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Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought. I mean, sure, it's clear why the eli

by lsc 8y ago

Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought. I mean, sure, it's clear why the elites wanted the war. But for the average white southern laborer, slavery did nothing but push down wages; It's hard to ask for a raise if the boss can just buy someone to do what you do. The explanations I've heard were nonsensical (that the average white southern man fought because it was in the interests of the elite southern man) or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.) I find both of those explanations really unsatisfactory, because they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely.

ceejayoz 8y ago
There's a quote (attributed without evidence to half a dozen prominent historical figures) that probably applies here: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Related, from Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  I prefer the three great questions of American history,any two of which is the answer to the other two. The frontier Slavery No socialism
maxxxxx 8y ago
" Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought." Wars were always fought by average people for the benefit of the elites. I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win.
- lsc 8y ago
  >I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win. The thing is, 'peasant armies' are largely a modern thing; Throughout history, arming your pesants without raising their station was... a little like giving slaves guns.[1] Most armies for most of history were composed of people who were higher class than peasants; for that matter, for much of history, your position in society was largely dependent on your ability to project force. (and that itself had a lot to do with wealth; a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive for most of history. And fighting is something that it takes time to get good at like anything else; if you are a substanance farmer, even if you are equally armed, (which you won't be, a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive) and equally big and strong (which you also won't be; having enough food matters a lot when strength training) you are gonna have a hell of a time fighting a guy who grew up wealthy who spent his time training.) My understanding was that nearly all ancient and medieval societies had mechanisms for successful warriors to rise up the socioeconomic ladder; be that tournaments (some societies had rules where if you were able to overcome a better armed/armored opponent in the mele, you'd be able to keep some of his arms/armor) or in war (really, until the modern era, if you participated in the sack of a city, you got to keep some of the stuff your side stole. Certainly, in the medieval era, if you captured a rich dude in war, not only could you keep the stuff he had on him, you got to ransom him back to his family) - and of course, there are direct promotions; do well enough, and your leader is gonna make you a knight or something. The idea is that if a society treated it's warriors poorly enough, they'd find, ah, 'Klingon promotions' on their hands; If they didn't align power with violence, they'd find themselves with new leaders. (In a way, this is an amazing thing about modern democracies. The army, in many cases, remains subservient to the civilian state, even when it sure looks like it has a decisive choice in the matter... But, historically, this is the exception, not the rule.) All that said, if you were poor, if you were sent to war, if you were used in battle, you probably wouldn't be armed/armored enough to be particularly effective, in part because your leaders would be just as afraid of you as of the enemy, in part because you were unlikely to be particularly effective against properly trained/armed/armored people, and in part just 'cause in the pre-industrial era, arms and armor were ridiculously expensive. (I mean, I guess you might compare a mounted knight to a modern MBT... the difference being that you were expected to go to war with your own stuff, not the government's stuff. Imagine a world where the only people who could be tankers were dudes who could afford to buy said tank... and a world where those guys expected said tank to pay for itself in booty.) My understanding is that as a medieval peasant, wars happened to you. You didn't really go to war except in the most desperate actions. You were seen, really, as part of the land; almost property that turned fallow fields into productive farmland. You could argue that the end of this system was Napoleon; I mean, it had been in decline for a while; more and more of the equipment used by armies was government property rather than private property, even to the point of the muskets being owned by the government rather than the soldiers, but... Napoleon decisively trounced the old system. You could argue this was a big part of why Napoleon conquered so much of the world; at a time when the rest of the world had an extremely class-based military leadership system, and where the men under arms were strictly limited, in part due to trust, Napoleon had an army (in part thanks to the preceding revolution) pretty much full of regular dudes, lead by officers largely promoted on merit. (Oh yeah, and because of this trust, Napoleon had a massive army) You could look at the 'levee en mass' which gave France it's numerical superiority as enabled by the fact that the French trusted their poor in ways that the rest of the world didn't; [1]which did happen; I mean, there are ancient sources suggesting that several bronze-age societies had elite units composed of slaves, even... but clearly these weren't your regular slaves; the status of being an elite soldier meant a lot more then than it does now. And throughout history, most of your army was a class above your laborers- It's hard to use force to make things shitty for the people who are applying said force for you.
cm2012 8y ago
>> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.) You have a very idealistic view of human nature if you don't think this banal evil is more common historically than not.
stevenwoo 8y ago
Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. There were likely some familial ties from the average southern white laborer with some who owned slaves or were in the system as overseers. I also don't see how evil is unlikely, the daily brutality of slavery required a large standing militia to suppress the constant threat of active rebellion of the slaves against the owners, and it's likely the average white adult male would have been a part of said militia. It seems to me that living with that one has to make the moral choice to accept it - for the alternative there was only one John Brown and family and maybe one Free State of Jones situation, for almost everyone else, they either did not see it as evil we see it today and commonplace (so not perhaps evil in their own eyes) or not willing to make the ultimate commitment against it. On the other hand, the United States being probably the last country to outlaw slavery does not speak too well of our country. The poor did not start the war, only serve as foot soldiers and there was a draft on both sides - the elite class served as officers, this notion that the war was initiated by the average person seems counterfactual, most of the time it's elites who want to start war and waging a propaganda campaign to get the populace behind starting a war. Even today there's no popular campaign today to go to war against Iran or North Korea, but it sure is popular in some conservative think tanks and with our current NSA, John Bolton, it's been his obsession for the last 20 years it feels like.
