ricardo clark and dempsey both went to Furman, which in South Carolina, so they wouldn't have developed as they had without the South... Besides, Texas was originally wanting to side with the Union...
if anything, kind of like people complain about illegal immigration now, because they provide a cheap labor source, poor white people should have opposed slavery because all those slaves were taking up high paying jobs that they themselves could have been performing. but then of course, they needed someone a little lower on the social ladder rung to look down on.
Who wants that remembered in history? We don't want to teach our 7th graders that guerilla/civilian warfare and what could very well be deemed 'terrorism' is an acceptable means of conflict resolution.
you know, I must admit that though I was a history major in college (emphasis in European history though), this is the first I heard of just how nasty the civil war got in the midwest. and I heard about it on NPR yesterday too (on Fresh Air I think). yeah, I guess it's not convenient for us to remember that part of our history.
There's actually been a decent amount of scholarship debating this issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Folk_of_the_Old_South I know it's Wiki, but it sums up the arguments made by scholars on both sides of this issue. Not surprisingly, reality was much grayer (no pun intended) than just planters with slaves and poor whites without.
Well it's not like it's hidden so I'm not sure why more people don't know about it. Surely, most studies of the Civil War include discussions about John Brown and Bleeding Kansas. Even in pop culture stuff like True Grit, Matt Damon's character has a discussion with Cogburn regarding the latter's former affiliation with Quantrill's raiders.
Probably has more to do with where the population centers/seats of power of the 1860's were. Instead of flyover states, they were more like Pre-Columbus, earth is flat, the edge of the world. It was much easier to summarize a battle in Maryland with very large armies/large casualties than following a forever ongoing guerrilla war
I'm curious as to how you can say that Southern whites where in great shape in regards to relative prosperity. I always found it interesting that the excuse of States Rights was the main thrust of the South's argument as to why they went to war. They were fighting for the state to maintain its control over slavery. If it weren't for slavery they wouldn't have given a rats ass about states rights. The great majority of lawmakers in the South came from prosperous land/slave owning families. It was in their best interest to maintain the status quo. In the end it was more about their rights as slave owners than the common man. It's a shame the poor uneducated Southern white male bought into their lies.
I am too. I know there was a lot of regional variation in the response of poor (and poorer) whites to secession. I also know there was a lot of jingoistic Southern mythologizing from he get-go that prompted many less well-off Southern whites (and many dirt poor Souther whites) to fight for a cause in which they really had no economic interest one way or the other. And, finally, I also know that the Confederacy had a real problem with poorer Southern whites deserting once they realized they were fighting a rich man's war (not much changes). And they were totally up front about this. All you have to do is read through the various declarations of the causes of secession which were issued by many (if not every) state that seceded.
The Dude on NPR made a good point, as horrible as it sounds, slaves were a very valuable asset, and Slaves over all were worth more than all the industries in the North combined. People like Jefferson knew that Slavery was wrong, but he also understood the wealth attached to those slave assets. That is the reason he could not free his own slaves, because they were part of his state inheritance to his daughter, the most valuable part. Ending slavery was pretty much like telling people you have to give up your entire stock portfolio and get nothing or penies in return. He also used the example of using oil, we know (if you understand/believe in Global warming) that using fossil fuels is bad for the environment, but most of us would not be happy if the government told us we could no longer use oil and they took away our cars, airplane travel, plastics, etc. Imagine Obama telling us all that starting tomorrow we all now have to ride bikes or walk everywhere, it would be a shock to us all (a good think IMO) Slavery was the original black gold, quite terrible.
The above isn't entirely accurate; although a large majority of wealth was related to plantation farming, the South was a more entrepeneurial society than you give it credit for. For instance, Lehman Brothers was actually founded as a cotton merchant pre-Civil War. The South was also rife in land speculation, shipping, etc. We're not talking about 2nd century Roman latifundia farming. The UK had discovered Indian cotton, which made the South less necessary. The UK was also pretty split - I don't think they were hoping to support the South if they could. Finally - given how the US was considered in the 1860s (as a backwater), I don't recall reading about European concerns that it would grow too strong. Reading about how difficult it often was for US entities (states, governments, companies, etc.) to persuade London to lend to them suggested that London had a less than fearful view of the US. I suspect this will change depending on various factors, such as the large amount of immigration into the North and the question of whether you're looking at the average white male or the median white male. Yeah, history is annoyingly unclear in that way.
It's a complex story. In the referendum on the question of secession, 25% of the vote was against it. But in 1861, the question was largely defined by who you were and where you were from, since back then, so many people in the state were from somewhere else. The Tejanos who had been there since Texas was Mexican were largely against it, but... they were Mexicans and were marginalized. The German immigrants in central Texas were against it, but their numbers were relatively small. People who had arrived from the east, from the Deep South, were largely for it and they were numerous. And since Texas was a poor state inhabited by poor people, it was the last group, who brought numbers and money into the state, who had the sway when it came time to decide. Still, Governor Sam Houston was against secession, remained loyal to the Union, and was removed from office because of that. And in his opposition to secession, he repeatedly made the point that it would be disaster for Texas, that the Union would eventually triumph. As one of the biggest heroes of the Texas Revolution, you'd think that his opinion would carry more weight, but this was 25 years after the revolution, and by that point... so many people were from somewhere else. According to the Texas State Historical Association, in 1836, when the Republic was born, there were estimated to be 50,000 people in Texas. At the end of the Republic in 1845, there were estimated to be 125,000 people. The first US Census for Texas in 1850 counted 154,034 whites, 397 free blacks, and 58,161 slaves. And in the 1860 Census, the count was over 600,000 people. Most of those people came from states that also seceded, and well, they voted the same way they voted in the places where they came from, and what Sam Houston had to say didn't amount to a hill of beans. And even among the Unionists in Texas, the sentiments were generally in favor of slavery, with the exception of the German settlers. After all, one of the secondary causes of the Revolution was the fact that Mexico had recently abolished slavery, which didn't sit well with a lot of people who had arrived from the South. (Some try to make the case that this was THE cause of the Texas Revolution, but I don't buy it. The Mexican government under Santa Anna gave them plenty of cause for revolution. But I won't deny that Mexico's abolition of slavery was a cause.) In other words, Texas' Unionists saw the status quo as the best way forward. In the end, secession in Texas in 1861 was generally what the people wanted and I don't really think that aside from some pockets, there was any great opposition to it. Texas in 1861 was a state largely settled by Southerners who largely lived in the eastern parts of the state, which are the most like the South. It wasn't until after the Civil War that the western parts of Texas started getting more settled, the railroads arrived, the cattle and oil businesses took root, and Texas started becoming more "Western. What we now know as Texas is largely an artifact of its post-Reconstruction history, but in 1861, it was the westernmost part of the South.
