“Our Homes, Our Land, and Our Negroes:” Poor White Men and the Confederate Cause

Nothing in this story is hidden. It was said aloud, written down, and passed along—often as common sense.

Portrait of Confederate soldier Washington Mackey Ives from the 4th Florida Infantry in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Source: State Library and Archives of Florida.

They rose before dawn and walked from cabins that barely held the night’s cold. Their fields were thin, stubborn, unpromising—soil that gave little back no matter how faithfully it was worked. Most owned no land worth naming. Many owned nothing at all, no human property, no claim beyond the edge of fields they did not control. Yet when the war came, they marched—ragged, hungry—convinced they were defending something essential. Not merely territory. Not abstraction. A way the world was ordered, and a place they believed they still occupied within it.

A newspaper lay folded on a table in Louisville, its language stripped of ornament, its questions sharpened to cut. Would they send their children to schools where Black children sat beside them? Would they accept Black men in the witness box, speaking against them? And then the line that did the work: AMALGAMATE TOGETHER THE TWO RACES IN VIOLATION OF GOD’S WILL. The argument ended where it began—with the poor. Without slavery, the Daily Courier warned, they would fall to the bottom—forced to live among those they had been taught to fear. The page did not need footnotes. It needed only repetition.

In a camp somewhere in Virginia, a private explained himself to a guard from Wisconsin. He did not reach for policy. He did not mention tariffs. He said what had been said to him, again and again: you Yanks want us to marry our daughters to niggers. It was not a theory. It was a picture—kitchens, beds, bloodlines—drawn so vividly that it felt already true.

Others put it more carefully, but no less plainly. Pvt. William McKee wrote that liberty meant nothing if it required equality. “I love home and al that surrounds it as wel as anybody,” he said, “but if I have to [be] the equal with a niger, I had rather never come home, better me fall in the struggle for it.” Freedom, as he understood it, did not exist apart from hierarchy.

Fear of racial leveling—more than land, more than wages, more even than slavery’s profits—became the load-bearing pillar of the Confederate project

Portrait of Private Edwin Francis, Company C, 2nd Louisiana Infantry Regiment. He served in the Peninsula campaign under General J .B. Magruder and was killed in the battle of Malvern Hill, July, 1862, Date between 1860 and 1862, Source: Britannica.

Letters followed the same grammar. A poor white farmer from North Carolina wrote that he would never cease fighting because the federal government was “trying to force us to live as the colored race.” A Louisiana artilleryman, exhausted by war but resolved to continue, said he would “never want to see the day when a [N]egro is put on an equality with a white person.” A Union soldier wrote in 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation, “I know enough about the southern spirit that I think they will fight for the institution of slavery even to extermination.” They were not arguing. They were deciding.

The words home and liberty moved easily in their mouths. Private Richard Henry Watkins insisted he went to war so that Southerners might “have our own form of government and our own social institutions and regulate our own domestic affairs.” Private J. V. Fuller wrote that he fought for “the liberty and privileges of my little children.” Lieutenant W. R. Redding was more explicit: “Our homes our firesides our land and negroes and even the virtue of our fair ones is at stake.” The sentence ran on because the fears did.

Honor and masculinity completed the system. Men stayed because leaving meant disgrace. “Anyone who stays at home is no part of a man,” wrote one North Carolinian. Another insisted, “I would be disgraced if I staid at home… The honor of our family is involved.” Captain James T. Armstrong worried less about death than about the shame his children might feel later, when the war was spoken of and his name had not been in it. The war watched them. The town watched them. Their ancestors watched them.

Elite voices reinforced the same structure. Mississippi lieutenant William Nugent wrote with chilling clarity, “This country without slave labor would be completely worthless… hence I am willing to fight to the last.” Captain Elias Davis vowed to fight forever rather than “submit to freeing negroes among us,” insisting they were defending “rights and property bequeathed to us by our ancestors.” Lieutenant William E. Smith of Georgia removed all doubt about causation: “Without slavery, there would not have been… any reason for the breakup [of] the old government.” Even Confederate clerks warned that defeat meant the loss of “property, country, freedom, everything.”

