The South’s reaction to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 was characterized by a remarkable display of popular support. Across the newly emerged Confederate nation, war enthusiasm skyrocketed and anti-Unionist rhetoric abounded. According to William Baylor of the 5th Regiment at Harper’s Ferry, “Great enthusiasm animates all, and should the vicegerent of the arch-fiend dare send his minions to Old Virginia, we will repel them, or leave the memory of brave men for our friends to revere.” A minority of dissenters – people with “union sentiments” – was scorned and sidelined. In perhaps the most potent expression of patriotism, volunteer rates for military service soared. In early August, 1861, a Virginian living in Augusta County reported in his diary a phenomenon Americans throughout the South had been witnessing for the past few months: recruiters “have arranged to furnish their quota of volunteers, and the remainder will return home.”

Historians often cite testimony such as this to argue that the supply of would-be soldiers in the South greatly outweighed demand when war broke out. Indeed, the phenomenon of popular support is undisputed in discussions of the war’s opening phase. Historian Frank Owsley’s 1925 criticism of the Confederacy’s failure to survive the Civil War generalizes upon reports such as these, and refuses to blame the volunteer spirit of young Southerners for the war’s outcome. Their enthusiasm in 1861 was, he writes, “almost without a parallel in history,” and would have enabled a more logistically prepared government to mobilize an army of 600,000 within a few months.

Historian David Donald concurs, asserting in his 1959 study of Confederate soldiers that Southern men “rushed to enlist, fearing the fighting would be over before they could get to the front.” Recent studies support this conclusion, such as Irwin Unger’s 2006 account of American history, These United States. He indicates that the system of relying upon volunteers for military service in the South worked well for the first year of the war. Though the Confederacy was plagued with problems in 1861, its own citizens’ support was not one of them.

The impressive phenomenon of popular support served to sustain the Confederacy as it went to war with the Union, imbuing the fledgling government with the power to resist the North’s challenge to its authority over the seceded states. It provided the regiments that successfully resisted the first serious Northern attempt to restore the Union at the First Battle of Bull Run in July of 1861, and continued to augment the ranks of Confederate grey well into the following year. As such, popular support for war in the South was instrumental in shaping the course of the war. Historian Charles Wesley, having just lived through the First World War, commented on the value of mass support to the Confederacy during the Civil War: “Clearly more important than numbers and resources – as weighty as they may be in the final result – are the morale of the people and their attitude toward war. … A nation like an individual is not beaten until its spirit is broken.”

Indeed, popular support for the war was a necessary condition for its continued existence beyond the first few engagements: without the support of its population, the Confederate government would not have had the human resources necessary to maintain a front against the Union. No matter how passionate the Confederacy’s politicians were in endorsing war, they relied upon popular support for their very survival.

In this essay, I argue that this phenomenon of mass support, this crucial ingredient in the recipe for war, cannot be understood without explicit reference to the institution of slavery in the South, and I highlight the almost universal desire within the white community to defend this institution. First, I show that slavery was a deeply rooted institution in the antebellum South, so important that it helped to define the region’s identity, and so powerful that it made up a large part of the Southern reason for supporting the Civil War in 1861. I argue, further, that post-bellum claims seeking to devalue the importance of slavery in Confederate combat motivation, placing the emphasis instead on the defence of sovereignty and states’ rights, are flawed.

Concepts of states’ rights were inseparable from the institution of slavery when applied to the Southern case, and when other states’ rights came into conflict with slavery, Southern choices overwhelmingly reflected the primacy of slavery over the concept of sovereignty. I also address a class-oriented view which holds that, though rich slaveholding planters may have desired a war for slavery, the poor Southern majority supported the war for other reasons. I suggest that these class distinctions are inaccurate labels when applied to the South, and that all members of white society were generally unified by their material interest in slavery and by their racially motivated conceptions of self. Finally, I contend that arguments designed to de-emphasize the role of slavery in the Confederacy’s war motivation are founded upon a popular but inaccurate recollection of the conflict that took hold almost immediately after Appomattox and was nurtured by a nation-wide mood of reconciliation.

