Self-sufficiency remained the primary goal of these farm families, a large majority of whom owned their land. In 1860 a majority of white Southerners lived not in the plantation belt but in the upcountry, an area of small farmers and herdsmen who owned few slaves or none at all. But white society after the war was transformed no less fully than black.įrom the earliest days of settlement, there had never been a single white South. The most profound revolution, of course, was the destruction of slavery. Like a massive earthquake, the Civil War and the destruction of slavery permanently altered the landscape of Southern life, exposing and widening fault lines that had lain barely visible just beneath the surface. The South’s inner civil war reflected how wartime events and Confederate policies eventually reacted upon the region’s distinctive social and political structure. This was a matter of conflict more than simple warweariness. Even as it waged a desperate struggle for independence, the Confederacy was increasingly divided against itself. Indeed, scholars today consider the erosion of the will to fight as important a cause of Confederate defeat as the South’s inferiority in manpower and industrial resources. Not only did the four million slaves identify with the Union cause, but large numbers of white Southerners came to believe that they had more to lose from a continuation of the war than from a Northern victory. Internal dissent was, if anything, even more widespread in the wartime South. Lincoln was constantly beset by draft resistance, peace sentiment, and resentment of the immense economic changes unleashed by the war. Yet neither North nor South was truly unified. Americans tend to think of the Civil War as a titanic struggle between two regions of the country, one united in commitment to the Union, the other equally devoted to its own nationhood.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |