23.See “The Differences of Race Between the Northern and Southern People,” Southern Literary Messenger (June 1, 1860): 401–9, esp. 403. On patrician rule in the South, see Frank Alfriend, “A Southern Republic and Northern Democracy,” Southern Literary Messenger (May 1, 1863): 283–90. On tempting the poor, see “Message of Gov. Joseph E. Brown,” November 7, 1860, in The Confederate Records of Georgia, ed. Allen D. Candler, 5 vols. (Atlanta, 1909–11), 1:47; William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, Secession Debated: Georgia Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bernard E. Powers Jr., “‘The Worst of All Barbarism’: Racial Anxiety and the Approach of Secession in the Palmetto State,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 112, no. 3/4 (July–October 2011): 139–56, esp. 151; Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 134. And on vigilante societies and “Minute Men” companies, see West, From Yeoman to Redneck, 68–69, 76–81, 84, 91–92. Northern observers in the southern states wrote that many poor whites opposed secession but felt “forced to maintain silence.” See “The Poor Whites at the South—Letter from a Milwaukee Man in Florida,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, April 15, 1861. Alfriend repeated the same argument as Governor Brown, that the Lincoln administration would win over the poor whites by “all the glozing arts at the command of himself and his adroit advisers, he will flatter the vanity and pamper the grasping and indolent propensities of the people for federal bounties and cheap lands,” and that the Republican message will peculate down to the “lower strata of Southern society.” He also predicted that what awaited the South was either a war of conquest or a class war: “If not conquest, it will be civil war, not between the North and South, but between the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder backed by the North.” See “Editor’s Table,” Southern Literary Messenger (December 1, 1860): 468–74, esp 472.
24.James D. B. De Bow was a South Carolinian who relocated to New Orleans to publish his own periodical. At first titled the Commercial Review of the South and West, it later became De Bow’s Review. Although early in his career he advocated public education and industrialization in the South, he fully embraced the secessionist rhetoric that “cotton is King” and slavery was the major source of the South’s superiority. De Bow published The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder as a pamphlet in 1860, and then republished the piece as articles in the Charleston Mercury and De Bow’s Review. See James De Bow, “The Non-Slaveholders of the South: Their Interest in the Present Sectional Controversy Identical with That of Slaveholders,” De Bow’s Review, vol. 30 (January 1861): 67–77; Eric H. Walther, “Ploughshares Come Before Philosophy: James D. B. De Bow,” in The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 195–227; and Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 234. Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia made a similar appeal to poor whites; he praised the high wages in the South, and warned that if slavery was eliminated poor whites would lose legal and social status and slaves would plunder those living in the mountainous region of the state—a region known for a high proportion of poorer nonslaveholders. Elite secessionists praised his appeal and felt it was “well calculated to arouse them” to the cause of secession and would fortify their minds against all appeals that might “array the poor against the wealthy.” See Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic, 49–51.
25.Rable, The Confederate Republic, 32–35, 40–42, 50–51, 60–61; Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic, 63–65, 110, 117–23, 153, 156; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 308; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 51, 55, 63, 75, 81; and G. Edward White, “Recovering the Legal History of the Confederacy,” Washington and Lee Legal Review 68 (2011): 467–554, esp. 483. The Southern Literary Messenger felt that constitutional reform should restrict the franchise from “classes incapable of exercising it judicially,” thus freeing the Confederate government from the “mercy of lawless and untutored majorities”; see “Editor’s Table,” 470; also see Richard O. Curry, “A Reappraisal of Statehood Politics in West Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 28, no. 4 (November 1962): 403–21, esp. 405. And on Unionists in East Tennessee and their fear of secessionists imposing an elitist government, see Noel L. Fisher, “Definitions of Victory: East Tennessee Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” in Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Homefront (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 89–111, esp. 93–94.