Slavery

In antebellum years, many Southerners believed the institution of slavery to be a vital part of their economy. With a broad base of support in Southern states, fierce defenders of slavery in Congress such as South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun held that slavery was both an essential component of their economy and a labour structure superior to any alternative the Nineteenth Century had to offer. In 1838, Calhoun declared slave labour to be “the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.” He justified this assertion with simplistic but effective logic, arguing that the detrimental conflict between labour and capital so characteristic of other “highly civilized nations” not reliant upon slavery was “impossible with us.” In a slave economy, labour simply was capital. By the time of the Civil War, this Southern view had not eroded. Addressing the Confederate Congress in April of 1861, Jefferson Davis stated that “the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable” to the Southern economy.

The Confederate president was not alone in his convictions. Slavery, according to Augusta County’s Republican Vindicator, simply saved money. The Vindicator avowed in 1861 that there could not “be a more striking illustration of the productive power of slave labor” than the lower tax levels found in slave counties when compared with free counties. It was not merely politicians and newspapers who saw slaves as important economic assets. Individuals, too, affirmed this sentiment with their actions. In one shocking example, a slave who attempted to murder a four-month-old child by forcing sharp objects down its throat was not jailed; instead, her owner sent her to Richmond to be sold, determined to get some money back on his investment. Unger generalizes upon examples like this, writing that the South’s “deep stake in the peculiar institution” at the time of secession was so solidly fixed that Southerners “feared both social and economic cataclysm if it failed.”

This belief was grounded not only in theory, but in decades – if not centuries – of history. Historian Douglass North’s 1964 study of American antebellum economics finds slavery to be vital to the Southern economy as “both the major capital investment” for agricultural production and also “an important intermediate product.” Historian Gavin Wright concurs in his 2003 study of American agriculture. Indeed, slavery was such a deeply entrenched and consistently profitable enterprise in the antebellum period that even after the importation of slavery was banned in 1808, more than 250,000 slaves were brought into the country illegally. Whether the institution’s popularity was due to any actual economic superiority is difficult to establish, though in his 1971 study of the Confederacy as a nation, Historian Emory Thomas finds evidence to suggest that the use of slave labour on Southern plantations was more efficient than the use of free labour on farms in the North.

However, even if Southern slavery were not as efficient a work structure as other available systems – as Wright points out, “the best of our models are no more than metaphors” and slavery’s “productivity advantage” is far from solid historical fact – the institution’s benefits to the slave-owning classes are obvious and undeniable. After the initial investment, there were very few costs of slavery for a slave owner; under competent direction, slaves were able to produce their own food, make their own clothes, and build their own dwellings. They were materially self-sufficient, allowing for the remainder of their labour to reap pure profit for their owner. Clearly, slave ownership was an economically attractive prospect from the white perspective. Indeed, Thomas even suggests that slavery’s prominence in Southern society was so marked that it hindered the working character of white men and women such that “addiction to the work ethic never became widespread.” Slavery was a key component of the South’s antebellum economy, and this fact was not lost on its slave-owning citizens.

Historian Howard Zinn’s recent study, A People’s History of the United States,recognizes the tremendous value of slavery to individual Southern whites, and sees this fact as a major cause for the United States government’s failure to outlaw it. The federal government’s general support for the system throughout the antebellum period, he argues, was thus based on “an overpowering practicality.” Gerald Gunderson’s 1974 statistical analysis of the potential loss of income to whites that would have resulted from abolition in 1860 concludes that all of the Southern states “had enough of their income dependent on slavery that they could certainly be expected to protest, agonize, resist and organize against any threats to its existence.” It was clear to the federal government that supporting slavery would likely lead to economic gains in the South, and would certainly help secure the political support of the majority of its population.

As such, it was protected through what Zinn calls “a network of controls in the southern states, backed by the laws, courts, armed forces, and race prejudice of the nation’s political leaders.” Indeed, historians can refer to the Constitution to argue that the basic system of American governance was designed to protect slavery: the Three Fifths Clause gave slaveholding states an advantage in terms of appointment to the House of Representatives, and the Fugitive Slave Clause required escaped slaves to be returned to their masters even if slavery was not legal in the state to which they escaped. The objections of abolitionists in the North were simply not as forceful an argument as the pro-slavery case, and this was accordingly reflected in the nation’s laws.

