavery, specifically the Fugitive Slave Act. Several other states such as Georgia, Texas, and Virginia specifically mention slavery as their primary cause of secession, the others did not issue documents justifying their reasons. Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy said in a speech on the Confederacy that its “cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition” and that the Confederacy “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Why then did Confederate soldiers, many of whom were poor farmers who did not own slaves, decide to fight for such a cause? To find the answer one must go back to the 17th century when a man named Nathaniel Bacon started a small rebellion that would have ramifications that still affect us to this day.
Bacon’s Rebellion and the Development of a Slave Society
In 1676, 100 years before the American Revolution would begin, Nathaniel Bacon was like many other Virginian frontiersmen, unhappy with the government’s handling of the frontier. This was especially true in regards to the conflicts with the natives on the colony’s edge. This sparked a rebellion in which rebels attack both natives and colonial institutions. As the rebellion gained steam the rebellion was made up of both African slaves and European indentured servants who began too focus much more anger on their shared economic oppression. While slaves had been on the continent since 1619, the Southern colonies had not yet been slave societies, that is societies whose economies and social structure are primarily based on slavery. A mix of African slaves and European indentured servants combine to make up the labor force. These two groups often shared sympathies with each other on a class basis and would even sometimes help each other escape from their masters. Their joining together in armed rebellion sent fear into the ruling classes. After the rebellion ended, planters and the upper classes, in general, had to make sure such a rebellion could not happen again. Their solution as historian Ronald Takaki put it was to “reorganize society on the basis of class and race.” This started a transition in the South to base their economics on the backs of slaves. Indentured servitude faded out to be replaced by African slaves. Poor Whites lacked economic power but now possessed racial power. If poor Whites saw Blacks as their enemies rather than rich Whites, the danger of a rebellion in which the poorer classes join forces across racial lines would be greatly diminished. The South, however, was poor and relatively nonimportant for economics as it was primarily based on tobacco, corn, and rice production. This would change with the invention of the cotton gin which would further
entrench the institution of slavery in the South. From this point, the South was transformed into the cotton-producing capital of the world. “King Cotton” would dominate the politics of the South, in fact, the Indian Removal Act and creation of Indian Territories was in part done to clear rich soil to make room for even more slave-based cotton plantations. According to Claudio Saunt in the book Unworthy Republic, “The coordinated expulsion of native peoples and deployment of unfree laborers satisfied the most intoxicating fantasies of elite with Southerners.” Without the native population, slavery was free to expand. Slavery was now inseparable from the Southern way of life.
Poor Whites in the South
Now that we have established that the South was more than a society with slaves, but a slave society where the so-called “peculiar institution” permeated every part of Southern life. Slavery was without a doubt the most harmful for the slaves themselves. They were taken from their lands, forced to work, beaten, raped, and killed. Slavery was without a doubt designed to work in the favor of the elites. But what of the poor Whites? For poor Whites in the Antebellum South and the Confederacy, they were stuck in a kind of semi-feudalism. European aristocrats admired that about the South. To them, the South was more European where the lower classes were kept in check as compared to the North that had relatively more social mobility. In the South, the only real way to move up in life was to own slaves. If someone was a poor White farmer, as most in the South were, who could not own slaves you were stuck in poverty. About 34% of the army of the Confederacy was these farmers, half of the enlisted men were farmers. Planters, those who likely owned multiple slaves made up roughly 27% of the Confederate army and the largest proportion of the officers. This was reflective of the South as a whole, poor farmers who either owned no slaves or perhaps rented a few were the largest population in the confederacy, but plantation owners dominated the hierarchy. While it is true that the number of individuals who owned slaves was fairly small in the South, the number skyrockets when you include the number of slaves owning families, or those who rented slaves.