26.Simms feared that the border states would promote manufacturing and thus increase the poor white population. See William Gilmore Simms to William Porcher Miles, February 20, 24, 1861, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, eds. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Oldell, and T. C. Duncan Miles, 5 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–56), 4:330, 335; Alfriend, “A Southern Republic and Northern Democracy”; also see “The Poor Whites to Be Dis-Enfranchised in the Southern Confederacy,” Cleveland Daily Herald, February 2, 1861. The editor of the Southern Confederacy, T. S. Gordon of Florida, defended not only the rejection of Jefferson’s notions of the rights of man, but the idea that his generation had the right to “think for themselves” and disregard the “opinions of their forefathers”; see a reprint of Gordon’s article in “Bold Vindication of Slavery,” Liberator, March 22, 1861; and Rable, The Confederate Republic, 50, 55–56.
27.For the slaveowners’ House of Lords, see Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, February 9, 1861. While Ruffin called the masses the “swinish multitude,” Georgia conservatives called them the mob or “domestic foes”; see William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 2:167–71, 176, 542; Rable, The Confederate Republic, 42; Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic, 101, 130–31, 143, 178–79, 184; McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 43; see reprint and discussion of editorial published in the Charleston [SC] Mercury in “Seceding from Secession,” New York Times, February 25, 1861. For another example of secessionists viewing the three-fifths compromise as a usurpation of southern rights, see “National Characters—The Issues of the Day,” De Bow’s Review (January 1861); on race as a “title of nobility,” see “Department of Miscellany . . . The Non-Slaveholder of the South,” De Bow’s Review (January 1, 1861).
28.“The Southern Civilization; or, the Norman in America,” De Bow’s Review (January/February 1862).
29.See John F. Reiger, “Deprivation, Disaffection, and Desertion in Confederate Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 48, no. 3 (January 1970): 279–98, esp. 286–87; Escott, After Secession, 115, 119; Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), 160; “The Conscription Bill. Its Beauty,” Southern Literary Messenger (May 1, 1862): 328; and Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 153. On using the slur “Tartar,” see James D. Davidson to Greenlee Davidson, February 12, 1861, in Bruce S. Greenawalt, “Life Behind Confederate Lines in Virginia: The Correspondence of James D. Davidson,” Civil War History 16, no. 3 (September 1970): 205–26, esp. 218; also see Williams, Rich Man’s War, 122; Bessie Martin, Desertion of Alabama Troops in the Confederate Army: A Study in Sectionalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 122.
30.On the twenty-slave exemption, see Williams, Rich Man’s War, 132; Escott, After Secession, 95; also see King-Owen, “Conditional Confederates,” 351, 359, 377–78. James Phelan measured patriotism in class terms: he wrote that the “pride of intellect, position, and education will only acutely feel its necessity and spring with alacrity to the post of such danger and sacrifice.” The poor white farmers lacked those qualities. See James Phelan to Jefferson Davis, May 23, 1861, in The War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 130 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), Series IV, 1:353, also see Escott, After Secession, 115; Rable, The Confederate Republic, 156, 190–91; Harris, Plain Folk and Gent
ry, 64; Jack Lawrence Atkins, “‘It Is Useless to Conceal the Truth Any Longer’: Desertion of Virginia Soldiers from the Confederate Army” (M.A. thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2007), 41–42.
31.Class-conscious men felt that honor and service displayed that they were the “right breed of people”; see Lee L. Dupont to his wife, February 27, 186[1 or 2], Dupont Letters, Lowndes-Valdosta Historical Society, as quoted in David Carlson, “The ‘Loanly Runagee’: Draft Evaders in Confederate South Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 589–615, esp. 597. William Holden, the editor of the Raleigh Weekly Standard in North Carolina, became a vociferous critic of conscription. He wrote, “We are not willing to see any one white child starve to death on account of this war, while the negroes are fat and sleek.” See Raleigh Weekly Standard, July 1, 1863, as quoted in Rable, The Confederate Republic, 190–91. On “dog catchers,” see John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate Capital, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1866), 2:317; also see an editorial from the Richmond Whig, reprinted in “The Rebel Army and the Rebel Government,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1862.
