Rich Man

Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. David Williams. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. 288pp.

In keeping within the rubric of New Military History, David Williams’s Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley offers a close examination of the role of class within the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Williams scrutinizes issues of class within the lower Chattahoochee Valley running through Georgia and Alabama. This particular region elicits socioeconomic analysis due to the combination of agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation industries defining the area. Serving as a highly productive cotton region, an important port, as well as a congested railroad hub, the lower Chattahoochee Valley quickly became a crucial economic center throughout the nineteenth century. As such, the area was populated by very wealthy planters, successful manufacturers and merchants, factory workers, yeomanry farmers (both slaveholders and non-slaveholders), poor whites, and an abundance of slaves. For the author, the many strata of society present in one region allow the impact of class upon the politics, culture, and economics of the area to be more clearly visible. The conclusion drawn from such an examination illustrates the power of planter elites, the divergence in opinion and attitude toward the war held by the various classes, and the preeminent role class conflict performed in the secession debate and the eventual Confederate defeat in the war.

Williams directs most of his analysis to the machinations of the powerful planter elite. The wealthy landholder and plantation agriculturist arguably held the largest stake in assuring the perpetuity of the institution of slavery. Not only did the ownership of a considerable number of slaves increase the profitability of cotton fields, it also ensured the planter’s position at the top of the hierarchical society in which he lived. Therefore, although a small number of business leaders in the North, along with textile manufacturers in the South, pressed for the preservation of the Union in order to safeguard a continuous supply of inexpensive cotton, the perceived threat of abolitionists toward the destruction of the institution of slavery overwhelmingly swayed the planter elite to advocate secession, beginning as early as 1850. The desire and decision to secede, subsequent to Lincoln’s election in 1860, directly opposed the will of the majority of those living in the South, according to the author. Conscious of the authoritarian position of the planter elite, and the inability to improve one’s social status, the remaining classes viewed the idea of secession ambivalently, with little to gain personally, and a military conflict to follow likely. In the end, the planter elite paid scant attention to the concerns of the other classes and voted for secession in defiance of the majority of the region’s inhabitants.

Class antagonisms were further exacerbated during the conduct and course of the Civil War. Not simply the enactment of a draft by the Confederate Congress in 1862, but rather the implementation of a policy allowing substitutes, engendered the ire of the lower classes. The practice of substitutes directly favored the wealthy elites and insulated them from the dangers of combat. Even more contentious was the “twenty-slave law” allowing those individuals owning twenty or more slaves to be exempt from the draft. Such practices highlighted the disparity in socioeconomic status and privilege that characterized the Confederate South. Finally, the need to provide an adequate supply of foodstuffs and material resulted in the impressment and confiscation of crops, farms, and private property. As the wealthy planters were concerned with the cultivation of cotton rather than foodstuffs, the burden of impressment fell disproportionately on middle class and yeomanry farmers. These practices combined to forge a home front environment rife with social conflict.

The elite position of wealthy planters and landowners changed little over the course of the war or after its cession. The period of Reconstruction witnessed minimal improvement in social mobility and resulted in the creation of innumerable obstacles, such as Black Codes, poll taxes, and literacy tests, to keep the recently freed slaves at the bottom of society. Furthermore, in order to continue to keep poor whites, whose socioeconomic position differed negligibly from both the enslaved and the freedmen, relatively content, or at least docile, the planter elite propagated racial policies designed to instill a fervent prejudice against African-Americans and to sustain a false sense of superiority among whites.

Though clearly organized and cogently written, the arguments presented by the author demonstrate an element of reductionism. Class conflict did indeed pose a challenging threat to the structure of Confederate society, especially the lower Chattahoochee Valley, as evidenced by the author’s use of newspaper articles, personal narratives, memoirs, and diaries of soldiers and civilians from the region and across the South. However, to ascribe secession, the conduct of the war, as well as the Confederate defeat to the selfish actions of the planter elite, while ignoring the issues of military defeat, ideology, and anti-slavery sentiment, appears somewhat monocausal.