- lsc 8y ago
  >Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. Yeah, I keep hearing this, and I just... saying things happen because people are too dumb to see their own self interest is... it's just really unsatisfying. It fits the data, but it also tastes like the other times in my life where I've been wrong because I'm arrogant. It's also unsatisfying because it's not particularly predictive; it doesn't tell me which elites the masses will follow and why.
jonathankoren 8y ago
I’m not sure why you find this unlikely. There’s explicit racism by the whites, which could be termed “loss of status”. In-group/out-group has been a long historic motivator. As far as as why the poor would die for the elites, well that’s also existed from the beginning of time. Pretty much every war is like that. The War Of The Roses was a family feud that lasted 32 years, and cost lives of somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000, all to decide which inbred guy gets to sit on a chair and boss everyone else around. Almost no one that died in that war, had anything to gain, or lose. Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]? People go off an die determine which religious bureaucracy will collect a monetary tax from a group. There’s no benefit or harm to any individual about this. [0] http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/article592199.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/article592199.html
- lsc 8y ago
  >Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]? There are a lot of ways of looking at world war 1. There are those that view it as largely a war of German aggression; that Franz Ferdinand was merely a convenient excuse.[1] - I dunno, if I was a French person and the Germans were marching on my home in Paris, I might think I had something to gain or lose. At any rate, I think that the schlieffen plan (i.e. We're going to war with Russia, so let us roll over France preemptively) evinces a kind of extreme arrogance that is... well, it certainly says something that isn't good. As an aside, I find it super interesting how the Germans took a very similar tack in world war two, with an army that was by all accounts, vastly inferior as far as training and equipment went, (I mean, adjusted to their enemies/the technology of the day) but with superior tactics. And while the attack was... similar, in the first war, the attack succeeded against Russia[2] and bogged down in France - and in the second the war, they succeeded against France,[3] and bogged down in Russia. - there is an argument to be made there that the victories were as much about politics and organization and motivation as anything else. Of course, there's also a strong argument that it's just technology. Taking ground with world war one era technology was really hard, as the attack moved forward at the speed of a walking man, while the defender moved men around at the speed of train. armored and motorized units in world war 2 allowed attackers to exploit breakthroughs again, breaking that huge advantage that the defense had. I mean, in favor of your point, it might not have been completely clear that had Germany won, that the citizens of the conquered nations would be treated so roughly as it was in the second round of that conflict. But still, I think that the civil war was very different, because the union war aims were pretty clear, and those aims would not have been served by treating the southerners as a conquered people. (One can make the argument, in fact, that we'd all be better off, especially the southerners, if we had treated the south as conquered land, and if reconstruction continued; if the north put together a marshal-plan style rebuilding effort that reconstructed the south as a functional society. But it didn't continue, in part because treating the southerners as a conquered people went against both the war aims and the ongoing goals of the north.) [1] Certainly July 5 showed that Germany was not willing to put any effort at all into preventing the war from escalating; At a pen stroke, Wilhelm 2 could have had a pretty good chance of making world war one a localized conflict, preventing world war two and the cold war in one stroke. Instead, he said "we'll back you up no matter how far you take it" I personally think history treats the man much more lightly than he deserves. [2](in part due to their support of Lenin... you could argue it wasn't really a military victory, that Germany succeeded against Russia in the first world war by funding Lenin until he took down the Russian government and sapped their will to fight. I mean, there were a lot of factors here; even in the second world war, Germany seemed to do really well against Russia... until they hit lenningrad and stalingrad, and things bogged down. - It's possible that a Kerensky or even Kornilov lead Russia[2a] would have pulled off something similar and fought the Germans to a standstill. The technology of the day favored the defense, after all. of course, you could also put this in part on Wilson for not propping up kerensky the same way the other allies were propped up with food and ammo. A well-timed and full throated "we will not let you starve" from America and some machine guns from the UK would probably have saved Russia from the Bolsheviks. I mean, some of it is on Kerensky; he wasn't aggressive enough against Lenin when he had the chance, and he had given up control of most of the armed forces (and unwisely armed some of the wrong people) by the time it was really clear that Lenin was a German-supported traitor.) but... Germany certainly wasn't doing badly militarily, you could argue that they would have won against a Kerensky government that didn't have a whole lot of allied support.) [2a](as an aside, I see the conflict between Kerensky and Kornilov as one of the great tragedies of history. If the two would have worked together, we would probably have had a mostly-democratic Russia... in 1917. Kerensky was understandably super suspicious of Kornilov, but all evidence later was that the man would have been a soldier loyal to the Russian government, even one lead by Kerensky.) [3]and why? France had more and superior tanks and a much larger army. It was in part tactics, certainly. Ohler argues that it was methanphetamene; He thinks the drug allowed the germans to plow through the ardennes and roll over France while sleeping something like 1/3rd as much as people without the drugs, thus ending the battle before the French had time to formulate a response. Of course, one could also attribute it to an airpower advantage on the German side; while the French had a larger army, more and better tanks, the Germans had an airpower advantage that may have been decisive. There's also the theory that war weariness from the first war just had a hugely different effect in Germany and France, and that was the root of the French defeat the second time around. My favorite book on the subject is, of course, Bloch - but while it is an incredible book, it doesn't really come to a real conclusion as to why France lost against an enemy that was by all accounts inferior.