32.Robert E. Lee to President Jefferson Davis, August, 17, 1863, in The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 591; also see Atkins, “Desertion among Virginia Soldiers,” 47–48; Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 179–80. North Carolina’s desertion rates may have been closer to Virginia’s numbers, but it is extremely difficult to get an accurate estimate; see Richard Reid, “A Test Case of the ‘Crying Evil’: Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War,” North Carolina Historical Review 58, no. 3 (July 1981): 234–62, esp. 234, 237–38, 247, 251, 253, 254–55. For retaliation against Confederates who joined the Union, see Lesley J. Gordon, “‘In Time of War’: Unionists Hanged in Kinston, North Carolina, February 1864,” in Sutherland, Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence, 45–58; Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War, 28, 43–46; see Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
33.On Georgia deserters and the defiant wives of renegades, see Carlson, “The ‘Loanly Runagee,’” 600, 610–13; and Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 180–81.
34.For the joke, see Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, December 23, 1864. Drawing on the work of James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (1985), Katherine Guiffre points out that powerless groups often engage in everyday acts of rebellion—gossiping, malingering, petty theft—instead of extreme acts, such as fomenting a large-scale uprising; see Katherine A. Guiffre, “First in Flight: Desertion as Politics in the North Carolina Confederate Army,” Social Science History 21, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 245–63, esp. 249–50, 260. I argue that jokes served a similar purpose, making light of what the ruling elite saw as acts of treason, cowardice, or mutiny.
35.Historians debate the estimates of men who served in the Confederate army. For the most recent estimates, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 152. On desertion, see Mark A. Weitz, More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); and Reid, “A Test Case of the ‘Crying Evil,’” 234, 247. For the best study on the problem of disaffection among conscripts, substitutes, and those who enlisted late in the war (two groups often ignored in studies of Confederate soldiers’ motivation), see Kenneth W. Noe, Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army After 1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 2, 7, 88–89, 94–95, 108, 113–14, 178, 190. As Noe notes, conscripts and substitutes, the men most likely to be disaffected, are also the two cohorts about whom historians have the least knowledge of their personal feelings. It is difficult to track down the correspondence of these men. Class also determines who was literate enough to write—so historians who rely on personal letters inevitably reflect a class bias. For the lower-class origins of substitutes and the difficulty identifying them, also see John Sacher, “The Loyal Draft Dodger? A Reexamination of Confederate Substitution,” Civil War History 57, no. 2 (June 2011): 153–78, esp. 170–73. For another example of festering resentment, Sergeant William Andrews of the First Georgia Volunteers wrote after Lee’s surrender, “While it is a bitter pill to have to come back into the Union, don’t think there is much regret at the loss of the Confederacy. The treatment that the soldiers have received from the government in various ways put them against it.” See David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 194.
36.Williams et al., Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War, 25–29, 34–36; also see “Cotton Versus Corn,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 4, 1861.
37.See Teresa Crisp Williams and David Williams, “‘The Woman Rising’: Cotton, Class, and Confederate Georgia’s Rioting Women,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 49–83, esp. 68–79; on the riot in Richmond, see Michael B. Chesson, “Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 2 (April 1984): 131–75; for two accounts of the Richmond bread riot of 1863, see Mary S. Estill, “Diary of a Confederate Congressman, 1862–1863,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 39, no. 1 (July 1935): 33–65, esp. 46–47; and Jones, April 2, 1863, A Rebel Clerk’s Diary, 1:285–87; also see Williams, Rich Man’s War, 99, 100–101, 114–15; Escott, After Secession, 122. As Lebergott argued, because the Confederacy failed to collect sufficient taxes, it was forced to rely on impressments, which often targeted the weakest members of society: farms run by women whose husbands were soldiers. This practice encouraged desertions and heightened women’s anger toward the government. See Stanley Lebergott, “Why the South Lost: Commercial Purpose in the Confederacy, 1861–1865,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1983): 58–74, esp. 71–72. In defense of the Confederacy, some reports insisted that the Richmond protest was not a “bread riot,” and that the cause was crime, not want; see “Outrageous Proceedings in Richmond,” Staunton Spectator, April 7, 1863; but in the same newspaper, another article argued that class conflict was going to destroy the Confederate cause, see “The Class Oppressed,” Staunton Spectator, April 7, 1863.
