Slavery; THE Cause?

[bill_torrens]

Tommy,

Your post #1237 reminds me that almost everything we discuss on these boards has been covered before somewhere in the archives. How far do you think that The Gilded Age was the natural and logical consequence of Union victory in the war?

Hal,

Bell Wiley estimated that the number of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate armies was "well up into the tens of thousands". [Life of Johnny Reb, p.324.] A more precise figure doesn't seem possible.

I've recently been concentrating on North Carolinian regiments, and noticed quite a number of men who were [coal?] miners and who had been born in Scotland. Did you know about this?

Bill

[hawglips]

Bill, I know nothing about that.

However, my mother's side hail from the mountains of SW Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, and they are all Scoth-Irish. Most of these ancestors fought for the 64th Va. Mounted Inf. or the 25th Va. Calvary, but to my knowledge, they are all listed as farmers or farm hands.

I'm not aware of much coal mining in NC's mountains back then, but there was coal mining in Va and Ky, at least. Perhaps they were coal miners back in Scotland?

Keep me posted on what you have for the NC 30th, 12th, 48th. I've got "lots" of folks who fought in those.

Hal

[bill_torrens]

Hal,

No, their occupations - as listed - should be those they had at the time they enlisted. The Scottish miners I have found came from Guilford, Rowan & Chatham Counties.

Send me an e-mail with the surnames you want from the 12th, 30th & 48th N.C. Inf. I'll copy anything I find.

Cheers,

Bill

[hawglips]

Bill,

Well I'll be dadgum. Learn something new every day.

Here's a couple links to some info on coal mining in NC, including a short snippet about CW period mining: "During the Civil War the Confederate army took over mining Egypt mine and the coal supplied blockade runners in Wilmington. Toward the end of the war, all mining was stopped in Egypt mine and its entrance was filled with small rocks and debris in case of enemy capture."

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.co...tate-1981.html

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.co...coal_glen.html

I'll email you some names to keep an eye out for.

Hal

[bill_torrens]

Dawna,


Sorry for the delay in getting back to you re your post 253.

I don’t deny the prestige and influence of the planter class, but it bothers me that the “standard” view of the social structure of the ante-bellum South concentrates on planters, crackers & slaves while more or less ignoring the most numerous element of all: the yeoman farmers. This view has come down to the present day from the abolitionists, who found that the smaller farmers offered them little material for propaganda and, therefore, ignored them

In fact 88% of the slaveowners of 1860 owned less than 20 slaves and were therefore deemed to belong to the yeoman class. As Monroe Lee Billington argues in “The American South”,

Marriages between yeomen and planters’ children commonly assisted a change in economic status, often blurring distinctions between the two groups. In reality the lines between the upper-middle-class yeoman farmer and the small planters were thin and sometimes nonexistent. Southern class lines generally were not as shaply etched as the conventional theory would indicate.

The emphasis upon the yeoman farmer in the South is relatively recent. Just after World War II Professor Franl L. Owsley and a group of his graduate students at Vanderbilt University began systematic statistical studies of the unpublished census records of the Old South. They discovered not only that slaveholding was more widespread than was popularly believed, but also that landowning in the South was far from restricted to planters. Their research indicated that, contrary to unfounded assumptions, many of these common folk lived among the planters, not relegated to the sidelines of the society. Furthermore, they plowed land comparable in quality to that cultivated by the large plantation owner, rather than being forced to till less fertile land. The Owsley School has also indicated that the economy was expanding rapidly in the 1850s, and that nearly all southerners, especially those in the lower economic brackets, experienced prosperous expansion. Thus, their picture of the South as a dynamic economic democracy has revised former assumptions about the South’s social structure and economy. Occasional challenges have been advanced criticizing the Owsley group’s statistical methods, but even the critics praise Owsley for documenting and calling attention to the presence and characteristics of this large middle class.