However, the political and economic advantages to the federal government of supporting the system of slavery in the South had an important side effect. This policy served to perpetuate the divide between North and South by increasing the South’s dependence on slavery such that it began to resemble the North less and less. Thomas writes that, because of their peculiar institution, Southerners “developed a sectional identity outside the national mainstream” which contradicted the norm. In his study of Augusta County, historian Edward Ayers also finds reason to suggest that slavery was the key part of an emerging Southern identity. Ayers cites John B. Baldwin, a long-standing member of the Virginia legislature, to link Augusta to the rest of Virginia through slavery. Augusta was, according to Baldwin, “identified with every interest and every institution that is recognized as of value in Virginia.” Ayers is careful to point out that Baldwin was referring to slavery. While the North acquiesced to slavery’s perpetuation, it was not a bound to or defined by the institution as was the South. In an important sense, then, well before the rise of the Confederacy the South had already become a separate entity from the rest of the nation. This entity was marked by and held together by slavery.

Whenever any force threatened the fundamental institution of slavery, the Southern reaction was predictably strong. As early as 1838, Senator Calhoun referred to abolitionists as “deluded madmen” who were “stirring heaven and earth” to destroy the South’s economy, and appealed to Southerners’ “highest and most solemn obligations” to defend it. In 1859, calls for vengeance, including public hanging, abounded across the South after John Brown’s failed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Less than a year later, Augusta County’s Staunton Spectator reported: “Nothing is more common than to hear our citizens declaim against the abolitionists. If a stranger comes into our midst who is even suspected of entertaining or inculcating abolition sentiments, the whole community is at once and justly in an uproar.” Clearly, attacks on slavery, whether political or through more forceful means, were routinely met with hostility in the South.

Moreover, Southerners displayed a marked tendency to view all opposition to slavery in the same terms. Northern abolitionists, the Republican Party, and fiery radicals such as John Brown were seen as part of the same unified force seeking to destroy the Southern way of life. Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia linked John Brown’s attempted slave revolt directly to the Republican Party, warning his fellow citizens that with this raid it “has already declared war against you and your institutions. It every day commits acts of war against you: it has already compelled you to arm for your defense. . . . Defend yourselves!” Supporting Francis W. Pickens’s 1860 campaign for South Carolina governor, the pamphleteer Edward Bryans declared to an approving public that he “would be willing to… if need be, cover the state with ruin, conflagration and blood rather than submit. … Give us slavery or give us death!” Fierce statements such as these widened the gap between North and South and at the same time helped to solidify Southern identity as a besieged community that had to be defended.

States’ Rights

With the institution of slavery so imperative to the survival of the South’s economy, way of life, and identity, it requires no great leap of intuition to appreciate it as a major cause for the great degree of popular support the Confederacy’s war effort enjoyed once hostilities broke out. From this perspective, the transition is seamless from the furious rhetoric of defence like that of Senator Toombs in 1859 and Edward Bryans in 1860 to the great rush to enlist in the Confederate military in 1861. In this view, slavery was at the heart of the Confederate motivation to fight. However, almost immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865, a position emerged that contradicted this view directly, flatly denying that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Proponents of this position (which, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to as the States’ Rights Argument) hold that Confederate soldiers fought to defend the rights of states to determine their own futures.

Jefferson Davis was a key advocate of this argument. After his release from prison in 1867, he passionately defended the validity of states’ rights as the Confederacy’s reason for war and insisted in his 1874 memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, that slavery was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” The South fought, his memoirs claim, to protect all of its natural rights against “unlimited, despotic power.” In this same vein of argument, Confederate veteran Roger A. Pryor held that slavery was the “occasion” but not the “cause” of the war. These arguments still hold considerable sway today. Tony Horwitz’s 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic, describes his interactions with neo-Confederates and other contemporary Southerners who take the arguments of Davis and Pryor to heart. Children of the Confederacy, Horwitz reports, are taught that “disregard of those in power for the rights of the Southern states” was the sole cause of war; explicit references to slavery are absent. A man that Horwitz meets at the Shiloh battlefield explains that Rebels fought not for any principle in particular but because they “believed strongly in their individual right to determine what their government should be.” To these people, conceptions of sovereignty and rights were the primary motivations for Confederate soldiers, and to linger on the importance of slavery is to grossly misrepresent the justice of the Confederate cause.

I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary, however. Though states’ rights and sovereignty were valid ideas in 1861, when used in the defence of the Confederacy they cannot be distilled from the pervasive institution of slavery. As Ayers points out, slavery was such an integral part of life that it “come to embody all the rights of white men” in the South. Any protection of the South’s right to its own way of life necessarily involved the defence of slavery precisely because slavery was essential to the Southern lifestyle.

