White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  Confederate ideologues turned to the language of class and breeding for obvious reasons. They were invested in upholding a hierarchy rooted in the ownership of slaves. When in 1861, Jefferson Davis spoke of “domestic institutions,” he meant slavery, and its protection formed the central creed of the new constitution that bound “men of one flesh” to the new nation. Vice President Alexander Stephens, in a speech given in Savannah on his return from the constitutional convention, took pains to make Hammond’s mudsill theory the cornerstone of the Confederacy. The delegates had instituted a more perfect government: first, by ensuring that whites would never oppress classes of their own race; and second, by affirming that the African slaves “substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.” Refuting the premise of Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech (that a nation cannot stand half slave, half free), Stephens equated the Confederacy with a well-constructed mansion, with slaves as its mudsill base and whites its “brick and marble” adornment. Presumably the brick represented the sturdy yeoman and the planter elite its finely polished alabaster.15

  Class concerns never lost their potency during the war. In 1864, as defeat loomed and the South’s leaders contemplated augmenting the army with slaves, some feared that the rebel nation would fall if deprived of its lowest layer. Black men would achieve a rise in status through military service, undermining general assumptions about the color-coded social hierarchy. Slaves had been impressed by state governments to build fortifications as early as 1861—a policy later adopted by the Confederate high command and the Davis administration. But putting slaves in uniform was a far more radical move, because it elevated them (as Hammond and Stephens had argued) above their station as menial mudsills. Texas secessionist Louis T. Wigfall raged in the Confederate Senate that arming slaves was utterly unthinkable, no different than the British eradicating their landed aristocracy and putting “a market-house mob” in its place. (“Market-house mob” was another term for class revolution, and deposing the aristocracy would turn the Confederacy into another mudsill democracy—like the enfranchised rubbish of the North.) Sounding like a snobbish English lord, Wigfall added that he did not want to live in a country where “a man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal.” In his mind, slaves were born servants, and raising them up by making them soldiers disrupted the entire class structure. Protecting that racial and class system was why southerners had seceded. In this way, class angst suffused Confederate thinking and served to unite southern elites.16

  Class mattered for another reason. Confederate leaders knew they had to redirect the hostility of the South’s own underclass, the nonslaveholding poor whites, many of whom were in uniform. Charges of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” circulated throughout the war, but especially after the Confederate Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1862, instituting the draft for all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Exemptions were available to educated elites, slaveholders, officeholders, and men employed in valuable trades—leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription.17

  The Union army and Republican politicians advanced a strategy aimed at further exploiting class divisions between the planter elite and poor whites in the South. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash. In his memoir, Grant voiced the class critique of the Union command. There would never have been secession, he wrote, if demagogues had not swayed nonslaveholding voters and naïve young soldiers to believe that the North was filled with “cowards, poltroons, and negro-worshippers.” Convinced that “one Southern man was equal to five Northern men,” Confederate soldiers saw themselves as a superior people. (The same five-to-one ratio was used by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper when he defended the Anglo-Saxon race in Land of Gold and claimed that one Kentuckian could trounce five dwarfish and feeble Nicaraguans.) In Grant’s estimation, the war was fought to liberate nonslaveholders, families exiled to poor land, who had few opportunities to better themselves or educate their children. “They too needed emancipation,” he insisted. Under the “old régime,” the prewar South, they were nothing but “poor white trash” to the planter aristocracy. They did as told and were accorded the ballot, but just so long as they parroted the wishes of the elite.18

  • • •

  By 1861, both sides saw the other as an alien culture doomed to extinction. In a speech delivered in 1858, the same year as Hammond’s famous mudsill oration, William H. Seward, the leading New York Republican who was to serve in Lincoln’s cabinet, coined the term “irrepressible conflict.” For Seward, free labor was a higher form of civilization, practiced by the “Caucasians and Europeans.” He blamed slavery on the Spanish and Portuguese, and reduced all of South America to a land of brutality, imbecility, and economic backwardness. Toppling slavery in the U.S. South, in Seward’s grand historical schema, was merely an extension of the continental march of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The two class systems—slave and free—were locked in a battle for domination, and only one would survive.19

  Of course, southern ideologues argued the exact opposite. Slavery was a vigorous and vibrant system, they insisted, and more effective than free labor. With a docile workforce, the South had eliminated conflict between labor and capital. Southern intellectuals alleged that the laboring class in the northern states was large, disruptive, jealous of the rich, and endowed with unwarranted political privileges. As Hammond and others saw it, the notion of equality had become the most deceptive fiction of the times. The very freedom “to think, feel and act,” a writer warned in Charleston’s Southern Quarterly Review, nurtures passion and provokes “unholy desire.” That “unholy desire” was the longing for social mobility. Slaves were content in their menial lot, many believed. In this strange reversal of the American dream, the South’s superiority arose, then, most ironically, from its absence of class mobility.20