chrisco255 8y ago
A lot of people in this thread are trying to flatten a complex situation. This comment is thoughtful: many poor southerners went to war and risked life and limb and stood to gain almost nothing from slavery. We take for granted our 20/20 view of 1861 and we are biased in our present knowledge of how things turn out. Descendants of slaves, poor white southerners, and northerners all turned out better off, and the U.S. would grow stronger as a whole. But to look at world and U.S. history from the lens of 1861, that's what the participants of the civil war had to do. Some of it was identity politics. Some of it was loyalty to home turf. Some men DID fight for states rights as much as that is derided as an empty excuse. There has always been concern of the Federal government gaining "too much power" since the Constitutional Convention and Anti-federalism is a well-documented movement of early American politics. For many, the Civil War was viewed as an extension of that cause. (If you want an excellent view on the war by a relatively impartial contemporary, view Lord Acton's account from 1866: https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war) And sure, rich slave owners had their own motives. And they certainly would leverage the motives driving poor southerners to garner support for the war. That story is as old as time.
Bluestrike2 8y ago
The answer is a bit more complicated than one might imagine, or the popular conceptions would suggest. Arguably, there are a couple different answers for the antebellum period, the initial days of the war, and then later on in the war. Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchical Republic: The Secession of Georgia[0] weighs the internal class conflict that helped precipitate secession. Keri Leigh Merritt's Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South[1] is another fascinating read on the subject that I'd heartily recommend along with Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.[2] Finally, James McPherson's wonderful Battle Cry of Freedom[3] touches on these matters throughout the book, albeit from a more general perspective. There's no question that poor southern whites and yeomen farmers both saw their wages depressed by slavery and recognized it as the direct cause of their woes. In the antebellum South--particularly during the two decades leading up to the Civil War--there was a significant class conflict that that represented a clear internal conflict to the planter/master class. Not only was the number of slaves increasing, they were also starting to be used in non-agricultural industries. And even when they weren't, slaves were a constant threat to poor white workers' efforts to try and push for wage increases as slave-strikebreakers.[4] Northern abolitionists repeatedly highlighted this conflict and hoped to use it to create division in the South; in 1838, Charles Olcott of Ohio famously observed "[a]ll of the evils of slavery are great evils; but one of the greatest is, that it injures the free as well as the enslaved." In the years leading up to secession, the master class embarked on a major propaganda campaign to get poor whites to overlook the class conflict and see themselves as beneficiaries of slavery, and later, secession. They argued that abolitionists and "Black Republicans" would force freed slaves to be viewed as the equal of whites, to the latter's everlasting detriment. The common points were that black emancipation would flood the labor market and depress wages for poor whites to starvation levels, the ensuing class conflict/race war would kill thousands of those whites who didn't starve to death first, and of course, there was the constant specter of miscegenation. James Furman, a South Carolina Baptist preacher, predicted that "[a]bolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands...submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!!...Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism" (McPherson). None of these attitudes were new. Fear of a slave rebellion had been a constant in slave states, and it touched slaveowner and yeoman alike; non-slaveowning whites figured they'd be at risk just the same as slaveowners. Then John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859, and the worry about hypothetical slave revolts turned into an orgy of fear and paranoia; the master class saw an imminent threat, with non-slaveholders in cahoots with Northern abolitionists even as non-slaveholders felt the same fear. John Brown was tried, and as the North started to lionize the man as a martyr and saint, the South went nuts in anger. McPherson likened the Southern panic in 1860 to France's Great Fear in 1789.[5] These arguments clearly had a profound impact on Southern society, and were embedded so thoroughly that they'd be lodged in the collective Southern psyche for the next century. But alone, they weren't enough to push through secession. For the master class, secession was seen as both a means of protecting the peculiar institution and eliminating the internal threat posed by poor whites. The propaganda and constant fear helped lay the groundwork, but they succeeded mainly by managing to push through before internal opposition could solidify and organize. They were also helped by poor whites being apathetic voters, as they knew they lacked the power of the master class. In the end, secessionists pulled out all the stops to ensure nothing could stop the movement: > The ultimate choice of disunion, therefore, was a choice made by the master class. By the early 1860s, the Deep South’s slaveholding interests were using every possible method to force people with no ties to slavery to support the institution. Politics became dominated, as Shugg wrote, by “farce and fraud; the knife, the sling-shot, the brass knuckles determining ... who shall occupy and administer the [public] offices.” Poor whites, along with many other non-slave owners, made it completely clear that they opposed disunion. The state conventions, of course, were all dominated by the master class, who deliberately chose to ignore public will. While proving the efficacy of manipulative violence, slave owners simultaneously invoked more concern from Northerners. To Americans residing in free states, it seemed as if a small but powerful band of slaveholders were the only Southerners desiring disunion. Poor whites certainly did not want war. They had no desire to fight and die to protect an institution that had long injured their own prosperity and well-being. Despite all of the weight scholars have afforded white supremacy, it was simply not enough to unite the white South over slavery and disunion (Merritt, 303). Once everyone accepted that war was inevitable, both sides tried to downplay slavery as the immediate cause. For the North, it was to avoid antagonizing the border states. For the south, it was because they needed a more palatable rationale for non-slaveholders to accept. The Confederacy also expected King Cotton to persuade European governments to quickly support them, but they figured avoiding mentioning slavery would give foreign governments a useful figleaf to hide behind on slavery. It was a complete fiction, but a useful one for each side. And in 1861, everyone believed it would be a short war. Southerners believed that their martial superiority would carry the day, and one Southern soldier