April 4, 2011, 9:36 PM
Men at War
By NINA SILBER
Most historians now argue — and contemporary documents bear them out — that the leaders of the Confederacy were, above all, motivated by a desire to protect their system of slavery. Leaving the Union, they believed, was the surest way to preserve an institution that was now threatened by the newly-elected, and self-proclaimed anti-slavery, president, Abraham Lincoln.
But if slavery motivated the leaders — almost all of them slave-owners — where did that leave the vast majority of Southerners, the men who owned no slaves but filled the ranks of the Confederate army? For them, the answer was less about the slave economy or states’ rights than the perceived threat that abolition posed to their very identity as white men.
Men go to war for all kinds of reasons — glory, money, peer pressure — and that was clearly true in the Civil War South. Yet the speeches, newspapers and writings from the time indicate that white masculine identity, particularly among those Southerners who had little else about them that guaranteed their social status. As long as slaves were legally below them, they were secure. The belief that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party would end that distinction drove them to a near panic — a fear that secession leaders were all too happy to exploit. Those who did not support the cause of separation, secession leaders said, would themselves become slaves. “On the fourth of March, 1861,” explained one Georgia orator in reference to Lincoln’s inauguration, “we are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it.” For the new Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, the question was “will you be slaves or will you be independent?”
But there was more to their fear than social status. The Republican Party, as depicted by Southern leaders, was not only pro-abolition, but pro-equality — “black Republicans,” they were called. Perhaps secession leaders would have called this a rhetorical flourish, but the phrase certainly summoned up an image of African Americans, now empowered by the new federal agenda, wreaking havoc on the South’s social order. “Black Republicans” would not be constrained by the Republican Party’s official pledge to leave slavery as it was in the slave states. Rather, like rebellious slaves throughout history, they would enforce their emancipation policies by any means necessary. Or, as one South Carolina clergyman put it, submission to Republican rule meant that “abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”
Thus the war fever among the South’s nonslaveholders was as much about masculinity as it was about class. In fact, the trope of masculinity became a convenient way for the slaveholding class to erase the tensions of economic difference; in this light, all Southern men, regardless of wealth or lack thereof, had to defend their region—and, by implication, the women and children who lived there with them.
To allow the policies of Lincoln and the “black Republicans” to triumph would be the same as abandoning one’s manly duties to keep women and children safe. “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?” asked one Georgia politician. A Union under Lincoln’s rule, he proclaimed, would mean “our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.” In an explicit appeal to the nonslaveholder, a South Carolina planter decried “womanly fears of disunion” and urged the “men of the South” to defend their “political mother” as well as their literal wives and children.
Perhaps the Georgia secession proclamation, approved on Jan. 29, 1861, put the issue most starkly when it urged opposition to the Republicans’ “avowed purpose … to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.” Here, indeed, was a threat that no real man, slaveowner or not, could ignore.
Nina Silber is a professor of history at Boston University and the author of “Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War.”
