The Confederacy was not a Con Job

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The Confederacy was not a Con Job

Assertion
The Confederacy — and the slavery that spawned it — was also one big con job on the Southern white working class. A con job funded by some of the antebellum one-percenters, and one that continues today in a similar form…. With low wages and few schools, Southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than Northern whites…

Rebuttal.
First, the author seems to accept the assumption that the lack of slaveownership meant that they had no stake in the preservation of the institution. A non-slaveowner may have been part of an extended family that did own slaves. Non-slaveowners also had opportunities to lease slaves for various purposes. And, of course, it only took the purchase of one slave to move someone into that elite category. This is not to suggest that such a transition happened often or that from our perspective the distribution of wealth in the South was not unfair. We are free to draw our own conclusion.

Key point.
But the idea that this arrangement was a “con job” dismisses the perspectives of ordinary people. It strips non-slaveholders and poor whites of any agency or ability to assess their world and take appropriate action. They are rendered simply as pawns in a larger game. It smacks too much of evil Wall Street bankers manipulating innocent 401-K investors and homeowners out of their mortgages. We can only imagine what con jobs future generations will claim were at work in 2015.

The author seems to admit given the evidence provided that we don’t know anything about how Canna Hyman or anyone else from the family who left home viewed the war. What we do know from an incredibly rich body of scholarship is that the Confederate government enjoyed support from slave and non-slaveowners alike well into the war. This is something that needs to be understood. We need to understand it on their own terms.
 
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