could whip a dozen or two Yankees. Some fought because of cultural beliefs about courage and the glories of war or the fear of the shame of cowardice (or the physical threat of hanging deserters). Others because the immediate enemy--Northerners--was a more tangible threat than the political power of the planter class. But at first, that wasn't a huge issue. In 1861, "almost half of all the South’s enlistees 'either lived with slaveholders or were slave owners themselves'" (307). That changed later on with conscription, the "Twenty Negro Law" (in part, tied to the fear of slave rebellion), and the hiring of substitutes who were mostly poor. And throughout the war, desertion was a constant challenge for southern armies. Eventually, the Confederacy would try to limit some of the class tensions that were hampering the war effort, but even after, they were always a factor. Finally: > The master class’s fear mongering surely helped convince a number of them that maintaining slavery would keep their families safe and their wages stable. By playing to their basest, most irrational anxieties, masters suc- cessfully used racism to push reluctant poor whites into an unsustainable war. Moreover, many of these men, who oftentimes lived hand to mouth during slavery, actually looked forward to the prospect of making a steady wage in the Confederate military [...] Other poor whites were seemingly coerced into enlisting due to the fact that they depended upon certain slaveholders for employment, land rental, or loans. Some simply concluded that allying with the powerful master class was in their best interest. Yet another often-overlooked incentive for antebellum era men to join the armed forces was the historic precedent of the government granting land to veterans [...] Finally, cravings for honor and respect undoubtedly led some poor white men to try to prove their own self-worth and masculinity through combat. And once the war actually began, slaveholders could shift their campaign of racial hysteria into a campaign about honor and patriotism. Once the fighting commenced, the region’s politicians could stop talking about miscegenation and race wars and begin talking about heroism and virility. And poor white men, who had spent most of their lives without a sense of honor, finally found a way to feel valued by their society. By protecting their homes, families, and communities, poor whites were able to elevate their social status. Furthermore, as David Potter found, most Southerners had more loyalty to the war and the troops than to the Confederacy itself, largely due to their emotional attachments to “home" (318-320). Apologies for the length, my reply got away from me. 0. https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Southern-Populism-Transformation-Upcountry-ebook/dp/B001L5T1NA https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Southern-Populism-Transformatio... 1. https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-American-ebook/dp/B07316D38R https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-A... 2. https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807848845/the-counterrevolution-of-slavery/ https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807848845/the-counterrevol... 3. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ 4. https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-slave-south/ https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-s... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear
philwelch 8y ago
Southern whites who weren't slaveholders tended to be economically dependent on slaveholders for their livelihoods, in a much more direct way than northern whites were dependent upon capitalists. The Southern economy was pre-capitalist in nature, dominated by a de facto hereditary, landed aristocracy, many of whom were descended from actual aristocracy who migrated to colonial America. Also, there's a natural human reaction to seeing invading armies occupying your home town, regardless of the rationale behind that action or one's previous or preexisting attitude towards their present ruling class. I mean, there's a spectrum of reactions, but a large chunk of that spectrum includes hostility.
woodruffw 8y ago
> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.) This gets down to Arendt's idea of the banality of evil: people who do bad things (usually) aren't mustache-twirling masterminds, they're otherwise "normal" people for whom the morally wrong course of action is either easier or more compelling (including for reasons of racial superiority). My opinion: we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness. When you consider that the average white sharecropper in the antebellum South inherited both social and political structures that granted him legitimacy in contrast to black slaves, it makes sense that such a status suffices for supporting war -- it's a matter of identity.
- lsc 8y ago
  > we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness. (Arendt's book is on my list; haven't gotten there yet.) I guess I use a definition of evil that is more utilitarian than I am. Evil, I think, is when someone does something that harms another person far out of proportion to the benefit the perpetrator receives. It's different from something that is merely wrong in that it diminishes utility for all parties involved rather than increasing utility for one party and decreasing it for the other. I mean, a stupid/extreme example would be that a starving person stealing bread from a wealthy person isn't very evil, maybe isn't evil at all, while a well-fed person stealing bread from the starving would be very evil. (Note here the diminishing marginal value of wealth; your first loaf of bread is worth rather more than your second million dollars.) As part of this definition, I am mostly only acknowledging material benefit; I would see it as much more evil to kill someone for fun, say, than to kill the same person for access to food, shelter or other material necessities, even if you are receiving quite a lot of utility in terms of emotional pleasure or what have you from the former act, and even if I feel the second act is wrong. The second act is still a lot more understandable. So, especially if you are already living with what I'd call desperate poverty, in a situation where both your access to food and shelter was insecure, giving up material wealth (including access to food) in exchange for a kind of social status that seems disgusting to me, seems to me like irrationally harming another person in a way that harms yourself, too- thus, stupid and evil. But maybe I undervalue social status? But more likely, I am missing part of the story
Tsubasachan 8y ago
The United States as we know it now didn't really exist. Every State in 1860 was basically a country with its own culture and history. The Civil War was instrumental in making the US into one country with one government. Before 1860 it was more a loosely held together alliance.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status. The South was run like a feudal society: “Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed. Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced. In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“ https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-slaveholders-why-did-they-fight-a-war-to-protect-slavery https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-...

