James Henry Hammond, South Carolina’s leading proslavery intellectual, coined the term “mudsill” to describe the essential inferiority of the North’s socioeconomic system. It was “mudsill” democracy that the Confederacy would decry as it made its case against the North. By 1861, mudsill democracy had seeped into portrayals of the mudsill Union army—meant to be a foul collection of urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, unwashed immigrants, and by 1862, with the enlistment of Afro-American Union troops, insolent free blacks. All in all, they were Davis’s waste people, the “offscourings of the earth.”11
In 1858, Hammond had publicly aired his ideas before the U.S. Senate in a speech that proved to be widely popular. Its most enduring critique concerned the fixed character of class identity. In all societies, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” With fewer skills and a “low order of intellect,” the laboring class formed the base of civilized nations. Every advanced society had to exploit its petty laborers; the working poor who wallowed in the mud allowed for a superior class to emerge on top. This recognized elite, the crème de la crème, was the true society and the source of all “civilization, progress, and refinement.” In Hammond’s mind, menial laborers were, almost literally, “mudsills,” stuck in the mud, or perhaps in a metaphoric quicksand, from which none would emerge.12
If all societies had their mudsills, then, Hammond went on to argue, the South had made the right choice in keeping Africa-descended slaves in this lowly station. As a different race, the darker-pigmented were naturally inferior and docile—or so he argued. The North had committed a worse offense: it had debased its own kind. The white mudsills of the North were “of your own race; you are brothers of one blood.” From Hammond’s perspective, their flawed labor system had corrupted democratic politics in the northern states. Discontented whites had been given the vote, and, “being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power.” It was only a matter of time, he warned ominously, before the poor northern mudsills orchestrated a class revolution, destroying what was left of the Union.13
Jefferson Davis and James Hammond spoke the same language. Confederate ideology converted the Civil War into a class war. The South was fighting against degenerate mudsills and everything they stood for: class mixing, race mixing, and the redistribution of wealth. By the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election, secessionists claimed that “Black Republicans” had taken over the national government, promoting fears of racial degeneracy. But a larger danger still loomed. As one angry southern writer declared, the northern party should not be called “Black Republicans,” but “Red Republicans,” for their real agenda was not just the abolition of slavery, but inciting class revolution in the South.14
Confederate ideologues turned to the language of class and breeding for obvious reasons. They were invested in upholding a hierarchy rooted in the ownership of slaves. When in 1861, Jefferson Davis spoke of “domestic institutions,” he meant slavery, and its protection formed the central creed of the new constitution that bound “men of one flesh” to the new nation. Vice President Alexander Stephens, in a speech given in Savannah on his return from the constitutional convention, took pains to make Hammond’s mudsill theory the cornerstone of the Confederacy. The delegates had instituted a more perfect government: first, by ensuring that whites would never oppress classes of their own race; and second, by affirming that the African slaves “substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.” Refuting the premise of Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech (that a nation cannot stand half slave, half free), Stephens equated the Confederacy with a well-constructed mansion, with slaves as its mudsill base and whites its “brick and marble” adornment. Presumably the brick represented the sturdy yeoman and the planter elite its finely polished alabaster.15
Class concerns never lost their potency during the war. In 1864, as defeat loomed and the South’s leaders contemplated augmenting the army with slaves, some feared that the rebel nation would fall if deprived of its lowest layer. Black men would achieve a rise in status through military service, undermining general assumptions about the color-coded social hierarchy. Slaves had been impressed by state governments to build fortifications as early as 1861—a policy later adopted by the Confederate high command and the Davis administration. But putting slaves in uniform was a far more radical move, because it elevated them (as Hammond and Stephens had argued) above their station as menial mudsills. Texas secessionist Louis T. Wigfall raged in the Confederate Senate that arming slaves was utterly unthinkable, no different than the British eradicating their landed aristocracy and putting “a market-house mob” in its place. (“Market-house mob” was another term for class revolution, and deposing the aristocracy would turn the Confederacy into another mudsill democracy—like the enfranchised rubbish of the North.) Sounding like a snobbish English lord, Wigfall added that he did not want to live in a country where “a man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal.” In his mind, slaves were born servants, and raising them up by making them soldiers disrupted the entire class structure. Protecting that racial and class system was why southerners had seceded. In this way, class angst suffused Confederate thinking and served to unite southern elites.16
Class mattered for another reason. Confederate leaders knew they had to redirect the hostility of the South’s own underclass, the nonslaveholding poor whites, many of whom were in uniform. Charges of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” circulated throughout the war, but especially after the Confederate Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1862, instituting the draft for all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Exemptions were available to educated elites, slaveholders, officeholders, and men employed in valuable trades—leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription.17
The Union army and Republican politicians advanced a strategy aimed at further exploiting class divisions between the planter elite and poor whites in the South. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash. In his memoir, Grant voiced the class critique of the Union command. There would never have been secession, he wrote, if demagogues had not swayed nonslaveholding voters and na?ve young soldiers to believe that the North was filled with “cowards, poltroons, and negro-worshippers.” Convinced that “one Southern man was equal to five Northern men,” Confederate soldiers saw themselves as a superior people. (The same five-to-one ratio was used by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper when he defended the Anglo-Saxon race in Land of Gold and claimed that one Kentuckian could trounce five dwarfish and feeble Nicaraguans.) In Grant’s estimation, the war was fought to liberate nonslaveholders, families exiled to poor land, who had few opportunities to better themselves or educate their children. “They too needed emancipation,” he insisted. Under the “old régime,” the prewar South, they were nothing but “poor white trash” to the planter aristocracy. They did as told and were accorded the ballot, but just so long as they parroted the wishes of the elite.18