Slavery as a Primary Cause of Widespread Confederate Support for the American Civil War

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.”