by lsc 8y ago

ceejayoz 8y ago

There's a quote (attributed without evidence to half a dozen prominent historical figures) that probably applies here: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

mikeash 8y ago
Related, from Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
barry-cotter 8y ago
I prefer the three great questions of American history,any two of which is the answer to the other two. The frontier Slavery No socialism

maxxxxx 8y ago

" Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought." Wars were always fought by average people for the benefit of the elites. I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win.

lsc 8y ago
>I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win. The thing is, 'peasant armies' are largely a modern thing; Throughout history, arming your pesants without raising their station was... a little like giving slaves guns.[1] Most armies for most of history were composed of people who were higher class than peasants; for that matter, for much of history, your position in society was largely dependent on your ability to project force. (and that itself had a lot to do with wealth; a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive for most of history. And fighting is something that it takes time to get good at like anything else; if you are a substanance farmer, even if you are equally armed, (which you won't be, a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive) and equally big and strong (which you also won't be; having enough food matters a lot when strength training) you are gonna have a hell of a time fighting a guy who grew up wealthy who spent his time training.) My understanding was that nearly all ancient and medieval societies had mechanisms for successful warriors to rise up the socioeconomic ladder; be that tournaments (some societies had rules where if you were able to overcome a better armed/armored opponent in the mele, you'd be able to keep some of his arms/armor) or in war (really, until the modern era, if you participated in the sack of a city, you got to keep some of the stuff your side stole. Certainly, in the medieval era, if you captured a rich dude in war, not only could you keep the stuff he had on him, you got to ransom him back to his family) - and of course, there are direct promotions; do well enough, and your leader is gonna make you a knight or something. The idea is that if a society treated it's warriors poorly enough, they'd find, ah, 'Klingon promotions' on their hands; If they didn't align power with violence, they'd find themselves with new leaders. (In a way, this is an amazing thing about modern democracies. The army, in many cases, remains subservient to the civilian state, even when it sure looks like it has a decisive choice in the matter... But, historically, this is the exception, not the rule.) All that said, if you were poor, if you were sent to war, if you were used in battle, you probably wouldn't be armed/armored enough to be particularly effective, in part because your leaders would be just as afraid of you as of the enemy, in part because you were unlikely to be particularly effective against properly trained/armed/armored people, and in part just 'cause in the pre-industrial era, arms and armor were ridiculously expensive. (I mean, I guess you might compare a mounted knight to a modern MBT... the difference being that you were expected to go to war with your own stuff, not the government's stuff. Imagine a world where the only people who could be tankers were dudes who could afford to buy said tank... and a world where those guys expected said tank to pay for itself in booty.) My understanding is that as a medieval peasant, wars happened to you. You didn't really go to war except in the most desperate actions. You were seen, really, as part of the land; almost property that turned fallow fields into productive farmland. You could argue that the end of this system was Napoleon; I mean, it had been in decline for a while; more and more of the equipment used by armies was government property rather than private property, even to the point of the muskets being owned by the government rather than the soldiers, but... Napoleon decisively trounced the old system. You could argue this was a big part of why Napoleon conquered so much of the world; at a time when the rest of the world had an extremely class-based military leadership system, and where the men under arms were strictly limited, in part due to trust, Napoleon had an army (in part thanks to the preceding revolution) pretty much full of regular dudes, lead by officers largely promoted on merit. (Oh yeah, and because of this trust, Napoleon had a massive army) You could look at the 'levee en mass' which gave France it's numerical superiority as enabled by the fact that the French trusted their poor in ways that the rest of the world didn't; [1]which did happen; I mean, there are ancient sources suggesting that several bronze-age societies had elite units composed of slaves, even... but clearly these weren't your regular slaves; the status of being an elite soldier meant a lot more then than it does now. And throughout history, most of your army was a class above your laborers- It's hard to use force to make things shitty for the people who are applying said force for you.

cm2012 8y ago

>> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.) You have a very idealistic view of human nature if you don't think this banal evil is more common historically than not.

stevenwoo 8y ago

Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. There were likely some familial ties from the average southern white laborer with some who owned slaves or were in the system as overseers. I also don't see how evil is unlikely, the daily brutality of slavery required a large standing militia to suppress the constant threat of active rebellion of the slaves against the owners, and it's likely the average white adult male would have been a part of said militia. It seems to me that living with that one has to make the moral choice to accept it - for the alternative there was only one John Brown and family and maybe one Free State of Jones situation, for almost everyone else, they either did not see it as evil we see it today and commonplace (so not perhaps evil in their own eyes) or not willing to make the ultimate commitment against it. On the other hand, the United States being probably the last country to outlaw slavery does not speak too well of our country. The poor did not start the war, only serve as foot soldiers and there was a draft on both sides - the elite class served as officers, this notion that the war was initiated by the average person seems counterfactual, most of the time it's elites who want to start war and waging a propaganda campaign to get the populace behind starting a war. Even today there's no popular campaign today to go to war against Iran or North Korea, but it sure is popular in some conservative think tanks and with our current NSA, John Bolton, it's been his obsession for the last 20 years it feels like.