Furthermore, despite their powerful rhetoric in support of states’ rights, many Southerners were quick to ignore them when it suited the “peculiar institution” to do so. For example, Georgia offered a sizeable reward for the killing or capture of David Walker, a black man born free in North Carolina and living in Boston who had written an infuriating anti-slavery pamphlet, Walker’s Appeal. When Walker was assassinated in 1830, Georgia had undeniably flouted Massachusetts’ right to the safety of its citizens. Furthermore, the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, perhaps the most inflammatory case of the antebellum period, called into question a territory’s right to keep slavery out of its borders; anti-slavery activists feared that this set a precedent for decisions pertaining to states as well. However, no one who championed states’ rights in the South denounced the Court’s decision. In this sense, Calhoun’s Doctrine of Nullification – which held that states had the right to invalidate any federal laws they deemed unconstitutional – was much less a universal principle of states’ rights than, in Unger’s words, “an appropriate weapon by which to defend the South’s [material] interests.”

Proponents of the States’ Rights Argument might be tempted to argue that in antebellum America there was no states’ right not to have slavery, and as a result Southern politicians could not be expected to stand up in defence of this non-existent principle. This view would allow the South’s stance on states’ rights and slavery to remain consistent; Southerners could defend both without hypocrisy. By this view, then, states’ rights may very well have been the primary principle that the South went to war for in 1861; slavery could have been merely incidental. However, we must examine the foundations of this claim before accepting it wholesale. We may refer to the Constitution in order to establish what exactly was and was not a state’sright. Indeed, as I have argued above, both the Three Fifths Clause and Fugitive Slave Clause are often interpreted as defending slavery in the United States. The Constitution’s protection of slavery, however, is not explicit. Though both clauses make it easier to hold slaves, they make no prescriptions as to the preservation of the institution itself. Just as the states’ right to legislate for slavery is unrestricted, so too is the right not to have slavery.

The States’ Rights Argument could make the case that, though slavery is never explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the Founding Fathers nonetheless intended for it to be protected. On these grounds, Southern politicians in the 1850s may refer to the states’ right to slavery and need not worry about the states’ right not to have slavery. However, interpreting the implications of the Constitution with respect to a state’s right to slavery, as opposed to its explicit pronouncements, is a muddy affair. A brief glance at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 shows that the Founding Fathers disagreed vehemently on this issue. Luther Martin, for example, denounced the Three Fifths Clause as “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character.” Crucially, Luther Martin was a strong advocate of states’ rights, and even refused to sign the Constitution because he felt it violated these rights. That an important states’ rights advocate – a Founding Father, no less – could oppose a pro-slavery clause in the Constitution is highly significant. Not only does it illustrate that the Founding Father’s intent with respect to slavery was neither clear nor unanimous, but it also proves that defending states’ rights in America need not entail defending slavery. Southern politicians put the two concepts together, using the rhetoric of states’ rights to shield their primary interest in slavery, when there was no clear constitutional precedent – explicit or implicit – to do so.

Indeed, though the South’s secession from the North has often been heralded as the ultimate expression of states’ rights sentiment, we must examine the Confederacy’s subsequent actions to judge the validity of this claim. Indeed, the Confederacy was no states’ rights haven. By and large, the Southern constitution was not markedly different from the North’s, except insofar as it guaranteed the protection of slavery in every Confederate State. Though this was of course widely supported throughout the fledgling nation, it nonetheless restricted states’ rights to choose whether or not to allow slavery. In addition, President Jefferson Davis’s central authority over the states of the Confederacy was at least comparable to President Abraham Lincoln’s power over the remaining Union states. The Confederate Constitution gave Davis the power to veto specific portions of bills, for example, enhancing the president’s power to manipulate whatever items were on his agenda. Davis’ federal power over Southern states is also evident in his successful imposition of universal conscription, transcending state borders, as early as April of 1862. Before the Civil War, the power to raise troops in America had been reserved for states, but the wartime Confederacy rejected this right. North Carolinian governor Zebulon Vance was one of many prominent Southerners who argued that Davis’s power over states was too great. Robert Toombs complained in 1863 that “the real control of our affairs is narrowing down constantly into the hands of Davis and the old army.” The fact that, even in the heart of the Confederacy, many states’ rights were compromised is a strong indicator that the defence of these rights was not its raison d’être, nor its goal in combat. On the contrary, the Confederacy’s primary concern was to retain the institution of slavery.

