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The fear of loss of status, of being no better than the enslaved was engrained in the minds of plain and poor whites in the Confederate states. In order to insure compliance, racist fears were the mechanism used to get plain folks to fight against their own interests. The old strategy, race, came into direct play again. The much-touted Civil War was not the total coming together of the southern people to fight for a noble cause but an active class conflict. The resentment toward the planter elite and the war was so intense that deserters formed guerilla bands or gangs and attacked government supply trains, burned bridges, and even raided plantations. Still unconvinced, poor men deserted in great numbers, their rallying cry, “It is a rich man’s war.” By 1864, Jefferson Davis had to admit that “two-thirds” of the fighting men were absent. Poor men were forced to fight when in April, 1862, the Confederate Congress passed a military conscription act. What was considered most unfair was that planters who owned twenty or more slaves were excused from the draft. While wealthy planters continued to plant cotton, small farmers grew food stuffs and bore the brunt of impressment. Two practices that fueled class resentment and undermined the elite’s control over poor whites were military inscription and the confiscation of personal property, or impressment. It was felt by those in power that controlling the lower classes might be easier and slavery more secure in a confederacy of slaveholding states. Those at the top of the economic scales were the wealthy planters and other businessmen who benefited especially from the cotton industry at the bottom were yeoman farmers and poor whites.Īs had been the concern of the power elite during the Colonial Period, fear of lower classes of whites encouraged strategic decisions this time it manifested in secession from the Union. By the beginning of the Civil War, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very few. The planter elites had privileges that protected them from actual combat, even while the war protected their interests as slaveholders.
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Class resentment as portrayed in the movie The Free State of Jones presented a realistic picture of the feelings of many plain non-slave-holding whites.Ĭlass issues played heavily in feelings about and support for the war. It has even been suggested that the Confederacy lost the war because of the number of Confederate desertions. The Civil War has been characterized as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Poor farmers and just plain folks in the South were antagonistic toward the elite planters and the war itself. The Civil War is a dark example of the influence of class and ultimately racism upon the outcome of the conflict. Most of America’s wars have been fought by those without the money or power to avoid military service.