In a debunking of a meme claiming only 1% of people owned slaves, Snopes describes that when instead of looking at the percentage of slave-owning families in individual Southern states “the number ranged from 3 percent to just shy of 50%.” As previously mentioned, families who did not own slaves often rented slaves from richer families. Still, most of the poorest in the south, and the majority of its population did not own slaves. Poor Whites were largely trapped in their poverty in a similar way in which peasants in the European Middle Ages were. Upward mobility was possible, but very rare and unlikely if the poor farmer was never able to own a slave. Some have argued that because of this, those poor farmers could not have fought for slavery as they did not own any. This claim, however, is untrue. As we will see, those who didn’t own slaves still had an extremely vested interest in defending slavery.
The Cause of the Confederacy
As previously established in this paper, the primary cause of secession was the defense of slavery. The governments of the South were very clear about it. This brings me to my first point regarding why those who owned no slaves could still fight for slavery. To explain why I will use an example. No one would disagree that in WWII the reason the German army was fighting was tied to Nazi war aims such as lebensraum. It is also true that not every Wehrmacht soldier was a Nazi. Just because a German soldier enlisted out of duty to their country while not being a Nazi, does not change the fact that the war’s cause was Nazi ideology. In the same way, the fact that a Confederate soldier signed up only out of patriotic duty to defend his state does not change that secession and the war was primarily caused by slavery. The average soldier knew this and was fully on board with fighting for such a cause, even if he did not sign up for that cause specifically.
On to our next point, the defense of the home state was deeply tied to slavery. Letters from Confederate soldiers often use language such as “our way of life” when describing what they were defending. What was this way of life? Slave society. The Southern way of life was deeply tied to slavery, even poor Whites interacted with slaves in slaves’ owners in their day-to-day life. Their way of life revolved around the institution of slavery. Similarly, whenever a Confederate soldier refers to “our property” it is a thinly veiled reference to slavery. And lastly, the reason poor non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers fought for a nation that defended slavery was that as long as slavery existed, they had one thing no slave or ex-slave could ever have, white skin. Due to the semi-feudal system of the south, it would be in the class interests of the poor Whites to abolish slavery. “Free labor” as it existed in the North, while still 19th-century capitalism, provided more freedom and opportunity for upward mobility than a slave society did. However, they vehemently defended the existence of slavery because they all knew that if slavery was abolished, there would theoretically be nothing separating them from the ex-slaves. Under slave society, they believed that they may be stuck in poverty, but at least they weren’t black. With slavery abolished, they’d go from the second-lowest rung on the ladder to the very lowest one. In his book For Cause and Comrades, James M. McPherson quotes a Louisiana artilleryman who said “I never want to see the day when a negro is put on a equality with a white person. There is too many free [n-word] … now to suit me, let alone having for millions.” Even a dirt farmer claimed to fight against the Yankees who wished to make White people equal to Black people. McPherson claims that “Herrenvolk democracy-the equality of all who belonged to a master race-was a powerful motivator for many Confederate soldiers.” This is why Southern men fought for a cause that went against their class interests. That cause was the defense of their way of life and the only thing giving them any level of social status. In the Confederacy, as long as you were White, you mattered.
Conclusion
I could have discussed this topic at much more length. The level at which slavery permeated American politics in the leadup to the Civil War is extensive and involves all-out fights and duels in Congress. But I have gone on long enough. I have shown how the Confederacy existed to defend slave society. A society that began when rich Whites sought to defend their position. A society that was expanded at the expense of all who stood in the way. And a society that thousands fought and died for. Poor Whites had to choose between their class interests, ending slavery and recognizing the rich as the ones who kept them in poverty, and their race, being deceived into thinking Black people were their real enemy. Ultimately most decided that their race was more important. Their worst fears seemed to be realized during radical reconstruction when black Americans held an unprecedented level of political and economic achievement. They reacted with violence and eventually Jim Crow society was established. The descendants of these men would grow up under a Lost Cause education. Many of them would grow up to become segregationists. When the Civil Rights movement reached its full force in the 1950s and 1960s, they would take up the Confederate flag as a symbol of racial superiority. The flag represented the segregation system and the earlier slave system. Many would say the flag represented their heritage and not hate. In a twisted way, they were right, a heritage of viewing Black people as the enemy and defending white supremacy.