lsc 8y ago
>Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. Yeah, I keep hearing this, and I just... saying things happen because people are too dumb to see their own self interest is... it's just really unsatisfying. It fits the data, but it also tastes like the other times in my life where I've been wrong because I'm arrogant. It's also unsatisfying because it's not particularly predictive; it doesn't tell me which elites the masses will follow and why.

jonathankoren 8y ago

I’m not sure why you find this unlikely. There’s explicit racism by the whites, which could be termed “loss of status”. In-group/out-group has been a long historic motivator. As far as as why the poor would die for the elites, well that’s also existed from the beginning of time. Pretty much every war is like that. The War Of The Roses was a family feud that lasted 32 years, and cost lives of somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000, all to decide which inbred guy gets to sit on a chair and boss everyone else around. Almost no one that died in that war, had anything to gain, or lose. Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]? People go off an die determine which religious bureaucracy will collect a monetary tax from a group. There’s no benefit or harm to any individual about this. [0] http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/article592199.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/article592199.html

lsc 8y ago
>Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]? There are a lot of ways of looking at world war 1. There are those that view it as largely a war of German aggression; that Franz Ferdinand was merely a convenient excuse.[1] - I dunno, if I was a French person and the Germans were marching on my home in Paris, I might think I had something to gain or lose. At any rate, I think that the schlieffen plan (i.e. We're going to war with Russia, so let us roll over France preemptively) evinces a kind of extreme arrogance that is... well, it certainly says something that isn't good. As an aside, I find it super interesting how the Germans took a very similar tack in world war two, with an army that was by all accounts, vastly inferior as far as training and equipment went, (I mean, adjusted to their enemies/the technology of the day) but with superior tactics. And while the attack was... similar, in the first war, the attack succeeded against Russia[2] and bogged down in France - and in the second the war, they succeeded against France,[3] and bogged down in Russia. - there is an argument to be made there that the victories were as much about politics and organization and motivation as anything else. Of course, there's also a strong argument that it's just technology. Taking ground with world war one era technology was really hard, as the attack moved forward at the speed of a walking man, while the defender moved men around at the speed of train. armored and motorized units in world war 2 allowed attackers to exploit breakthroughs again, breaking that huge advantage that the defense had. I mean, in favor of your point, it might not have been completely clear that had Germany won, that the citizens of the conquered nations would be treated so roughly as it was in the second round of that conflict. But still, I think that the civil war was very different, because the union war aims were pretty clear, and those aims would not have been served by treating the southerners as a conquered people. (One can make the argument, in fact, that we'd all be better off, especially the southerners, if we had treated the south as conquered land, and if reconstruction continued; if the north put together a marshal-plan style rebuilding effort that reconstructed the south as a functional society. But it didn't continue, in part because treating the southerners as a conquered people went against both the war aims and the ongoing goals of the north.) [1] Certainly July 5 showed that Germany was not willing to put any effort at all into preventing the war from escalating; At a pen stroke, Wilhelm 2 could have had a pretty good chance of making world war one a localized conflict, preventing world war two and the cold war in one stroke. Instead, he said "we'll back you up no matter how far you take it" I personally think history treats the man much more lightly than he deserves. [2](in part due to their support of Lenin... you could argue it wasn't really a military victory, that Germany succeeded against Russia in the first world war by funding Lenin until he took down the Russian government and sapped their will to fight. I mean, there were a lot of factors here; even in the second world war, Germany seemed to do really well against Russia... until they hit lenningrad and stalingrad, and things bogged down. - It's possible that a Kerensky or even Kornilov lead Russia[2a] would have pulled off something similar and fought the Germans to a standstill. The technology of the day favored the defense, after all. of course, you could also put this in part on Wilson for not propping up kerensky the same way the other allies were propped up with food and ammo. A well-timed and full throated "we will not let you starve" from America and some machine guns from the UK would probably have saved Russia from the Bolsheviks. I mean, some of it is on Kerensky; he wasn't aggressive enough against Lenin when he had the chance, and he had given up control of most of the armed forces (and unwisely armed some of the wrong people) by the time it was really clear that Lenin was a German-supported traitor.) but... Germany certainly wasn't doing badly militarily, you could argue that they would have won against a Kerensky government that didn't have a whole lot of allied support.) [2a](as an aside, I see the conflict between Kerensky and Kornilov as one of the great tragedies of history. If the two would have worked together, we would probably have had a mostly-democratic Russia... in 1917. Kerensky was understandably super suspicious of Kornilov, but all evidence later was that the man would have been a soldier loyal to the Russian government, even one lead by Kerensky.) [3]and why? France had more and superior tanks and a much larger army. It was in part tactics, certainly. Ohler argues that it was methanphetamene; He thinks the drug allowed the germans to plow through the ardennes and roll over France while sleeping something like 1/3rd as much as people without the drugs, thus ending the battle before the French had time to formulate a response. Of course, one could also attribute it to an airpower advantage on the German side; while the French had a larger army, more and better tanks, the Germans had an airpower advantage that may have been decisive. There's also the theory that war weariness from the first war just had a hugely different effect in Germany and France, and that was the root of the French defeat the second time around. My favorite book on the subject is, of course, Bloch - but while it is an incredible book, it doesn't really come to a real conclusion as to why France lost against an enemy that was by all accounts inferior.