Class

Another type of argument that seeks to downplay slavery’s role in generating popular support for the war in 1861 (which, to avoid confusion, I will refer to as the Argument from Class) is not troubled by the view that the Confederacy’s first concern was to protect the peculiar institution in the South. Though the Confederate government indeed had a stake in slavery, this argument holds, this government represented the interests of only the rich slaveholding minority. The bulk of the Southern population, by contrast, did not rank the protection of slavery among their reasons to support the war. After all, on the eve of war only a third of Southern whites owned slaves. The words of the elite – such as South Carolina’s spokesperson at the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, William Preston, who declared that “Slavery is our King; slavery is our Truth; slavery is our Divine Right” – failed to reflect the views of the poorer white majority.

The earliest, and perhaps the most radical, version of this thesis originated during the war. In 1861, Karl Marx argued:

[An] oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilized the Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same time to revolutionize the internal constitutions of the slave states, to completely subjugate the section of the white population that had still maintained some independence under the protection of the democratic Constitution of the Union.

To Marx, poor Southern whites were robbed of their democratic rights and left with no choice but to support the war. Highly class-oriented views such as Marx’s saw publication in the Union by 1864, and gained some popularity in the North after the war had ended. John William DeForest’s 1867 novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, for example, portrayed the South as a region where the poor were oppressed by “an oligarchy,” and interpreted the Union’s role in the war as that of the liberator. President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation of May 29, 1865 also implied that rich Southerners were more to blame for the war: any Confederate worth more than $20,000 was exempted. Congress subscribed to the spirit of this view as well. Historian Eric Foner portrays the first few years of Radical Republicanism as an attempt to bring to power “a new class of politicians of the plain people” whose guidance was untainted by wealth and would avert future disasters. In his 1885 Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant also places the blame on overzealous politicians and slave owners, not poor whites, for the war. It is clear that after the war, many in the North agreed on some version of the Argument from Class, believing that the South’s poor majority class had not fought the war for slavery.

More recent understandings of the cause for mass Southern support also appeal to the Argument from Class. Horwitz’s report on the 1990s South refers to the “famous Southern gripes” that it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” A man he meets in a bar tells him that “[t]he whole Southern cause was manipulated by a bunch of Charleston fat cats and that’s what got us into the mess at Sumter.” This same basic outlook may be found in the historical community. In his 1999 case study of John Brown’s act of political violence, Gary Fine argues that secessionists such as George Fitzhugh and Edmund Ruffin “used John Brown to whip the South into a frenzy of anti-Northern hatred, justifying secession.” Fine points out that Ruffin was so keen that he attended Brown’s hanging, believing it could “stir the sluggish blood of the South.”

Armstead Robinson makes the same case in his 1980 study of the first two years of Confederate mobilization, arguing that though white society was deeply divided by slavery, the “epidemic of insurrection anxiety” that followed John Brown’s actions gave secessionists a “psychological weapon” to launch the war. Zinn’s study, too, focuses on class conflict in the South to suggest that the poor majority did not fight to protect slavery. He argues that “beneath the apparent unity of the white Confederacy, there was also conflict. … Behind the rebel battle yells and the legendary spirit of the Confederate army, there was much reluctance to fight.” The essence of the Argument from Class has remained constant ever since Appomattox: poor whites did not support slavery, and they were only tricked into fighting for it by the ruling class’s psychological manipulation.

The pivotal point of the Argument from Class is its use of class distinctions within Southern society to differentiate between two separate groups. Viewing Southerners as members of two separate categories makes it a straightforward task to discern how their interests differed. No longer, from this perspective, must we analyze the beliefs and views of individual Southerners. Instead, members of society are instead defined by their class: the rich and the poor, the aristocratic upper class and the subjugated masses, the deceivers and the deceived. For poor Confederates to support or even to fight for something that was not in their interests as defined by these class distinctions had to be the result of trickery. However, a number of arguments (which, again for the sake of clarity, I will refer to as Arguments from Similarity) have emerged to challenge this view. They deny the validity of class distinctions when applied to the antebellum and Confederate South, maintaining that society was more homogeneous than the Argument from Class suggests. From this premise, the Argument from Similarity holds that poor whites felt they too had an interest in slavery, even though they did not own any slaves.