Bryan Cupp

Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. By David Williams. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

In Rich Man’s War, David Williams focuses on the Civil War experience of people in the Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia to illustrate how the exploitation of poor whites and enslaved blacks by a rich, planter class led to a Confederate defeat by generating class conflict throughout the South. Although Williams’ theory is interesting, his efforts to promote it fall flat. The end result is a book with a Marxist slant and an argument that has no room to maneuver.

The author’s theory contains no gray areas or nuances, here it is and that is how it was. Thus, there is no room for the argument to maneuver and to explain certain instances that do not follow Williams’ proposal. Williams suggests that the lines of class conflict were clearly visible. He concludes that the Confederacy lost because its leadership failed to win over the hearts and minds of its people and by the war’s end, many Southerners openly opposed the Confederacy. Many historians, while not totally abandoning the argument that internal strife wracked the Confederacy, believe the class conflict was not as clear as Williams believes.

The first two chapters of the book provide background information pertaining to the socioeconomic status of the population in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. Primarily an agricultural area, the valley also held one of the Confederacy’s major manufacturing centers. Its population ran the gamut of the socioeconomic scale from planters down through sharecroppers and slaves. There were also merchants, factory workers, and industrial and urban professionals and entrepreneurs. Williams contends that the valley was “in short, as representative of the Cotton Kingdom as one is likely to find.”(6) This statement presents problems with his argument though. If it is representative of the Confederacy and therefore provides a demographic that bolsters his argument, why does Williams rely on people from outside the Chattahoochee to make his case? In documenting the perceived agitation between the planters and the poorer whites, Williams quotes a North Carolinian (p. 31-32) and a Tennessee yeoman (p. 48). It would appear that by using these two individuals, the author might not have sufficient evidence to make his argument.

Williams contends that the poorer whites’ support for the Confederacy was mild to begin with and deteriorated rapidly as the war went on. Angered by unfair conscription, taxation, and economic impressments policies, the lower whites renounced the struggle for Southern independence and undermined the Confederate cause by deserting, forming secret peace organizations, and even organizing anti-Confederate guerilla bands. While it is true that there were thousands of deserters, Williams obscures the fact that most of the desertions did not come until 1864, after the fall of Atlanta and other debacles for the Confederacy. Williams makes it seem as if there was a constant stream of Confederate deserters throughout the war. The slaves also undermined the Southern effort at independence by resisting their masters and running away. It is questionable how worthy this fact is to Williams’ class conflict study. What else did he expect the slaves to do?

Williams contends that the poorer whites’ held an increasingly antagonistic view of the planter elite and the Confederate government as the war dragged on. Most of this was due to the ability of the elite to evade conscription and sustain certain economic hardships such as impressments better than the poor white yeoman. He points out that the soldiers complained of their situation and of their government in increasingly disparaging tones. Williams fails to recognize that every soldier throughout the history of mankind has criticized his lot in the army and the government that he serves. For a large majority, complaining is intrinsic to a soldier’s nature. Williams believes that by complaining the Confederate soldier was undermining the Southern cause, constantly deserting, and his morale ever lessoning. The truth is complaining comes natural during military campaigns, Confederate morale changed with the victories and defeats, and desertions were not rampant until very late in the war. Along with this is the fact the resentment against the elite who are normally the controlling factors in the military and the government by the less fortunate is always implied.

Williams’ effort is intriguing but his propensity for grand hypotheses waters down the argument. Also hurting the text is that fact that some of Williams’ documentation or evidence is from people who did not live in the Chattahoochee Valley. Williams concludes that at the end of the war, the population was openly opposed to the Confederacy; however, recent studies on Confederate nationalism have shown that while the populace may have lost their will to fight and were ready for peace, they still supported the Confederacy. The public knew they could not win and resigned themselves toward reunification. Williams fails to comment on the fact that in most destructive wars, morale remains low due to homesickness, death, and uncertainty. The class divide was just another facet in an already low morale, but certainly not the overriding cause. No doubt, there were class conflicts in the South during the war, as there were also in the North, but Williams places too much emphasis on the magnitude and impact of these conflicts as the cause of the Confederate defeat.