chrisco255 8y ago

A lot of people in this thread are trying to flatten a complex situation. This comment is thoughtful: many poor southerners went to war and risked life and limb and stood to gain almost nothing from slavery. We take for granted our 20/20 view of 1861 and we are biased in our present knowledge of how things turn out. Descendants of slaves, poor white southerners, and northerners all turned out better off, and the U.S. would grow stronger as a whole. But to look at world and U.S. history from the lens of 1861, that's what the participants of the civil war had to do. Some of it was identity politics. Some of it was loyalty to home turf. Some men DID fight for states rights as much as that is derided as an empty excuse. There has always been concern of the Federal government gaining "too much power" since the Constitutional Convention and Anti-federalism is a well-documented movement of early American politics. For many, the Civil War was viewed as an extension of that cause. (If you want an excellent view on the war by a relatively impartial contemporary, view Lord Acton's account from 1866: https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war) And sure, rich slave owners had their own motives. And they certainly would leverage the motives driving poor southerners to garner support for the war. That story is as old as time.

Bluestrike2 8y ago

The answer is a bit more complicated than one might imagine, or the popular conceptions would suggest. Arguably, there are a couple different answers for the antebellum period, the initial days of the war, and then later on in the war. Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchical Republic: The Secession of Georgia[0] weighs the internal class conflict that helped precipitate secession. Keri Leigh Merritt's Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South[1] is another fascinating read on the subject that I'd heartily recommend along with Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.[2] Finally, James McPherson's wonderful Battle Cry of Freedom[3] touches on these matters throughout the book, albeit from a more general perspective. There's no question that poor southern whites and yeomen farmers both saw their wages depressed by slavery and recognized it as the direct cause of their woes. In the antebellum South--particularly during the two decades leading up to the Civil War--there was a significant class conflict that that represented a clear internal conflict to the planter/master class. Not only was the number of slaves increasing, they were also starting to be used in non-agricultural industries. And even when they weren't, slaves were a constant threat to poor white workers' efforts to try and push for wage increases as slave-strikebreakers.[4] Northern abolitionists repeatedly highlighted this conflict and hoped to use it to create division in the South; in 1838, Charles Olcott of Ohio famously observed "[a]ll of the evils of slavery are great evils; but one of the greatest is, that it injures the free as well as the enslaved." In the years leading up to secession, the master class embarked on a major propaganda campaign to get poor whites to overlook the class conflict and see themselves as beneficiaries of slavery, and later, secession. They argued that abolitionists and "Black Republicans" would force freed slaves to be viewed as the equal of whites, to the latter's everlasting detriment. The common points were that black emancipation would flood the labor market and depress wages for poor whites to starvation levels, the ensuing class conflict/race war would kill thousands of those whites who didn't starve to death first, and of course, there was the constant specter of miscegenation. James Furman, a South Carolina Baptist preacher, predicted that "[a]bolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands...submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!!...Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism" (McPherson). None of these attitudes were new. Fear of a slave rebellion had been a constant in slave states, and it touched slaveowner and yeoman alike; non-slaveowning whites figured they'd be at risk just the same as slaveowners. Then John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859, and the worry about hypothetical slave revolts turned into an orgy of fear and paranoia; the master class saw an imminent threat, with non-slaveholders in cahoots with Northern abolitionists even as non-slaveholders felt the same fear. John Brown was tried, and as the North started to lionize the man as a martyr and saint, the South went nuts in anger. McPherson likened the Southern panic in 1860 to France's Great Fear in 1789.[5] These arguments clearly had a profound impact on Southern society, and were embedded so thoroughly that they'd be lodged in the collective Southern psyche for the next century. But alone, they weren't enough to push through secession. For the master class, secession was seen as both a means of protecting the peculiar institution and eliminating the internal threat posed by poor whites. The propaganda and constant fear helped lay the groundwork, but they succeeded mainly by managing to push through before internal opposition could solidify and organize. They were also helped by poor whites being apathetic voters, as they knew they lacked the power of the master class. In the end, secessionists pulled out all the stops to ensure nothing could stop the movement: > The ultimate choice of disunion, therefore, was a choice made by the master class. By the early 1860s, the Deep South’s slaveholding interests were using every possible method to force people with no ties to slavery to support the institution. Politics became dominated, as Shugg wrote, by “farce and fraud; the knife, the sling-shot, the brass knuckles determining ... who shall occupy and administer the [public] offices.” Poor whites, along with many other non-slave owners, made it completely clear that they opposed disunion. The state conventions, of course, were all dominated by the master class, who deliberately chose to ignore public will. While proving the efficacy of manipulative violence, slave owners simultaneously invoked more concern from Northerners. To Americans residing in free states, it seemed as if a small but powerful band of slaveholders were the only Southerners desiring disunion. Poor whites certainly did not want war. They had no desire to fight and die to protect an institution that had long injured their own prosperity and well-being. Despite all of the weight scholars have afforded white supremacy, it was simply not enough to unite the white South over slavery and disunion (Merritt, 303). Once everyone accepted that war was inevitable, both sides tried to downplay slavery as the immediate cause. For the North, it was to avoid antagonizing the border states. For the south, it was because they needed a more palatable rationale for non-slaveholders to accept. The Confederacy also expected King Cotton to persuade European governments to quickly support them, but they figured avoiding mentioning slavery would give foreign governments a useful figleaf to hide behind on slavery. It was a complete fiction, but a useful one for each side. And in 1861, everyone believed it would be a short war. Southerners believed that their martial superiority would carry the day, and one Southern soldier could whip a dozen or two Yankees. Some fought because of cultural beliefs about courage and the glories of war or the fear of the shame of cowardice (or the physical threat of hanging deserters). Others because the immediate enemy--Northerners--was a more tangible threat than the political power of the planter class. But at first, that wasn't a huge issue. In 1861, "almost half of all the South’s enlistees 'either lived with slaveholders or were slave owners themselves'" (307). That changed later on with conscription, the "Twenty Negro Law" (in part, tied to the fear of slave rebellion), and the hiring of substitutes who were mostly poor. And throughout the war, desertion was a constant challenge for southern armies. Eventually, the Confederacy would try to limit some of the class tensions that were hampering the war effort, but even after, they were always a factor. Finally: > The master class’s fear mongering surely helped convince a number of them that maintaining slavery would keep their families safe and their wages stable. By playing to their basest, most irrational anxieties, masters suc- cessfully used racism to push reluctant poor whites into an unsustainable war. Moreover, many of these men, who oftentimes lived hand to mouth during slavery, actually looked forward to the prospect of making a steady wage in the Confederate military [...] Other poor whites were seemingly coerced into enlisting due to the fact that they depended upon certain slaveholders for employment, land rental, or loans. Some simply concluded that allying with the powerful master class was in their best interest. Yet another often-overlooked incentive for antebellum era men to join the armed forces was the historic precedent of the government granting land to veterans [...] Finally, cravings for honor and respect undoubtedly led some poor white men to try to prove their own self-worth and masculinity through combat. And once the war actually began, slaveholders could shift their campaign of racial hysteria into a campaign about honor and patriotism. Once the fighting commenced, the region’s politicians could stop talking about miscegenation and race wars and begin talking about heroism and virility. And poor white men, who had spent most of their lives without a sense of honor, finally found a way to feel valued by their society. By protecting their homes, families, and communities, poor whites were able to elevate their social status. Furthermore, as David Potter found, most Southerners had more loyalty to the war and the troops than to the Confederacy itself, largely due to their emotional attachments to “home" (318-320). Apologies for the length, my reply got away from me. 0. https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Southern-Populism-Transformation-Upcountry-ebook/dp/B001L5T1NA https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Southern-Populism-Transformatio... 1. https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-American-ebook/dp/B07316D38R https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-A... 2. https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807848845/the-counterrevolution-of-slavery/ https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807848845/the-counterrevol... 3. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ 4. https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-slave-south/ https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-s... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear

