It’s perfectly feasible to imagine that if the South had successfully left the Uhion, the West would also have split away

Did Confederate soldiers lose the will to fight as the outlook began to appear bleak for the South late in the war? Many scholars have argued that case, but Jason Phillips of Mississippi State University, author of Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean of the University of North Florida, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, argue that many Southern soldiers stayed defiant to the end. Their research has focused on those soldiers who fought on  for cause and country.

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PC:     Until recently historians have agreed that Confederate soldiers lacked the will to fight.  Why?

JP:    I would say the new social history of the ‘60s and ‘70s, by taking a bottom-up approach, was probably one of the first reasons why this loss of will thesis gained momentum. You start looking at desertion as an act of will among soldiers and the disintegration of the home front and the yeoman class criticism worked like [?] after secession, sort of seminal in this regard. And I think that’s probably where it gained momentum and lasted for at least twenty years, really.

ASD:    When you start talking about social relationships, any kind of social history is going to discover—it’s not a big surprise—but you’re going to discover that there is a lot of conflict on the Confederate home front just as there was on the Northern home front. But I think the other part of this is a general chronology which says that Gettysburg is the watershed, and so if you marry that standard narrative, which says that there’s a kind of inevitable decline after Gettysburg, to plenty of evidence that there’s social conflict, then you say, sure, class conflict, gender disagreements, that’s what drove or withered away the Confederacy.

PC:    Can you both be more precise about what you mean by social conflict and dissent that Confederate soldiers engaged in?

JP:    I guess the prevailing phrase would be “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” the notion among non-slave-owning Southern soldiers that this was a war for slavery, that the secessionists were planters, and yet the people who were sacrificing most in terms of life and property were of this vast yeoman class. And when the conscription act with the substitute clause and the tax in kind started to hit the yeoman class hard, it seemed the planter class wasn’t sacrificing as much as it should since it seemed to have the most to gain from Confederate independence. I think that’s where we see—that phrase, “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” seems to be the rallying cry. And then people tie that to bread riots in Richmond and rising desertion rates within the army.

ASD:    Yeah. I always think of the big three Confederate policies that spur opposition within the Confederacy as being the draft act, impressments, and the tax in kind, in chronological order. Conscription was by far the most important of those, but I don’t think—and that one there is legitimate—we actually can see desertion patterns that spike because of that. But I think—

PC:    Can you explain what impressment and tax in kind is?

ASD:    Impressment is the ability of the government to seize goods and services and may give as compensation Confederate script, the problem being that Confederate paper money lost its value extremely rapidly, so it was essentially as though the government was just taking your property. The tax in kind was a flat 10 percent tax on foodstuffs that came—you grow a hundred bushels of corn, there’s a tax in kind agent who will come collect ten bushels of that. And this is what Bill Blair’s book [Virginia’s Private War] does very effectively, is it shows that although the tax in kind generates anger and people horde goods and they hide goods, by acquiring actual goods, the government then has the ability to redistribute those to those who are needy. And so it actually helps, and in some ways, as Bill argues, prolongs the life of the Confederacy because the government shows a fair amount more flexibility than you would have imagined they did—or that we knew they did until we looked in detail at that policy.

PC:    Civil War letters overwhelmingly suggest that white Southerners grew tired of the war and that they were resentful of the Confederate government for the very policies that you both have specified.  How do you overcome the considerable literary evidence that captures Confederate disaffection which you both are arguing against?   

ADS:    Well very little of that is tied to overt expressions on the part of Southern participants—white Southern participants—as a desire to return to the fold of the Union.  I don’t think criticizing the policy of the Davis Administration is not the same thing as saying I want to return to the Union. In fact, I think sending a letter to the government signals a fair amount of investment in that government. You actually expect that government’s going to respond to your plea. They have an obligation to you because you’re a citizen of their country. I don’t think Unionists—diehard Unionists—probably even bothered to write Jefferson Davis because they considered him a usurper in the same way that Lincoln would have. But for the majority of white Southerners, they perceived that new government as legitimate, which isn’t to say they don’t dislike a lot of the policies, but the same thing can be said for most Americans. At any given time their lives they’re going to disagree with policies of the White House. Protesting those policies or speaking out against them doesn’t become an act of treason.

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