Mud could well be the central image in sizing up the cost of this war to Union and Confederate sides alike. There was no glamour, only tedious muddy marches, food shortages, foraging (which often entailed stealing from civilians), and the inhuman conditions that prevailed in fetid muddy camps. Union and Confederate dead alike were hastily laid to rest in shallow, muddy mass graves.54
But it was the “foul mudsill” in wartime propaganda that captured the political imagination on both sides. “Mudsill” joined other Confederate slurs for Union men: vagabonds, bootblacks, and northern scum. And we mustn’t forget Jefferson Davis’s insult of choice: “offscourings of the earth.” By adopting such a vocabulary, rebels could imagine northern soldiers as Lincoln’s indentured servants, low-class hirelings. To convince themselves of easy victory, Confederates insisted that the Federal army was filled with the “trash” of Europe, rubbish flushed from northern city jails and back alleys, all brought together with the clodhoppers and dirt farmers from interior sections of the Union. For their part, northerners perceived the bread riots, desertions, poor white refugees, and runaway slaves as firm evidence of a fractured Confederacy. In this way, North and South each saw class as the enemy’s pivotal weakness and a source of military and political vulnerability.55
Both sides were partially right. Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest. North and South had staked so much on their class-based definitions of nationhood that it is no exaggeration to say that in the grand scheme of things, Union and Confederate leaders saw the war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign triumphant.
Union men had a way of identifying “white trash” with the dual bogeymen of southern poverty and elite hypocrisy. They saw secession as a fraud perpetrated against hapless poor whites. A Philadelphia journalist had the best, or at least the most original, putdown of the Confederacy’s overproud social system when he directed Jeff Davis’s government to put a slave on their five-cent stamp; for only then, he argued, would “poor white trash” be able to “buy the chattel cheap.” But he didn’t let his fellow northerners entirely off the hook either. Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder.56
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thoroughbreds and Scalawags
Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics
It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
—Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Buck v. Bell (1927)
In 1909, at the National Negro Congress in New York City, W. E. B. Du Bois gave a provocative speech on the reception of Darwinism in the United States. In the published version of the speech, “The Evolution of the Race Problem,” Du Bois declared that social Darwinism had found such favor in America because the very idea of “survival of the fittest” ratified the reactionary racial politics that already prevailed. The Harvard-trained scholar underscored, with more than a touch of irony, how the “splendid scientific work” of Darwin endorsed an “inevitable inequality among men and the races of men that no philanthropy ought to eliminate.” Du Bois’s argument went this way: if one accepted the racist assumption that blacks are of “inferior stock,” then it was pointless to “legislate against nature”; proving the supremacy of the white race needed no help from politicians, because any form of philanthropy would be “powerless against deficient cerebral development.”1
For the social critic Du Bois, it was one short step from the racism contained in the Americanization of Darwinian selection to the realization that white rule had corrupted the normal course of evolution. Instead of allowing the best (whether black or white) to rise, racism had actually undermined the Darwinian argument. It had not only not improved the white race, but a false hegemony had led to “the survival of some of the worst stocks of mankind.” As much as the lower class of whites remained where they had always been, one found throughout the U.S. South “efficient Negroes,” able and productive, being trampled under the heels of elected officials who supported white vigilante justice and propped up the heinous lynch law––catering to the interests of the unreconstructed white trash of the postwar South.2
Du Bois reasoned that by denying equal education across racial lines, in preventing the laws of evolution from operating freely in the South, white political hegemony had reapplied the “evils of class injustice.” White supremacy, as a thesis, lacked any basis in science, while it wreaked more and more havoc upon a perverse, fear-and hate-based class system. Despite popular claims that the white race was destined for global dominance, it was, Du Bois assured, in decline. Among the “many signs of degeneracy” was the overall reduction in birthrates. Thus any threat of white deterioration came “from within.” Yet when Democrats gained control of the southern states in 1877, after a decade of black enfranchisement, they invariably blamed Republican egalitarians for producing social chaos and triggering white downward mobility. By refusing to hold up the mirror to themselves, Du Bois contended, southern whites were failing to see their own degeneracy.3
In the larger scheme of things, Du Bois was retelling the history of Reconstruction and its aftermath. Much later, in 1935, he would expand his perspective into a full-length study. Yet in the 1909 speech he was already exposing several crucial connections. Above all, he understood how southern politics had set the stage for the dual appeal of Darwinism and the eugenics movement. Darwin’s best-known works, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), scored big in America, as did the work of his cousin Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.
Evolution rested on nature’s law, whereas eugenics found nature wanting. Galton’s adherents stressed the necessity for human intervention to improve the race through better breeding. Darwin himself endorsed eugenics, and he drew on the familiar trope of animal husbandry to make the case: “Man scans with scrupulous care the pedigree of his horses, cattle and dogs before he mates them; but when it comes to his marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care.” Compare Thomas Jefferson—the wording is practically identical: “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not that of man?” Almost as a mantra, eugenicists compared good human stock to thoroughbreds, equating the wellborn with superior ability and inherited fitness.4
Pseudoscience, masquerading as hereditary science, provided Americans with a convenient way to naturalize class and racial differences. The appeal of this language, which reached its zenith in the early twentieth century, first took hold during Reconstruction. Both Republicans, who wanted to rebuild the South in the image of the North, and Democrats, who wished to restore elite white rule, saw the grand scope of national reunion as part of a larger evolutionary struggle. And so Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” became the watchword of politicians and journalists. They invoked a vocabulary that highlighted unnatural breeding, unfit governance, and the degenerate nature of the worst stocks. At the center of the argument was the struggle that pitted poor whites against freed slaves.