  Secessionists painted a dire picture of class instability above the Mason-Dixon Line. In the North, a writer contended in a Virginia magazine in 1861, “people are born, bred and educated to their leveling views,” which might “reverse the condition of the rich and the poor.” Education and class equality itself was seen as subversive, and Helper’s Impending Crisis of the South was attacked as incendiary. Men were arrested, and some hanged, for peddling his book. Worried elites urged Confederate leaders to “watch and control” poor whites, “permitting them to have as little political liberty as we can, without degrading them.”21

  Not surprisingly, evidence exists to prove that southern whites lagged behind northerners in literacy rates by at least a six-to-one margin. Prominent southern men defended the disparity in educational opportunity. Chancellor William Harper of South Carolina concluded in his 1837 Memoir on Slavery, “It is better that a part should be fully and highly educated and the rest utterly ignorant.” Inequality in education was preferable to the system in the northern states, in which “imperfect, superficial, half-education should be universal.” As the Civil War arrived, editors and intellectuals called for an independent publishing industry in the Confederacy, in order to shield its people from the contamination of Union presses.22

  Confederates openly defended the idea that the planter class was born to rule. The “representative blood of the South,” the aristocratic elite, those of good patrician stock, were destined to have command over white and black inferiors. But for all their confidence about harmonious relations between the rich and poor in the South, many secessionists viewed nonslaveholders as the sleeping enemy within. White workingmen in places like Charleston were called “perfect drones,” whose resentments could potentially be marshaled against slaveowners. Antidemoc
ratic secessionists dismissed the poor as the hapless pawns of crass politicians, willing to sell their votes for homesteads or handouts. In 1860, Georgia governor Joseph Brown prophesied that the new Republican administration would bribe a portion of the citizens with offices, while others predicted that Lincoln would dangle bounties and cheap lands, using flattery and lures to ensnare the “lower strata of Southern society.” It was in response to such projections that small slaveholders in South Carolina organized vigilante societies and “Minute Men” companies, mainly to intimidate nonslaveholders who might try to forestall secession.23

  Some secessionists went out of their way to allay concerns over the loyalty of nonslaveholders. In 1860, James De Bow, the influential editor of De Bow’s Review, published a popular tract detailing the reasons why poor whites had every reason to back the Confederacy. He assured that slavery benefited all classes. Giving the mudsill theory an emphatic endorsement, he declared that “no white man at the South serves another as his body servant to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform menial services in his household!” Besides, he wrote, wages for white workers were better in the South, and land ownership was more dispersed—which was patently untrue. He went on: class mobility was possible for nonslaveholders who scrimped and saved to buy a slave, especially a breeding female slave, whose offspring were “heirlooms” to be passed on to the next generation. If his promises of trickle-down economics were unconvincing, De Bow tacitly confirmed that slaves’ elevation meant nonslaveholders’ utter degradation. For these reasons, he said, the poorest nonslaveholder would readily “dig in the trenches, in defense of the slave property of his more favored neighbor.” Fear of dropping to the level of slaves would lead poor whites to fight.24

  Disunion did not alleviate such fears. In the lower South, for example, there was no popular referendum on secession except in Texas. The upper South was in no hurry to bolt. The four states that left (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee) did so only after Lincoln called for troops; all of these states contained significant numbers of pro-Union residents. West Virginians seceded from Virginia and rejoined the Union. Jefferson Davis secured the presidency without opposition, reducing his election to a symbolic vote, rubber-stamping the choice of the elite minority in the Confederate Provisional Congress.25

  In addition to insulating the government from the people, a vocal contingent of delegates to the Confederate constitutional convention called for a repeal of the three-fifths compromise, instead counting slaves as whole persons for the purpose of representation in the Confederate legislature. This manner of representation benefited the states with the highest number of slaves. The South Carolinian novelist William Gilmore Simms, for one, thought that the border states, with their larger nonslaveholding populations, might “overslough” the cotton states. In that a slough was a swamp or mire, Simms was alluding to the mudsill-like nonslaveholders of the upper South, whose higher numbers would allow them to have more representatives than the slave-dominated states of the lower South. In the final draft of the Confederate constitution, the repeal of the three-fifths clause was voted down, but by the narrow margin of four to three states.26

  In 1861, a nervous Georgian, who worried that slaveholders were a minority, proposed that the new state government should establish an upper house composed only of slaveholders, much like the English House of Lords. Conservative Georgia and Virginia delegates to their respective state conventions wished to curb the “swinish multitude,” but in the end they refused to tamper with the right to vote. In Virginia, some elitists recognized the problem that conscription posed and sought to deal with it. Nonslaveholders might refuse to fight in a war designed to protect the slaves of the rich. Virginian Edmund Ruffin privately proposed a solution for his state: a dual system of conscription. In his two-track class system, one would require nonelite white men to take up arms, and another for planters’ slaves, who would be impressed by the state and put to work for the army. Too bold and too honest in broadcasting the prevalence of social inequality, Ruffin’s radical plan was never adopted.27

