Explanation: In the US Civil War, the seceding Confederate States of America (CSA) fought explicitly for the cause of maintaining slavery against increasing abolitionist sentiment in the USA. The thing is, in most wars, it’s the poor who do the dying, and Confederate troops were no exception to this - fighting for the ultrawealthy’s right to own human beings while they themselves often went barefoot, both in civilian life and in uniform (as both sides had supply issues for troops, but the CSA’s were compounded by the fact that the only thing of value they made was cotton).
I once went through some 1860 Census records looking for some potential relatives in (IIRC) northwest Georgia, and decided to check all the households in a precinct (or whatever… basically whatever the smallest division was took 7 or 8ish pages and had one enumerator working it). Completely unscientific and very possibly non-representative, to be sure, but I came out with about a quarter to a third of households having at least one enslaved person in the enumeration. Given the white women, children, and other non-enslaved people in households, you do indeed end up with a tiny number of OFFICAL SLAVE-OWNERS, but owning human beings as chattel property seemed incredibly widespread.
If nothing else, I came away with the idea that while the basic narrative may still be true, that poor whites were fighting to defend a system which did absolutely nothing to benefit them other than keep them out of the bottom-most social stratum, the idea that only the truly wealthy were invested in the system may be worth revisiting in the public consciousness. I assumed actual historians have a better grasp on these numbers across the antebellum slave-states, and sure enough it seems I accidentally picked a slightly high but not crazy sample: Twenty-five percent of slave-state households were listed in the 1860 census as having at least one slave.
A disproportionate share of Confederate soldiers also came from slave-owning households, compared to the general population - something like a third - but non-slave owning households still provided the majority of recruits. But yeah, it wasn’t a tiny minority, it was widespread and normalized. It was a ‘realistic’ thing to aspire to, to be a slaver shithead, like climbing from the working to the middle class. Then you can sneer at all the other poors and their lack of slaves.
So there were middle-class households with slaves? Like could you get just 1 or 2 even if you you were not super rich?
If so how did they stop them from escaping, I imagine these slaves did stuff like go to the market, wash clothes etc…
Yeah, it would have been fairly common to have a small number. Even if you didn’t “own” any people, it was possible to “rent” their services for a time, increasing the number of households that directly benefited from the system.
As for why they didn’t just run away, several reasons I know of. One, it was hard to travel incognito, especially as a visible minority.
Two, black people trying to do so in slave states would frequently have been required to keep a “slave pass” on them to travel away from their “homes” at all, and the fact that it was generally illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write would have further complicated the inherent challenges of forging one.
Three, enslavers would take out literal classified ads for “runaways” and offer bounties.
Four, overarching all of this, all slave states had laws regulating the relationship between free people, enslaved people, and the state, and the most organized law enforcement institutions in the antebellum South were the slave patrols.
No society is just one thing, but the Antebellum slave states had a systemic and pervasive infrastructure of laws, customs, and institutions to ensure chattel slavery “worked.”
Funny thing about cotton. Once a black man, Eli Whitney, invented the cotton gin, suddenly cotton plantations became far more valuable.
Never understood why the teachers talked so much about the cotton gin until I actually grew and picked cotton. Jesus H. Christ it’s impossible to get the seeds out by hand. And picking? I’ll spare you the gory details, but it’s a bloody business. If anyone hasn’t tried it, give it a shot, you’ll see what I mean.
Doesn’t look very black to me
Eli Whitney was white.
Completely true, but that misinformation was delivered with such confidence that I got curious, and whaddayaknow, it’s an extremely common misconception rising out of sloppy curriculum design, systemic racism that crams everything related to the black experience into one month, and easy assumptions on the part of children.
Fuck me I got told wrong. Thank you for the correction!
There was also plenty of propaganda from the CSA about how if slaves were freed, they’d kill the whites. So some average Joe’s may have been fighting for the safety of themselves and their families against an imagined threat of freed slaves.
Not only was the was about maintaining chattel slavery but, also about expanding it. Banning slavery in new territories really pissed the slavers off. Like other hyperstratified socioeconomic structures, it was unsustainable without expansion and the slavers were well aware of this.
Shoeless Alabamian jumping over the ramparts to charge the enemy: … FREEDOMMMMMM!!!
Always funny to me when I read about how West Virginia came to be… because they were so poor that no one had slaves, and thus nothing to fight for. They split from Virginia because of it, and unseceded. Now of course if you go there, CSA flags aplenty, because fuck learning history we got black lung disease to get.
Most of Appalachia was a Unionist stronghold for that reason. Not good plantation land, so slaver power never set down deep roots - and unlike some morons in the modern day, folk at the time understood goddamn well that the war was being waged for the sake of slavery. Most Appalachian counties in the CSA offered some amount of partisan resistance during the Civil War for that very reason. If you’re gonna risk death without any hope of gain for you or your’s, may as well do it resisting a bad cause, rather than serving it.
Think of it as fighting so that someone is still lower than you.
