Why They Fought

Careless writers have written as if all the Confederate soldiers were slaveholders. Since the slave population was hardly more than one third of the total, such an idea is manifestly absurd. In the Atlantic South there were three sections. In the mountainous regions, where the amount of arable land was small, there were few slaves. The Piedmont, or hill country, was a land of small farms, where the greater part of the population owned no slaves, and a smaller proportion, a small number. In this section, however, were a few great plantations along the rivers, on which the number of slaves was larger. The stronghold of slavery was on the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts, and along the lower Mississippi. Here were great bodies of level land on which slaves could be employed to advantage.

In 1860 there were in all the slaveholding states 384,000 slaveholders. The white population of these states was more than 12,000,000. Evidently not one person in thirty held slaves, or reducing the population to families, about one family in five held slaves. More than half of the slaveholders in North Carolina held less than five; only one hundred and thirty-three held one hundred or more. Some of the leading men, and a large proportion of the great captains of the war held no slaves. Robert E. Lee inherited many, but had emancipated them in 1862. Joseph E. Johnston, A. P. Hill and Fitzhugh Lee had never owned a slave. Stonewall Jackson had owned two, which he bought at their own request ; one was allowed to buy his freedom, the other refused. J.E.B. Stuart, the dashing cavalry commander, owned two in his lifetime, but at the outbreak of the war held none. In the famous "Stonewall Brigade" the proportion of slaveholders is estimated at one in thirty.

In truth "more than half of the Confederate officers in 1861 owned slaves," writes historian Joseph Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse. As young army recruits, only a few of the enlisted men personally owned anyone, but more than a third of them were members of slave-owning families. And as young white men in America, they all benefitted from membership in a society which prospered from the system of slavery.

These men were not consciously fighting for slavery. The theory of the paramount allegiance to their states had become a part of their duty was to the commonwealth in which they lived. As they saw it, the national government was attempting to coerce their states, which had exercised their constitutional right to withdraw from a compact which they had entered, and which they believed to be working to their injury. This does not mean that the question of slavery did not precipitate the war, or that there might not - probably would not - have been a war but for slavery. If slavery had not existed, the development of some of the slaveholding states would have been different. In 1810 North Carolina's textile production, for example, was greater than that of Massachusetts, and it seemed that the logical development would be into a frugal manufacturing state. The growth of slavery prevented such a development. Such states would naturally have shared the general change of attitude toward the general government, which slowly took place between 1789 and 1860 in the Northern States. The truth is that the Southern States had stood still.

Slavery drove the South into opposition to the broad, liberal movement of the age. The French Revolution; the destruction of feudalism by Napoleon; the later popular movements throughout Europe and South America; the liberalizing of Great Britain; and the strong nationalistic feeling developing in the northern part of the Union itself had but little reflex action in the South because of slavery and the South's consequent segregation and tendency to a feudalistic nationalization. In 1789 the states were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the states.

As early as 1848 the aggression on the rights of the South had become such a menace that John C. Calhoun contended that we ought to "force the issue of the slavery question in the North;" and said, moreover, "We are now stronger, relatively, than we shall be hereafter politically and morally."

The defeat of the proslavery people caused intense feeling throughout the South, and when the Republican party came into power by the election of Abraham Lincoln, November 6, 1860, the leaders in Southern politics knew that all hopes of a further extension of slave territory were gone, and they immediately began to plan for a dissolution of the Union. That the Republican party would be content to restrict slavery in the territories and leave it unmolested in the states, no southerner believed. The South preferred, instead, to think that John Brown was the true exponent of the Republican theory, and saw in his fanatical attempt at a servile revolt a forerunner of abolitionist control. In the prolonged fight the section had convinced itself that slavery was an economic good, to be preserved at any cost. The leaders now only had to lead, for behind them was a popular sentiment for secession that grew stronger every day.

The South Carolina Senators withdrew from Congress November 9 and 11, and that State formally seceded, by a vote of the people, December 20,1860. On the 20th of December 1860, an ordinance of secession was passed in South Carolina. South Carolina followed up the ordinance of secession with a declaration of independence which attempted to justify her action. It asserted that "The states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them." The non-slave-holding states "have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the states and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery." It complained of the open establishment of abolition societies; of the encouragement of slaves to escape, or rebel; of the election, by a section, of one who had declared that the "government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free"; of the elevation to citizenship of persons "who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens"; of the announcement that the South "shall be excluded from the common territory; that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease." No mention of the tariff as a grievance is made in the document. All of the South Carolina senators and congressmen had voted for the tariff of 1857, and the fiery Keitt himself could say in the secession convention, in reply to a suggestion that it be mentioned, that no tariff since that of 1832 had caused any desire for secession.

It was followed by Mississippi January 9; Florida, January 10; Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; Texas, February 1; Virginia, April 17; Arkansas, May 6; North Carolina, May 21; and Tennessee June 8, 1861. The western portion of Virginia refused to secede, and became a separate State in 1863.

Just north of the lower South came a tier of states less identified with the plantation system, having fewer slaves as well as a larger proportion of non-slave-holding whites. North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas were doubtful. Had slavery been the only issue they might not have risked secession for it. But they, as their neighbors, had been taught for many years that the Union was a compact, terminable at will, upon suspicion of violation. The sovereign rights which all the states had possessed in 1787 they believed still to exist, since none of their political teachers had dwelt heavily upon the maxim that " this Constitution . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Fear of aggression upon slavery might not have moved them, but should coercive means be used to hold the lower South in the Union, such attack upon the cherished sovereignty of states was likely to drive them to secede.

The War of the Rebellion, so far as the Confederacy was concerned, was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. It was in behalf of the elements in control, and of the government of the States composing the so-called Confederate States of America. Carl Sehurz gives this apt description of the poor whites: "They had but a very dim conception, if any conception at all, of what all this fighting and bloodshed was about. They had been induced or forced to join the army by those to whom they had been accustomed to look up as their superiors. They had only an indistinct feeling that the war had not been undertaken and was not carried on by the South for their benefit. There was a 'winged word' current among the poor people of the South which strikingly portrayed the situation, as they conceived it to be, in a single sentence: ' It is the rich man's war and the poor man's fight.' This was so true that the poor whites of the South could hardly be expected to be sentimentally loyal to the 'Southern cause.' Hence, whenever a good opportunity offered and special hardships were being suffered by rebel soldiers there were many deserters to the Federal lines from this class of soliders, who were nevertheless excellent -soldiers while in the ranks. . . . Such poor whites lived and died and knew nothing better than to be the abject followers of 'the slave-holding aristocracy, oppressors and misleaders of the common people, who had resolved to destroy the Republic if they were not permitted to rule it.'"

It was the poor whites of the South who were forced to the front in the war of secession and did the principal battling; thr Confederate State of Alabama, with other States South, having passed an act exempting from conscription for service in the war the large holder of chattel slaves.