Thomas disagrees directly with the Argument from Class, maintaining that Southerners were “a homogeneous people ethnically and culturally” in comparison to the rest of America.To support this admittedly counterintuitive claim, Thomas’s 1971 study of the nature of the Confederacy underscores the rationality of the poor South’s support of slavery. He cites census data and tax records to confirm the existence of a large number of small planters and yeoman farmers who were “in contrast to the moonlight-and-magnolias model… neither “po” nor “trash”” and argues that these men were respected by larger-scale planters. Thomas shows how nineteenth century conceptions of race helped to magnify the unifying impact of slavery upon white Southern society: ties of “racial solidarity” melded with ties of “self-interest” and led to an overwhelming support of slavery from both rich and poor whites. Class-oriented historians also accept the importance of race as a unifying force in white society. Robinson writes that in antebellum years, “obsession with racism served to deflect attention away from critical issues of economic and political control.” Zinn, too, sees race as a powerful force that detracted from class-consciousness, recognizing that “[r]ace hostility became an easy substitute for class frustration.”

Class-oriented historians like Zinn and Robinson both see white Southern racism as a regrettable factor leading to an artificial version of white homogeneity, whereas Thomas sees the race factor as only one example of a much wider trend. To Zinn and Robinson, the presence of racism covered up class issues that otherwise would have been at the forefront of Southern society. To Thomas, white homogeneity was anything but artificial; it was the accepted norm, and had been for the duration of the South’s history. The South, he argues, was an “essentially solid” society, and poor whites “generally recognized their stake in the slaveholders’ world.” Thomas points out the obvious, that freeing four million slaves would injure the poor members of white society as much as the rich. Non-slaveholders’ interest in slavery, to Thomas, is undeniable.

More recent accounts concur with Thomas’s claim. Historian Stephanie McCurry argues that white men, both rich and poor, were united by their mastery of the domestic sphere. In her 1995 study of antebellum yeomen households in South Carolina,she points to the “virtually unlimited right of an independent man to mastery of his own household” to highlight the commonality between white males of all economic positions. As such, the apparent divisions so crucial to the Argument from Class are completely absent from McCurry’s account. Poor whites, she argues, were “embraced within that system as surely as were their planter counterparts.” Yeomen were solidly committed to the protection of the republican system that respected the legitimacy of white male dominance because, as white males, they were clear beneficiaries. Just as planters respected yeomen’s independence, yeomen believed in the right of planters to keep what they owned. When the institution of slavery was threatened, so too was the very principle of ownership in the South; by defending slavery, this all-important principle of ownership was preserved. Thus, even without any immediate stake in slavery, poor whites were still devoted to its survival. McCurry argues that this interest in slavery led yeoman farmers to play “the majority, if not the leading, part” in secession.

If, as McCurry suggests, North Carolinian yeoman farmers who owned no slaves could display such a strong commitment to slavery in 1860, then it is difficult to see how – as the Argument from Class holds – this interest was absent from their reasons to support the war in 1861. Historian James Oakes extends this argument to the rest of the Confederacy. In his 1998 study Master-class Pluralism, he questions the accuracy of assigning class barriers to the South that protect poor whites from the accusation that they fought for slavery. To Oakes, this distinction simply did not exist. Despite the unequal distribution of wealth in the South, Oakes finds evidence of considerable upward social mobility. Further, he argues that “a clear majority of white families in the Deep South had a direct material interest in the protection and perpetuation of slavery. The paradox is extraordinary. If the Old South was dominated by slaveholders, that domination was in large measure the democratic reflection of white social reality.” Poor Southerners were not simply brainless masses fooled by a psychological weapon into fighting for slavery; indeed, they appear to be rational actors acting in defence of what was logically in their best interest. The economic stake in slavery identified by McCurry and Oakes combined seamlessly with the racial reasons for slavery that Thomas, Zinn, and Robinson recognize, solidifying the white community’s homogeneity and motivating its defence of this long-standing institution.

Memory

If slavery was truly at the centre of the Confederate motivation to support the Civil War, outweighing the concept of states’ rights and transcending class barriers, then we must ask why arguments to the contrary are so abundant. Oakes points to this question in his study of the antebellum Confederacy, exclaiming that the “only surprise… is that the middle-aged white farmer with perhaps a handful of slaves quickly disappeared from the history books, replaced by a plantation legend that bears little resemblance to historical reality.” With the popular myth focussing only upon large planters, average Confederates’ interest in slavery disappeared from the public memory and, thus, the impact of slavery on most Confederates’ combat motivation could be easily ignored. Another common myth contributing to the arguments de-emphasizing the role of slavery is that of the “happy slave.” Horwitz’s account shows how this myth is often used to dissociate the Confederate cause from slavery. He explains that Children of the Confederacy are told that the war was not fought for slavery and, as if to prove this statement, that slaves were loyal and devoted to their masters. A woman he meets, who sees slavery as unrelated to the war’s cause, declares almost with the same breath that “[s]lavery was not all that bad.” Given the widespread belief in such myths, it is little wonder that slavery plays little or no part in current perceptions of the Confederacy’s rush to war.