  The future did not bode well for southern patricians. If they remained in the Union, or suffered defeat at the hands of the Yankees, they faced extinction. The aristocracy would be washed away in a flood of northern mudsills and liberated slaves. Their own homegrown white trash were a problem as well. Presumably, without total victory, landless laborers and poor farmers might outbreed the elite class, and if corrupted by northern democratic ideas, they might overwhelm the planter elite at the ballot box.28

  • • •

  Throughout the war, the unfair conscription policy sparked serious grievances. Early on, Florida’s governor, John Milton, felt that the law could not be enforced, that poor whites would not stand for a substitution system that favored those who could buy a man to do his fighting for him. Exemptions protected the educated: teachers, ministers, clerks, politicians, as well as men in needed industries. Once the lowly conscripts were in the ranks, officers looked down on them as “food for powder,” or compared them to “Tartars” and barbarians, which were the same slurs that elite southerners used to demean Lincoln’s ruthless hordes. An Alabama recruit fed up with such treatment said the obvious: “They think all you are fit for is to stop bullets for them, your betters, who call you poor white trash.”29

  One odious feature of the draft was the “twenty slave law,” which granted exemptions to planters with twenty or more slaves. The provision shielded the already pampered rich man and his valuable property. Some nonslaveholders refused to fight for the protection of slavery, while others thought the wealthy should pay higher taxes to subsidize a war that benefited them most. Lower-class men wanted their material interests protected. Wealthy officers were readily granted furloughs, while common soldiers were expected to endure long terms of enlistment, jeopardizing the livelihood of families left behind. As one historian has concluded, poorer soldiers thought of themselves as “conditional Confederates.” This meant that poor farmers put their family’s well-being before their loyalty to the Confederate nation.30

  Southern gentlemen might be expected to fight without steady pay, but their definition of chivalry created an unrealistic standard for the lower classes. Class identity divided the ranks throughout the war. The “layouts,” men who refused to volunteer or to appear for service once drafted, were rounded up by guards who were crudely called “dog catchers.” Substitutes came from the poorest class of men, and were generally despised by other soldiers.31

  Desertion was common among poor recruits, so much so that by August 1863, General Robert E. Lee was pleading with President Davis to take action to curb it. Later that year, Davis issued a general amnesty to all men who returned. In other instances, while some soldiers were executed, most companies subjected deserters instead to humiliating punishments. They were put in chains or forced to wear a barrel. Vigilantes hunted down runaway conscripts, especially in North Carolina, which had the highest rate of desertion. A community in Mississippi seceded from the Confederacy, creating the “Free State of Jones” in the middle of a swamp; it was, quite literally, a white trash Union sanctuary in President Davis’s home state.32

  Deserters stole food, raided farms, and harassed loyal soldiers and citizens. Pockets of poor men and their families had become the anarchists that upper-class southerners had long feared. In Georgia, late in the war it had reached the point that deserters were threatening to kidnap slaves or, worse, conspire with runaways. In 1865, the wives of Okefenokee renegades taunted authorities by claiming that their husbands would rise out of the swamp, armed and ready to steal as many slaves as they could round up, and then sell them to the Union navy.33

  It is difficult to gauge what poor, illiterate soldiers thought of desertion, because they left no written records. But oral folk culture suggests that poor men openly joked about it. Desertion to them was part of the daily resistance to upper-class rule. One story making the rounds pitted a Georgi
a sandhiller against a North Carolina Tar-heel. Asked what he had done with a quantity of pitch, the Carolinian claimed he had sold it to Jeff Davis. Caught off guard, the sandhiller said, “What did old Davis want with all that for?” “Why,” the Tar-heel jibed, “you Georgians run so that he had to buy some to make you stick.”34

  There is no way to know precisely how many men deserted. The official count from the U.S. provost marshal’s report was 103,400. This was out of a total of 750,000 to 850,000 men listed as in the army by the end of the war. But these numbers are only a small part of the story. Class divided soldiers in other ways. The Confederate army dragooned at least 120,000 conscripts. There were between 70,000 and 150,000 substitutes, mostly wretchedly poor men, and only 10 percent ever reported to camp. Another 80,000 volunteers reenlisted to avoid the draft. Finally, as many as 180,000 men were at best “reluctant rebels,” those who resisted joining until later in the war. Such resistance demonstrates that among average soldiers there was little evidence of a deep attachment to the Confederacy.35

  Shortages in food fueled more discontents. As early as 1861, when planters were urged to plant more corn and grain, few were willing to give up the white gold of cotton. Consequently, food shortages and escalating inflation led to massive suffering among poor farmers, urban laborers, women, and children. One Georgian confessed that “avarice and the menial subjects of King cotton” would bring down the Confederacy long before an invading army could.36

  More disturbing, through, the rich hoarded scarce supplies along with food. In 1862, mobs of angry women began raiding stores, storming warehouses and depots; these unexpected uprisings blanketed Georgia, with similar protests surfacing in the Carolinas. In Alabama, forty marauding women burned all the cotton in their path as they scavenged for food. A food riot broke out in the Confederate capital of Richmond in 1863. When President Davis tried to calm the women, an angry female protester threw a loaf of bread at him.37