In February 1861, Jefferson Davis, the newly elected president of the Confederacy, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, for his inauguration. Greeted by an excited crowd of men and women, he gave a brief speech outside the Exchange Hotel. Addressing his people as “Fellow Citizens and Brethren of the Confederate States of America,” he invoked a tried-and-true metaphor to describe his new constituency: “men of one flesh, one bone, one interest, one purpose, and of identity of domestic institutions.” As it happens, his was the same biblical allusion his vice president, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, had commandeered in Congress in 1845 when he rose in support of the annexation of Texas and its Anglo-Saxon population.1
The one-flesh marital trope had both a racial and a sexual dimension, presenting the desirable image of a distinct breed. Davis echoed the words of his namesake, Thomas Jefferson, when he described his new country as one that embodied “homogeneity.” In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had made native-born stock and shared cultural values the basis of national unity and security. The idea of an “American breed” was firmly entrenched.2
Expositors of the “American breed” model all gravitated to an “us versus them” calculus, which became useful as territorial expansion unfolded and cultures collided. As the South seceded, further distinctions needed to be made. So when the Confederate president recurred to one of his favorite couplets, “degenerate sons,” he appealed at the same time to the “days of ’76,” making sure his audience understood that the revolution of 1861 aimed to restore the virtuous pedigree of the founding fathers. The southern people, he assured the crowd, were heirs of the “sacred rights transmitted to us.” If required, they would display “Southern valor” on the field of battle. The new nation would prove to the world that “we are not the degenerate sons” of George Washington and his noble peers, but in fact the genuine offspring and rightful lineage of the first American republic.3
And then there was the flip side. Davis returned to the bully pulpit in the final days of 1862, addressing the Mississippi legislature, where he openly rebuked the men who comprised the Union forces. They were nothing more than “miscreants” deployed by a government that was “rotten to the core.” The war proved that North and South were two distinct breeds. Whereas southerners could lay claim to a positive pedigree, their enemy could not. Northerners were heirs to a “homeless race,” traceable to the social levelers of the English civil war. What’s more, the North’s unflattering genealogy began in the “bogs and fens” of Ireland and England, where they were spawned from vagabond stock and swamp people. It was a delusion, Davis declared, to imagine that these two races could ever be reunited. No loyal Confederate would ever wish to lower himself and rejoin his lessers.4
Returning to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Davis gave another such speech in early January 1863. “You have shown yourselves in no respect to be the degenerate sons of our fathers,” he repeated. Yet in one important respect, the South’s cause was radically new. Their Revolutionary forebears had fought against a “manly foe.” Confederates faced a different enemy: “You fight against the offscourings of the earth,” the president railed. Yankees were a degenerate race, worse than “hyenas.” In dehumanizing the Union troops, Davis placed them close in nature to a ravenous, cowardly species that hunted its innocent prey in whimpering packs.5
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Wars are battles of words, not just bullets. From 1861, the Confederacy had the task of demonizing its foe as debased, abnormal, and vile. Southerners had to make themselves feel viscerally superior, and to convince themselves that their very existence depended on the formation of a separate country, free of Yankees. Confederates had to shield themselves from the odious charge of treason by fighting to preserve a core American identity that nineteenth-century northerners had corrupted.6
To do so, the Confederacy had to create a revolutionary ideology that concealed the deep divisions that existed among its constituent states. Tensions between the cotton-producing Gulf states and the more economically diverse border states were genuine. We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side, and that four border states never seceded. In Georgia, throughout the war, dissent from Davis’s policies was significant. Richmond was tasked with smoothing over the ever-widening division between slaveholders and nonslaveholders caused by conscription and food shortages. Claims to homogeneity were more imagined than real.7
The Confederacy built upon the South’s prewar critiques of Yankee attributes. The Yankee gentry was allegedly composed of upstarts who lacked southern refinement. Their “freedom” was really low-class fanaticism. As one Alabama editor transparently put it in 1856:
Free society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant.8
At a parade in Boston in that year, supporters of the first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, embraced the “greasy mechanic” slur as a badge of honor by displaying it on one of their banners.9
All the lurid name-calling had a specific purpose. Turning the free-labor debate on its head, proslavery southerners contended that the greatest failing of the North was its dependence on a lower-class stratum of menial white workers. Ten years before he became president of the Confederacy, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had argued that the slave states enjoyed greater stability. Recognizing that “distinctions between classes have always existed, everywhere, and in every country,” he observed that two distinct labor systems coexisted in the United States. In the South, the line between classes was drawn on the basis of “color,” while in the North the boundary had been marked “by property, between the rich and poor.” He insisted that “no white man, in a slaveholding community, was the menial servant of anyone.” Like many other proslavery advocates, Davis was convinced that slavery had elevated poor whites by ensuring their superiority over blacks. He was wrong: in the antebellum period, class hierarchy was more extreme than it ever had been.10