Bitterly divided: the South's inner Civil War

The 2016 film Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross, has generated considerable enthusiasm amongst moviegoers and yet has been received with hostility by layers of academia and the professional identity politics crowd for allegedly highlighting the “white savior” role of the film’s protagonist, Mississippi abolitionist militant Newton Knight. Opposition from figures like the Atlantic’s Vann Newkirk is typical. Newkirk denounced the film on the grounds that it highlights Knight’s “message of universal class-based solidarity,” which is “about as offensive as they come. ...” According to Newkirk, Knight’s “philosophy that economic justice underpins all societal ills seems to motivate his strange goodness and also allows him the inhuman ability to recruit white Mississippians into the ranks of the escaped slaves to form a group of economic freedom fighters who only bicker once about race.” Though Newkirk injects a tone of cynical irony in these lines and claims Free State of Jones is “a quasi-historical telling,” his criticism is exposed as fraudulent by historical fact. Newkirk’s presentation of a racially unified South bears much in common with “Lost Cause” historiography, which portrayed the Confederacy as an indivisible body of whites aimed at defending slavery against “northern aggression.” Newkirk and his ilk likewise find a monolithic “Solid South”—of white racists. A 2008 book published by The New Press titled Bitterly Divided: The South ’ s Inner Civil War shatters these myths. It presents abundant evidence of class struggle in the American South during the Civil War. As the book’s author, Professor David Williams, explains on the cover fold: “[I]nstead of the united front that has been passed down in Southern mythology, the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—an external one that we know so much about and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness.” The South mobilizes for war Williams describes the changing economic and demographic position of the American South in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The discovery of the cotton gin in the 1790s undercut the abolitionist purpose of Article One, Section 9, Clause 1 of the US Constitution, which barred the importation of slaves after 1808. The immense wealth of the slaveowners produced an aristocratic order in the American South. By 1850, Williams explains that although “the proportion of slaveholders in the South’s general population was falling, their numbers in Southern state legislatures were on the rise. In Mississippi, for example, the percentage of state lawmakers who owned slaves rose from 61 percent to more than 80 percent.” (22) North Carolina Emigrants: Poor White Folks, by James Henry Beard, 1845, Cincinnati Art Museum. Strikes of workers opposing slavery occurred throughout the South in the first half of the 1800s. In 1830, stonecutters struck in opposition to the use of slave labor in the construction of a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, on the grounds that it drove down the wages of workers. Throughout the 1850s, Southern whites working with slaves to encourage slave rebellions were prosecuted and jailed for inciting rebellion. Williams notes that “In Mississippi, twenty-one ‘bleached and unbleached’ men were hanged for plotting a slave revolt,” while other whites were hanged for organizing slave revolts in Charleston, South Carolina; Lynchburg, Virginia; Jefferson County, Georgia; and Iberville, Louisiana. As the clouds of war gathered over the United States in the latter half of the 1850s, conferences and conventions were called across the South to discuss the question of secession. Williams explains that secessionism was largely opposed by poor Southern whites in the lead-up to war. In fact, many of slavery’s defenders supported moves to enslave poor whites before the outbreak of war. In the 1854 pamphlet Sociology for the South; or The Failure of Free Society, George Fitzhugh wrote that slavery was “the best form of society yet devised for the masses” and “that slavery, black or white, was right and necessary.” (31) Slaveowners in Alabama wrote in 1860 of their fears that “slavers are constantly associating with low white men who are not slave owners. Such people are dangerous to the community.” (31) Again, white men in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi were captured and hanged for plotting to unite poor whites with slaves to rise up against the slaveowners. Secession was held to statewide votes across the South, and was roundly defeated by poor whites. Professor Williams notes: “The balloting for state convention delegates [preceding the war] makes clear that the Deep South was badly divided. It also suggests that those divisions were largely class related.” Williams explains that non-slaveholding whites in Louisiana saw “the whole secession movement as an effort simply to maintain ‘the peculiar rights of a privileged class,’” and that poor counties in Alabama, for example, voted to elect anti-secessionist delegates by margins of up to 90 percent. (36) Another historian, David Potter, notes that “At no time during the winter of 1860-61 was secession desired by a majority of the people of the slave states.” Williams describes a process by which secessionist aristocrats throughout the South pulled a series of parliamentary maneuvers and bribery schemes aimed at revoking anti-secessionist votes of local delegations. One secessionist leader wrote to Confederate President Jefferson Davis after the outbreak of war that “nothing is now in peril in the prevailing war but the title of the master to his slaves,” and that many poor whites had “declared that they will ‘fight for no rich man’s slaves’...I leave you to imagine the consequences.” (48) Anti-Confederate rebellions broke out as early as 1861. In Winston County, Alabama, several union leaders organized mass meetings of unionists and declared the “Free State of Winston,” while poor whites did the same in East Tennessee; West Virginia; Green County, Mississippi; Choctaw County, Alabama; Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, Mississippi; and southwest Georgia. Small slave rebellions took place in Decatur County, Georgia; Charles City County, Virginia; Monroe, Arkansas; and Owen and Galatin counties, Kentucky. Abolitionist-set fires tore through New Orleans as the war broke out.