38.“Pity the Poor Rebels,” Vanity Fair, May 9, 1863.
39.Entries for July 26, 27, 1863, Lucy Virginia French Diaries, 1860, 1862–1865, microfilm, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville; Stephen V. Ash, “Poor Whites in the Occupied South, 1861–1865,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 1 (February 1991): 39–62, esp. 55.
40.On government officials dining on delicacies while soldiers were suffering, see Jones, September 22, 1864, A Rebel Clerk’s Diary, 2:290; and on snubbing Varina Davis, see Jones, March 19, 1865, A Rebel Clerk’s Diary, 2:453.
41.“The Drum Roll,” Southern Field and Fireside, February 18, 1864; and Anne Sarah Rubins, The Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 88. The same theme of the loss of class privilege (wives forced to clean the “slops of the bed chamber”) appeared in the Richmond Daily Whig, February 12, 1865; see George C. Rable, “Despair, Hope, and Delusion: The Collapse of Confederate Morale Re-Examined,” in The Collapse of the Confederacy, eds. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 129–67, esp. 149–50; and “Items of Interest,” Houston Daily Telegraph, December 21, 1864.
42.See “Sketches from the Life of Jeff. Davis,” Macon Daily Telegraph, March 12, 1861. For southern papers calling Lincoln a drunken sot, see “The News,” New York Herald, May 21, 1861. For Lincoln derided as the “Illinois ape,” see Josiah Gilbert Holland, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, MA, 1866), 243; also see “A Bad Egg for the Lincolnites,” The Macon Daily Telegraph, September 18, 1861, and Richmond Examiner, October 19, 1861. On Davis’s and Lincoln’s shared birthplace of Kentucky, see “News and Miscella
neous Items,” Wisconsin Patriot, March 30, 1861. For Hunter’s opinion of Lincoln, see Letter from Salmon Portland Chase, October 2, 1862, in Diary and Correspondence of Salmon Portland Chase, eds. George S. Denison and Samuel H. Dodson (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1903), 105. And for the slur against midwesterners, see John Hampden Chamberlayne, Ham Chamberlayne—Virginia: Letters and Papers of an Artillery Officer in the War for Southern Independence, 1861–1865 (Richmond, VA, 1932), 186. Chamberlayne also criticized people in Maryland for their free-labor ethos and Yankee blood. He described them as having low character, “with the education of common schools, with Dutch instincts dashed with Yankee blood.” He dismissed them for only working to make money, believing that the man “is worthiest who most unremittingly toils with his hands, or if with his brains, he must dry them up with years of mechanic toil over Day Book & Ledger.” See ibid., 105.
43.“The Presidential Campaign,” New York Herald, June 8, 1860.
44.“The Educated Southerner,” “The Effect of Bull Run upon the Southern Mind,” “Anti-Mortem Sketches,” and Charles Godfrey Leland, “North Men, Come Out!,” Vanity Fair, May 6, August 17, August 21, and September 28, 1861. On Vanity Fair, which was published from December 31, 1859, to July 4, 1863, see James T. Nardin, “Civil War Humor: The War in Vanity Fair,” Civil War History 2, no. 3 (September 1956): 67–85, esp. 67; also see “The Bad Bird and the Mudsill,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863.
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