1. Support for the #Confederacy varied greatly among non-slaveholders, depending on rural/urban, Upper/Lower South, slave societies/societies w slaves, & ties to slaveholders. Class also mattered: many landholding yeomen DID think 1 day they could own slaves, some rented slaves.
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2. But for many cyclically-poor landless whites, esp in the cotton South (abt 1/3 white pop), there was no desire to fight & die to protect slave property. They even realized that their lives were negatively impacted (socio-economically) by the "peculiar institution."
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3. In the cotton South, poor whites were overwhelmingly illiterate & often disenfranchised, & even when they voted they did so viva voce in front of 3 of the most powerful slaveholders in town, who controlled job prospects, property leases, & the criminal justice system.
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4. (Important:) Most poor whites FULLY REALIZED they could never afford a purchase a slave. Most never owned more than a few dollars cash at the richest point in their lives. There was no credit for poor people.
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5. And you wanna know how much a slave cost in 1860 in today's (2011) terms? An astounding $130,000: http://measuringworth.com pic.twitter.com/ZPoJdakqDE
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6. In the 1850s, non-slaveholding laborers were forming nascent unions, demanding protection from competition w brutalized slave labor. These unions met throughout the South, & some even threatened to withdraw their support for slavery altogether -it hurt their prospects & wages.
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7. By eve of war, slaveholders used racist media to try to scare lower class whites into supporting secession, predicting that they'd be raped & slaughtered by the thousands in an inevitable race war following emancipation. If they lived, slaveholders said, they'd be white slavespic.twitter.com/wzEevT0Gy1
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8. Slaveholders were terrified of Republican Party, & not just because of the Party's stance on slavery:pic.twitter.com/RwoM6joGCQ
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9. More on "Red" & "Black" Republicans:
#SUSIHhttps://s-usih.org/2017/08/reflections-on-david-potters-the-impending-crisis-part-2/ …Show this thread -
10. Unfortunately, no matter how many times abolitionists tried to reach the white masses, censorship+illiteracy+police state rendered the effort fruitless. Lynchings for whites -whether talking about Lincoln, or possessing Hinton Helper's book, or associating w Blacks-abounded.
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11. So why did poor whites vote for secession?? Well, many did not. Voter turn-out dropped precipitously bw the 1860 Presidential election and the secession convention elections - the extent of apathy v force is still unknown. Fraud *was* rampant.pic.twitter.com/wzH83rK4Rp
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12. And we *must* keep in mind that slave societies were HEAVILY policed, constantly surveilled, censored societies. Slaveholders used vigilante violence whenever they could to beat & torture ppl into maintaining the southern hierarchy:pic.twitter.com/w5NoCSTL2I
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13. Now, re: joining the Confederacy: both historians & (quant) political scientists agree that most of the ppl volunteering were slaveholders or made a living off of slavery somehow. In the early years, poor whites who joined typically did so for 4 reasons: (1) FORCE. Accounts
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14. of poor men forced at the point of bayonets, or who were arrested for vagrancy & then forced to join are common. (2) PAY. Already trapped in cyclical un-& under-employment, this was a steady & decent wage. Good-excellent, life-changing $ for substitutions,etc. (3) LAND. prior
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15. to the Civil War, veterans had always had the chance to get LAND for their service. Poor whites had NO land. (4) Honor. These were white men with no honor...& what's the quickest way to gain honor? Fight to protect your home.
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16. Poor whites were forced to join en masse after the Conscription Act of 1862. Then the "Twenty Negro Act," exempting the richest slaveholders, inflamed class tensions. = led to massive defections/desertions of the poor in 63-64, ultimately adding to the Confederacy's defeat
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17. Whether Unionist, anti-Confederate, or just completely apathetic, non-slaveholding whites - along with the enslaved & the Union - ultimately added to the Confederacy's demise.
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18 (FIN). The slave regime of the South - the
#Confederacy - needs to be remembered for what it was. In 1867 Union General John Pope wrote a letter to Ulysses Grant, expressing his concerns about how the Civil War—and the causes of the Confederacy—would be remembered in history:pic.twitter.com/ENsc9hXMk8
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Wow - this has blown up, thank you. (And many thanks to
@TheTattooedProf &@PatrickIber for the shout-outs). For those who are asking, yes, this is pretty much all from my book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1316635430/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= …Show this thread -
Here's a link to my thread on the historiography: (
@SandyDarity thought you may be interested.)https://twitter.com/KeriLeighMerrit/status/1031924416270282754?s=19 …Show this thread
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