Why would normal people fight for the Rich’s right to own slaves, something which had no importance to them
(Asked in another sub) but I think this is a better sub for that question
Why would normal people fight for the Rich’s right to own slaves, something which had no importance to them
(Asked in another sub) but I think this is a better sub for that question
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See the answers to this question by the excellent u/secessionisillegal and u/supermanhat as well as the answers they link therein.
It’s important to note that the South was a slave society, not a society that happened to have people who owned slaves. Slave ownership was ideologically something to aspire to, and enslaved people comprised a huge portion of the wealth of the South. About 25 percent of households in the South owned at least one person (numbers range from about 3 percent in Delaware to 49 percent in Mississippi).
That said, attitudes towards slavery varied widely, with some enslavers being Unionists and some people who did not own other people being staunchly Confederate. From an older answer of mine on the topic:
> Most whites in Missouri in 1850 were from Southern states (approximately 75 percent), and others who had emigrated from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had come from areas that had previously been settled by Southerners. There was also a growing German population in the state, mostly in St. Louis but also in some river towns; as well as a large Irish population, mostly in St. Louis. (The German and Irish population in St. Louis made it the American city with the largest percentage of foreign-born population in 1860, with close to 60%. Also, many of those immigrants were engaged in industrial labor, which was concentrated in St. Louis.) The railroad reached St. Louis in 1853, and served to integrate products (which could be shipped by river to the city) from Missouri’s hinterland to the wider economy in the East.
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> The African-American population in Missouri had risen substantially since 1810, but fallen steadily as a percentage of population since 1830, when African-Americans (free and slave) had made up almost 18 percent of the population. By 1850, there were about 3,500 free African-Americans in the state and 115,000 slaves, comprising slightly less than 10 percent of the state’s population. We don’t know as much as we would like to about attitudes among that group in the 1850s, but I think I am safe in assuming that they were generally antislavery Unionists.
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> The slave owners in Missouri (who were always a minority of whites) settled along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, growing mostly hemp and tobacco (cotton was never a large crop in the state). Hemp would be made into fiber and sent South for bagging and binding cotton bales, and tobacco sold in the wider market throughout the U.S. Most slave owners in Missouri owned few slaves; the average number per slave owner was 4.66, and only about 20 families owned more than 50 slaves. Only about 12.5 percent of white families owned slaves, compared with close to 50% in the lower South.
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> The hemp market illustrates the complexity of attitudes towards slavery, and how people felt towards either North or South. Missouri’s hemp crop was grown mostly with slave labor, and sold South, but strong tariffs on imported hemp (opposed by free-trade Southerners) made hemp growers sympathetic to the North, and thus reluctant Unionists. These slave counties were also surrounded by free counties, and a large swath of the state north and south of the Missouri River that had very few to no slaves at all. The southern counties in particular (in the Missouri Ozarks) were full of poor whites who hated both African-Americans and planters (it was quite possible to be indifferent on slavery but also anti-African-American; Irish attitudes were similar — by marginalizing slaves, the Irish sought to carve out a higher status that might eventually accord them equal rights with natives.)
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> The German immigrants, many of whom were refugees from the revolutions of 1848, were the majority of the only strong anti-slavery groups in the state.
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> In fact, most people who voted in Missouri (said group obviously not including slaves) supported compromise with the South. The presidential election of 1860 illustrates this: the river counties that were intensively slaveholding counties voted for John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas, while the poorest white counties were those that voted for John C. Breckenridge. The German population voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln; in fact, he garnered ~17,000 votes in Missouri, which was a majority of the 27,000 votes he got from all slave states.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2200dc/if_i_was_an_average_american_citizen_either/
By all accounts (by which I mean the 1860 census and my own math) more than half the population was enslaved in some states. You can read a longer thread on this here.
The CSA began conscription in 1862. Do we have any sources on what percentage of their troops were volunteer vs conscript?
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