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Article Excerpt
Twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Blackwell, a small-time tenant farmer from Washington County, Virginia, had had enough of war. A single man who lived with an uncle, he enlisted as a private back in June 1861 in the 48th Virginia Infantry, but prolonged service grew wearisome. In fall 1862, he went absent without leave, returning voluntarily less than a month later. By the end of the next summer, after the failure at Gettysburg, his mood had soured once again. Originally, Blackwell had supported the rebellion, but in early September 1863, he revealed that he was fed up. To his brother Mathew, Blackwell expressed concern that the Rebel war effort had taken a decided turn for the worse. "Everything looks like it is going on wrong since Jackson was killed," he complained, "and I believe that we will at last have to come back in the Union at last, and I am sorry to think that all our hardships and fighting will do no good, for I was in hopes that we could gain our independence, tho I have lost all hopes."
Disconsolate over Confederate failures in the field, he urged his brother to remain at home. "Mat if I was you I wod stay with my famly and dy with them for I dont think that you nor me ought to fight for we did not have no hand in making it." He then explained, "I don't intend to do any fighting if I can help it for hear is those swell headed upshots that owns all the property and has keep out of the armmy all the while." The worst part was they speculated and profited grandly "off the soldiers that is [in] the field fiting for their [slaves].... And the soldiers get eleven dollars a month, and how can a man that has a family support them? It would not pay for more than one meal vituals for a small family. I tell you," he grumbled, "the poor soldiers gets poor encouragement to fight for." (1)
Blackwell's bitterness stemmed in part from his failure in a speculative enterprise, selling whiskey to fellow soldiers. He also wrote the letter from Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, where he was recovering from illness, which may have affected his outlook on the war. Yet Blackwell's views represent a major point of debate within Civil War literature: Did class conflict escalate in the Confederacy into an internal struggle over a rich man's war and a poor man's fight? (2)
In 1937, black historian Charles H. Wesley in his frequently ignored study, The Collapse of the Confederacy, offered the first detailed assertion of the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" as part of his larger thesis that the Confederacy died of internal causes, a loss of will. Wesley believed that artisans, small farmers, "crackers," and backwoodsmen had menaced the existing order, one dominated by slaveholders, during the war. That same year, Charles D. Ramsdell delivered his Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, formulating arguments similar to Wesley's, but offering more evidence. Published in 1947 under the title Behind the Lines in the Confederacy, Ramsdell described the hardships that befell Confederates, particularly poor whites, drawing on contemporary letters to substantiate his case. Bell Irvin Wiley tapped into those class tensions in the Confederate States in his 1943 book Plain Folk of the Confederacy to provide the first coherent argument for the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" thesis. According to Wiley, the friction between rich and poor was so serious that it broke down support for the war. "Paramount among these," he argued, "was the feeling that privileged groups, particularly the planters, were shirking their military responsibilities." Since then, Wayne Durrill has argued the class-conflict thesis, as has Paul Williams in a recently published book on the Chattahoochee Valley, entitled Rich Man's War. Paul Escott, however, offers the most skillful argument for this thesis, proposing that President Jefferson Davis's inability to appeal to the poorer people cost the Confederate war effort their support. (3) The basis of these authors' assertions is that wealthy people instigated secession and a war to protect their slave property and then hid behind legal loopholes to escape military service. The Twenty-Slave Law (later Fifteen) enabled a white male of military age to remain at home if the household owned twenty adult slaves. In other cases, wealthy soldiers were able to hire substitutes to serve for them, a luxury unavailable to less fortunate men. This left the poor and the middle class to shoulder the burden of fighting the war for independence. While the rich men enjoyed the pleasures of life at home, all others endured the burdens and brutality of war in uniform, and their families suffered the absence of a major breadwinner. The resulting hardships and frustrations caused severe internal dissension in the Confederacy and were the major factor in its defeat.
But was this more of a rich man's war and a poor man's fight than other conflicts? Because wealthy people constitute a small minority of the population, virtually every major war is fought by those who have less. They compose the overwhelming majority of the population. That was certainly true of the slave states from which the Confederacy drew its soldiers, an area where one in every four households had at least one slave. (4) Virtually every government protects the interests of the wealthy best. The rich usually wield the power, and people from that economic stratum have much greater access to high-ranking officials than poorer people. In democratic republics, people from the middle and lower classes help choose their representatives and often benefit from their governments; this was the case in both the Southern states and the Confederate States of America, but those representatives almost always came from among the wealthy. (5)
Yet the question still remains: Did the wealthy in Southern society instigate the secession crisis, foment war, and then stand on the sidelines while the poor and middle class did the fighting and shouldered the hardships? In the past, scholars have mined large quantities of soldiers' and civilians' letters and diaries and plucked bits and pieces of evidence to string together an argument in favor or against the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" thesis. Scholars have failed to generate valid statistical evidence to support arguments in either direction.
Based on a large-scale, statistically valid cluster sample of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, this study will generate data on a host of important issues in the Civil War, among them the question of the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" thesis. I will offer sound statistics on issues of slavery, wealth, desertion, and casualties, among other topics, to offer a better understanding of the thesis.
The evidence will demonstrate that for Lee's army, this was not simply a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, that it was a rich and a poor man's fight. Rich people were, in fact, greatly overrepresented in Lee's army, and not just at the officer level. Troops in...
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