Religion did not interrupt these conclusions. It settled them. Southern ministers taught that the order of the world had been written long before these men were born—that some were fitted to rule and others to serve. Rev. George H. Clark preached that Black people were “the most degraded race in every way, physically, socially, intellectually, and morally.” Rev. Richard Furman insisted that enslaved people were better off than “thousands of the poorer classes in countries reputed civilized and free,” conceding only that the trade—not slavery itself—might be “censurable.” Scripture became insulation, not challenge. God was invoked not to restrain the cause, but to bless it.

Beneath these claims ran a deeper, unspoken terror: retribution. Southerners spoke obsessively of “subjugation” and “enslavement” should the Confederacy fail. These were not casual metaphors. They reflected intimate knowledge of what slavery actually was. As James McPherson noted, slavery was to them “a fate worse than death” precisely because they saw its horrors daily. One act, recorded without embellishment, reveals the depth of that knowledge: a group of white Southerners mutilated and blinded a slave child for giving information against them. Such violence lingered in the imagination. What had been done could, they feared, be done in return .

There were moments when the machinery showed its seams. The draft came. Exemptions followed—twenty enslaved people, and a man could stay home. Grumbling spread through camps. A North Carolina private, John W. Reese, complained that “big men lay at home feasting… making speeches… while we poor soldiers are forced away from home.” A Georgian conscript, William Ross Stilwell, reached a devastating conclusion: “If this is independence don’t want it. I had rather take bondage.” The words were there, written in pencil, then folded away. Orders remained.

Nearly one out of every four military-age white Southern men did not survive four years of war—-some 260,000 to 300,000. Survivors came home carrying what the war had left them: missing limbs, ruined lungs, damaged eyesight, bodies weakened by disease, and minds unsettled by sights they could not lay down.

The fields emptied. Households lost sons, brothers, fathers. Whole counties counted absences instead of returns. The scale leaves little room for accident. So many men do not vanish unless a commitment to cause is carried, again and again, into places where survival itself becomes uncertain.

From this vantage, the Confederacy comes into focus not merely as a slaveholders’ republic, but as a racial state sustained by the fears and commitments of those who owned nothing but their whiteness. They marched because the world they had been taught to see could not survive otherwise. Because slavery placed a floor beneath them and a distance between them and the bottom. Because the questions had been asked in newspapers and sermons and songs until the answers felt like their own. Because to step away would mean stepping down—into schools, courts, kitchens, beds—into a new world they had been trained to dread.

To understand this is not to soften judgment. It is to sharpen it. Poor white Southerners fought not because slavery enriched them, but because its destruction threatened to strip away the last claim they believed they possessed. Slavery guaranteed rank. It promised meaning. It told them who they were—and who they would never be.

When the war ended, that grammar did not vanish. It reorganized—into resistance, into law, into violence—carried forward by a South that did not surrender its beliefs, only its uniforms.

Next week, “The Militant South.”

I’m writing a long-running historical series on the origins of American authority and the stories used to make it feel legitimate. Subscribe to follow the next essays in that arc.

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Intellectual Map

Bolland, Chris. “Enslaved to the Cause: The Poor White Southerner’s Support for Slavery and Secession.” Mid-Atlantic Humanities Review 2 (2024). PDF. https://www.lycoming.edu/humanities-research-center/mid-atlantic-humanities-review/pdfs/vol-2/14-bolland-enslaved-to-the-cause.pdf.

Escott, Paul D. After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Gallagher, Gary W. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Gallagher, Gary W. Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New Loyalty. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Horton, James Oliver. National Park Service. “Why Confederate Soldiers Fought. Appomattox Court House,” National Historical Park, U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d. PDF. https://www.nps.gov/apco/planyourvisit/upload/Why-Confederates-Fought-Final.pdf.

Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Merritt, Keri Leigh. Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Plain Folk of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949.

Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

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Primary sources and documentary collections

Furman, Richard. Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States. Charleston, 1822.

Stephens, Alexander H. A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States: Its Causes, Character, Conduct and Results. 2 vols. Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1868–1870.

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.