philwelch 8y ago

Southern whites who weren't slaveholders tended to be economically dependent on slaveholders for their livelihoods, in a much more direct way than northern whites were dependent upon capitalists. The Southern economy was pre-capitalist in nature, dominated by a de facto hereditary, landed aristocracy, many of whom were descended from actual aristocracy who migrated to colonial America. Also, there's a natural human reaction to seeing invading armies occupying your home town, regardless of the rationale behind that action or one's previous or preexisting attitude towards their present ruling class. I mean, there's a spectrum of reactions, but a large chunk of that spectrum includes hostility.

woodruffw 8y ago

> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.) This gets down to Arendt's idea of the banality of evil: people who do bad things (usually) aren't mustache-twirling masterminds, they're otherwise "normal" people for whom the morally wrong course of action is either easier or more compelling (including for reasons of racial superiority). My opinion: we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness. When you consider that the average white sharecropper in the antebellum South inherited both social and political structures that granted him legitimacy in contrast to black slaves, it makes sense that such a status suffices for supporting war -- it's a matter of identity.

lsc 8y ago
> we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness. (Arendt's book is on my list; haven't gotten there yet.) I guess I use a definition of evil that is more utilitarian than I am. Evil, I think, is when someone does something that harms another person far out of proportion to the benefit the perpetrator receives. It's different from something that is merely wrong in that it diminishes utility for all parties involved rather than increasing utility for one party and decreasing it for the other. I mean, a stupid/extreme example would be that a starving person stealing bread from a wealthy person isn't very evil, maybe isn't evil at all, while a well-fed person stealing bread from the starving would be very evil. (Note here the diminishing marginal value of wealth; your first loaf of bread is worth rather more than your second million dollars.) As part of this definition, I am mostly only acknowledging material benefit; I would see it as much more evil to kill someone for fun, say, than to kill the same person for access to food, shelter or other material necessities, even if you are receiving quite a lot of utility in terms of emotional pleasure or what have you from the former act, and even if I feel the second act is wrong. The second act is still a lot more understandable. So, especially if you are already living with what I'd call desperate poverty, in a situation where both your access to food and shelter was insecure, giving up material wealth (including access to food) in exchange for a kind of social status that seems disgusting to me, seems to me like irrationally harming another person in a way that harms yourself, too- thus, stupid and evil. But maybe I undervalue social status? But more likely, I am missing part of the story

Tsubasachan 8y ago

The United States as we know it now didn't really exist. Every State in 1860 was basically a country with its own culture and history. The Civil War was instrumental in making the US into one country with one government. Before 1860 it was more a loosely held together alliance.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status. The South was run like a feudal society: “Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed. Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced. In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“ https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-slaveholders-why-did-they-fight-a-war-to-protect-slavery https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-...