well I never took a class specifically in civil war history, and most general American history classes don't go into that level of detail. I do remember John Brown's rebellion, but I guess not enough to know about reprisal killings being widespread.
Source/link? I have an MA in American history, and my thesis was on Spartanburg Co SC during reconstruction. That was a long time ago, but I haven't forgotten EVERYTHING. Southern whites were not mostly "dirt poor." I was pointing out the error in a very specific statement. There seems to be this "folk wisdom" that the typical southern white person led a hardscrabble life even by the standards of the time, and that's not true. If by "was" you mean that was the contemporary argument, you're dead wrong. At the time, Southerners said that they were going to war to protect their way of life, which was chattel slavery. I've probably written this on bigsoccer 20 times, literally, but anyone who doubts the war was about slavery should take a Saturday and go to a good research library and spend some time looking at microfilm copies of Southern newspapers from, say, September 1860 to April 1861. If you do that, you'll have no doubt what the war was about.
"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, 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 normal condition." Alexander Hamilton Stephens VP of the Confedrate States of America March 21 1861 http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76
So rich landowners convinced the poor white trash to fight a war for their benefit? Hmm, I've seen this one before...don't tell me
This really is not true, you know-- unemployed textile workers in England demonstrated vociferously against intervention on the behalf of the south, even though the lack of cotton destituted them and raised a trade in Indian textiles which continued to hurt them long after the flow of cotton resumed. Europe was unwilling to support the continuation of slavery no matter what the financial incentive, and no matter how much easier they found it to feel kinship with Virgininans and Carolinians than with Yankees. Cotton did NOT bring England to its knees, and without England the rest of the continent could not be influenced. England threw in the towel after Yorktown not because the American revolution had become irrevocable, but because the French Navy had gained a position in the Indian Ocean-- and the real money was in India and would remain in India for another 130 years. America was simply a promising venture gone sour. The India trade was both England's lifeblood and candy store. The Confederacy never quite grasped the notion that this was still true-- that her trade with England was only viable, not vital. As soon as the war impeded that trade, it was more profitable for England to make other arrangments. Blockade runners made huge profits individually-- but they were not a major industry. Besides, the whole of Europe did make enormous money selling obsolete munitions to the Union early on; the arsenals of Europe were emptied of 18th century small arms at more than cost before Stanton could get control and bring sanity to the procurement process. The treasuries of Europe were full of US dollars which no government wanted to risk devaluing by making the Confederacy a fact... (By 1863, BTW, cotton was flowing again, because some of it had been captured in the fields and harvested by the Freedmen's Bureau --to provide paying work for the runaway slaves who collected around military camps and needed feeding-- while much Texas and Mississippi cotton was purchased by corrupt northern merchants and authorities and shipped from the north or occupied New Orleans at great profit...)
The politicians of the South portrayed their fight to its citizens as one of states rights. There's no doubt that it was over slavery, but to the common man why tell him that you need to fight the Northerners to protect my slaves. What was the benefit to the little man who didn't own slaves? None, but if you tell him that you're protecting your way of life in the South and your states right to control its own affairs then you'll have the poor uneducated signing up to fight.
yes, I believe they even told them that the North was coming for their guns and moonshine too. some things haven't changed...
That's just not right. The South portrayed the fight as one for their way of life, and the first part of that way of life was the inequality of slaves. I will also add that poorer white southerners were not necessarily significantly disadvantaged by slavery. Slaves were used for cotton (and tobacco) by the 1860s, which were not industries that could be done on a small scale. Had there been no slaves, it's unlikely that cotton farming would have resulted in many small cotton farms; white southerners were not necessarily competing with slaves for agricultural work. Also, the ownership of slaves itself was a massive boon to the Southern economy because it represented far and away the biggest capital assets in the United States - estimates are that at 1860 prices, slaves were worth about 1/3rd of the entire property of the United States - which is one of the reasons why the South fought so hard to keep them (and why a payment by the North in exchange for freeing them was never realistic). While it may seem like this wouldn't matter to poor Southern whites, imagine what would happen if most of the wealth of the top 5% of the population today just disappeared. While I'm not a proponent of trickle down economics, it would have a vast effect on the economy because those people rely on those assets to spend money on goods and services provided by other people. Even though Reconstruction certainly blighted southern development, the position of southern whites certainly didn't improve with the end of slavery. So there's really no reason to think poorer southern whites were particularly turned off by a war to defend the "peculiar institution". Not to mention the Southern racist propaganda, which got worse and worse after the 1810s and which made fighting against the equality of slaves much easier.