How the ideology of white supremacy undermined the South’s own war effort.
For Confederates, the increasing military burdens tested public commitment to the war. Slaveholders were insulted when the government tried to force them to provide slaves to support the war effort or to join the army even if they felt they had more important things to do. Such policies—which grew more draconian as the South’s position deteriorated—“violated political, social, and other cultural imperatives and taboos.” This included “keeping government small and weak, extolling local and state sovereignty over that of a national government, and keeping black people firmly subordinated and strictly excluded from many spheres of life.” Planters refused to grow food for the army instead of cotton for profit. Critical fortifications were left unfinished because they refused to loan slaves to accomplish the task. Morale in Confederate ranks was eroded when well-connected plantation owners passed laws giving their families special exemptions from conscription.
Southerners had long claimed that black people liked being enslaved because many of them realized they were incapable of providing for themselves. Serving whites was supposedly their “manifest destiny” and the best fate any of them could have. This ideological holding always stood uneasily alongside the slave lords’ oft-expressed fears of a slave uprising and the draconian measures they took to keep their property compliant. But the war laid bare this lie. As Union forces approached, house servants and field hands who’d outwardly expressed loyalty to their masters suddenly abandoned them. Levine quotes one disillusioned Southern belle, Honoria Cannon, saying she sometimes wished “there was not a negro left in the country,” although “learning to do our own work would be hard.”
If having their slaves abandon them was a hard blow to planter ideology, seeing many of them return as brave and disciplined Union soldiers was the knockout punch. Black volunteers served bravely in unit after unit, belying the notion that they didn’t want the freedom and were incapable of fighting for it. General Robert E. Lee thought Lincoln’s arming of the slaves a “savage and brutal policy,” as it would consign “our social system” to “destruction” and a “degradation worse than death.”
Reeling from these shocks, white Southern unity began to collapse. Poor soldiers abandoned their units in droves and made their way home to help their families grow food. Anti-Confederate guerilla bands spread across the uplands. Some political leaders did the unthinkable—suggesting blacks be armed and encouraged to defend the Confederacy in exchange for freedom. Clearly a war to defend slavery had lost its central aim.
By war’s end, Congress had passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery and various Northern states had begun dismantling some of the laws that made blacks second-class citizens. This “second American Revolution” would be substantially rolled back, of course, with the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow laws, which would last another hundred years, supported by more or less the same white supremacist ideology that had sustained slavery. Still, the House of Dixie would never be fully restored.
Feed the Political AnimalDonate
Washington Monthly depends on donations from readers like you.