Everyman's War: A Rich and Poor Man's Fight in Lee's Army

Twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Blackwell, a small-time tenant farmer from Washington County, Virginia, had had enough of war. A single man who lived with an uncle, he enlisted as a private back in June 1861 in the 48th Virginia Infantry, but prolonged service grew wearisome. In fall 1862, he went absent without leave, returning voluntarily less than a month later. By the end of the next summer, after the failure at Gettysburg, his mood had soured once again. Originally, Blackwell had supported the rebellion, but in early September 1863, he revealed that he was fed up. To his brother Mathew, Blackwell expressed concern that the Rebel war effort had taken a decided turn for the worse. "Everything looks like it is going on wrong since Jackson was killed," he complained, "and I believe that we will at last have to come back in the Union at last, and I am sorry to think that all our hardships and fighting will do no good, for I was in hopes that we could gain our independence, tho I have lost all hopes."

Disconsolate over Confederate failures in the field, he urged his brother to remain at home. "Mat if I was you I wod stay with my famly and dy with them for I dont think that you nor me ought to fight for we did not have no hand in making it." He then explained, "I don't intend to do any fighting if I can help it for hear is those swell headed upshots that owns all the property and has keep out of the armmy all the while." The worst part was they speculated and profited grandly "off the soldiers that is [in] the field fiting for their [slaves]. . . . And the soldiers get eleven dollars a month, and how can a man that has a family support them? It would not pay for more than one meal vituals for a small family. I tell you," he grumbled, "the poor soldiers gets poor encouragement to fight for."¹

Blackwell's bitterness stemmed in part from his failure in a speculative enterprise, selling whiskey to fellow soldiers. He also wrote the letter from Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, where he was recovering from illness, which may have affected his outlook on the war. Yet Blackwell's views represent a major point of debate within Civil War literature: Did class conflict escalate in the Confederacy into an internal struggle over a rich man's war and a poor man's fight?²

In 1937, black historian Charles H. Wesley in his frequently ignored study, The Collapse of the Confederacy, offered the first detailed assertion of the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" as part of his larger thesis that the Confederacy died of internal causes, a loss of will. Wesley believed that artisans, small farmers, "crackers," and backwoodsmen had menaced the existing order, one dominated by slaveholders, during the war. That same year, Charles D. Ramsdell delivered his Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, formulating arguments similar to Wesley's, but offering more evidence. Published in 1947 under the title Behind the Lines in the Confederacy, Ramsdell described the hardships that befell Confederates, particularly poor whites, drawing on contemporary letters to substantiate his case. Bell Irvin Wiley tapped into those class tensions in the Confederate States in his 1943 book Plain Folk of the Confederacy to provide the first coherent argument for the "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight" thesis. According to Wiley, the friction between rich and poor was so serious that it broke down support for the war. "Paramount among these," he argued, "was the feeling that privileged groups, particularly the planters, were shirking their military responsibilities." Since then, Wayne Durrill has argued the class-conflict thesis, as has Paul Williams in a recently published book on the Chattahoochee Valley, entitled Rich Man's War. Paul Escott, however, offers the most skillful argument for this thesis, proposing that President Jefferson Davis's inability to appeal to the poorer people cost the...