….one of the reasons the middle-class yeoman farmer was overlooked in the social structure of the Old South was the fascination observers found in the southern poor whites. The poor white, with all of his degradation, laziness, slothfulness, and idleness, made much better reading material for northerners than did the comparatively bland farmers.

[Billington, The American South, pp.76-78]

The bold italics above are mine. I find myself wondering why we so frequently debate the degree to which a minority “imposed” secession on the typical Southerner (who was a small farmer) and never talk about whether anyone “imposed” the war for the Union on the typical Northerner (who was also a small farmer). On the face of it, this seems odd.

Bill

[hawglips]

I share your feeling regarding the double standard.

Hal

[unionblue]

Bill,

So what you are inferring is that slavery was more widespread amongst what we call the yeoman farmers and that they supported secession from the Union over the fact that they were about to lose a very profitable type of workforce?

Unionblue

[unionblue]

A Quote of Interest;

"The question of human slavery has been a topic of partisan discussions ever since our government began; but it is relation to the territories of the Union that it has presented itself in the most complicated and dangerous form."

From 'The Issue Fairly Presented,' Democratic National Committee, 1856.

Please go to the following web site for more information on the conflict in Kansas, where slavery was the primary cause of violence.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HN...as/kansas.html

What other clues do we have that slavery was THE issue, how about this site on the Dred Scott case:

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/dred_scott/scottxx.htm

Unionblue

(Message edited by Unionblue on October 15, 2004)

[dawna]

Bill & Hal:

I understand your concerns regarding double standards, but here are some interesting facts and statistics regarding the political influence, for example, of Southern planters in Georgia, and the influence of "fire-eaters" on yeoman farmers in South Carolina.

In 1860 less than one-third of Georgia's adult white male population of 132,317 were slaveholders. The percentage of free families holding slaves was somewhat higher (37 percent) but still well short of a majority. Moreover, only 6,363 of Georgia's 41,084 slaveholders owned twenty or more slaves. The planter elite, who made up just 15 percent of the state's slaveholder population, were far outnumbered by the 20,077 slaveholders who owned fewer than six slaves. In other words, only half of Georgia's slaveholders owned more than a handful of slaves, and Georgia's planters constituted less than 5 percent of the state's adult white male population.

These statistics, however, do not reveal the economic, cultural, and political force wielded by the slaveholding minority of the population. Slaveholders controlled not only the best land and the vast majority of personal property in the state but also the state political system. In 1850 and 1860 more than two-thirds of all state legislators were slaveholders. More striking, almost a third of the state legislators were planters. Hence, even without the cooperation of nonslaveholding white male voters, Georgia slaveholders could dictate the state's political path.

As early as 1858 the Charleston Mercury proclaimed: "the free white man here stands above and superior belonging to the master ruling class . . . . He has every reason to make property secure and to perpetuate justice and freedom amongst those of his class." By 1860 the Charleston Mercury was urging its readers to "inform every man (the nonslaveholder as well as the slaveholder) of the deep and vital interests that are involved in our slavery institutions" and readers were warned that they must protect the "rights of freemen" against the "tampering thieves of abolition."

Yeoman farmers were reminded that in property rights -- such as the right to own African slaves -- lay their claim to masterhood and all of its prerogatives. One fire-eater went to great lengths to explain what emancipation of slaves would mean to "the non-slaveholding portion of our citizens," observing that yeoman would then have no rights that weren't also conferred on slaves. "In no country in the world does the poor white man whether slaveholder of non-slaveholder occupy so enviable a position as in the slaveholding states of the South."

Poor whites were told, "The poor man has as much at stake [in slavery] as he who is possessed of hundreds of negroes. . . . He has his all at stake" including his person, his wife, his children. "These two races [white and "negro"] cannot live together on terms of equality." Yeoman farmers were told that if they didn't fight to support slavery their worlds would tumble down around them and they would be no better than slaves.

Dawna

[unionblue]

Dawna,

I hate to be a pest, but what is your source on the above post? I would really like to view it and see if I could get some more stats on other states also.

Thanks,
Unionblue