The origin of these myths may be traced to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; indeed, it was during this period that the bulk of the arguments seeking to de-emphasize slavery first arose in the United States. A statement released at a press conference in 2000 in Colombia, South Carolina, signed by ninety-eight historians from twenty-five academic institutions, holds the leaders of the recently vanquished Confederacy responsible for the de-emphasis of slavery as a cause for waging war.

After the war had been lost, and the Lost Cause was in need of justification, [President] Davis and [Vice President] Stephens backed away from their original statements, casting the cause of the war in the context of “states rights.” Their revisionist interpretation, in which slavery became not the cause but merely the “question” resolved on the field of battle, still misleads many South Carolinians. The historical record, however, clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.

In light of the ferocious crusade-against-slavery rhetoric emanating from the victorious North, it is hardly surprising that the leaders of the Confederacy would seek to explain their role in the war’s raison d’être without reference to slavery. Further, with their old political leaders arguing that slavery had no role in the war, it is similarly unsurprising that many other ex-Confederates followed suit. Slavery was gone, and in a Republican-dominated political climate little stood to be gained by resisting its demise.

Powerful states’ rights rhetoric, in contrast, was not so thoroughly crushed. Though Southern states’ rights were in clear peril after the war, politicians realized that many rights would nonetheless still be guaranteed by the Constitution if each state could return to the Union. Since re-admittance into the United States seemed to hinge upon appeasing the Republican Party, the expedience of slavery-amnesia quickly became apparent in the post-bellum South, paving the way for convenient myths to develop in place of forgotten realities.

The North, too, experienced a degree of slavery-amnesia. This phenomenon served to enforce arguments in the South that denied slavery’s role in the war. As early as 1865, the Northern memory of slavery’s importance to the war began to suffer due to a new spirit of reconciliation with the South. A Northern audience listened and applauded when Henry Grady, an editor for the Atlanta Constitution, called for “a new era of peace and prosperity,” asking Americans to “[l]et bygones be bygones.” Historian David Blight’s 2001 study, Race and Reunion,argues that the “great challenge of Reconstruction was to determine how a national blood feud could be reconciled at the same time a new nation emerged out of war and social revolution,” and asserts that this effort caused the race issues of the war to be largely forgotten. Both Blight and Horwitz point out that talk of slavery was completely absent from the 1913 reunion of Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg. Pushed aside by reconciliation, slavery virtually disappeared from the popular American narrative of the Civil War, both Northern and Southern. Academic arguments seeking to de-emphasize the role of slavery fit neatly into this reconciliation-inspired narrative, thriving in an environment that no longer chose to remember the institution’s divisive effects.

Slavery was the primary reason for the great degree of popular support for war in the Confederacy of 1861. It was an all-pervasive institution with deep roots in the South’s antebellum past, so great that it was inseparably entwined with – and, crucially, prior to – Southern politicians’ arguments for states’ rights. White Southerners, rich and poor, had a material stake in slavery’s survival, a stake magnified by their belief in natural white superiority. As such, slavery was an integral part of the Confederate identity, and when this institution came under threat, vast sectors of the newly-formed Confederacy rose quickly to defend it. After the fall of the Confederacy, however, slavery was quickly divorced from both Northern and Southern recollections of the Civil War’s opening phase. As a result, Americans’ understanding of their national history remains incomplete. Lost Cause myths, which rose to fill this gap, make up an important component of America’s semi-fictionalized understanding of its past.

But the consequences of America’s historical amnesia extend beyond mere myth. In part due to the forgetful spirit of reconciliation, Reconstruction would fail to secure anything but superficial rights for freedmen and freedwomen. Forgotten by federal authority, black Americans would endure another century of undisguised racial oppression until their civil rights were finally enshrined in the American system. Even in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding area, the federal government would be widely criticized for ignoring the plight of black Americans and focussing its relief efforts on predominantly white sectors of the disaster area. Because America fails to accurately recall the past, it fails to accurately assess – and ultimately fails to solve – the pressing racial issues that still confront it in the twenty-first century.