Slave Owners in the Confederate Army.
This question, as far as I am informed, has not been analyzed to separate it from the concrete mass of men that composed the Confederate army. This is desirable to establish what influence they had in deciding the Southern States to secede from the Union, and the solution of it should give the number of slave owners in the army.
The white population of these States was, in 1860, about 8,300,000. There were 346,000 whites who owned slaves. These figures represent and include men of all ages, widows, and minors: also young married women who owned the servant usually given them.
Now divide 8,300,000 by 346,000, and we have 8,300,000/346,000==24, which shows that only one person in twenty-four was a slaveholder, and we know not what number in this twenty-four were women, orphans, and old men. If allowance be made for the old men, women, and minors, there would not be over four able-bodied men to the one hundred; hence in a company of one hundred soldiers four would be slave owners. In a regiment of one thousand there would be forty, in ten thousand there would be four hundred, and in the whole Confederate army of six hundred thousand there would be only twenty-four thousand who represented slavery. The remainder (600,000-24,000) would be 576,000 who were not slave owners! This number, however, might be reduced by young men heirs apparent of slaves.
Henceforth, then, let it be known that the Confederate army was not an army of slave owners. To the people of the South it was well known that the slaves were fast becoming the property of the owners of large estates, and on many sugar and cotton plantations there were from one to two hundred negroes employed. The tendency was to consolidate labor, as it was more profitable. Therefore it was that the Confederate army was mainly composed of men as free from interests in slavery as were the men living in sight of Bunker Hill. These men were contending for an object far more dear to them than any arising from slavery. They had seen the accumulated funds of the United States treasury expended in making harbors for towns on the great Northern lakes yearly, and in digging deep-water channels for Eastern cities, and appropriations for little creeks called rivers; while the harbors of the Southern cities were neglected. Then, again, the tariff almost invariably discriminated against the South, even to the extent of nullification, almost thirty years anterior to the war; then the fugitive slave act was nullified by Northern State laws; "underground railroad" was a term used to express how negro slaves were conveyed under cover of the night to the North when enticed from their owners. They openly published that the Constitution was a "compact made with the devil;" and the hatred of the North and the West was so widespread that by a sectional party vote they elected a President antagonistic to the South. These are but a few of the acts that caused secession; and yet he who believes that secession was entertained by more than a mere majority of the people South is mistaken. Genuine love and an abiding fidelity to the Constitution were ever found in the South. Her cause for complaint also was that the people of the North and West, actuated by hatred of the people South, proclaimed that the higher law of conscience was superior to the Constitution!
Events came on apace. The Southern people were homogeneous, "to the manner born." Save only in the commercial cities were there any foreigners and but few Northerners. North Carolina did not have quite one per cent foreign; the West had about thirty-five per cent. (Census Report.)
When coercion of the South was proclaimed, it was the homogeneousness of her people that solidified both parties at once to a common defense of their homes, and these five hundred and seventy-six thousand soldiers, without interest in slavery, for four years fought for the right of their people to govern themselves in their own way. Their deeds are now a matter of history that will, by them, be recorded, contrary to the past rule, that the conquerors always write history.
Appomattox terminated the war only—it was not a court to adjudicate the right of secession—but its sequence established the fact that secession was not treason nor rebellion, and that it yet exists, restrained only by the question of expediency. Wherefore the Union will be maintained mainly by avoiding sectional and class legislation, and remembering always that in the halls of legislation the minority have some rights, and in the minority the truth will generally be found.
The charge, then, that the slaveholders, so few in number, forced secession, or that the five hundred and seventy-six thousand nonslaveholders who really constituted the Confederate army were battling to maintain slavery, is a popular error.
The cry at the North that the South was fighting to maintain slavery was proclaimed (as I have elsewhere said) to prejudice the Emperor Napoleon III. and the English Cabinet against forming an alliance with the Confederate States; but the power of public opinion and the press were such that they were obliged to remain neutral; for this constrained neutrality England was rewarded by being forced, when the war ended, to pay the United States the sum of fifteen million dollars—the Geneva award—for the ships destroyed by Admiral Raphael Semmes, Confederate States Navy; and France was rewarded by obliging Napoleon to withdraw his troops from Mexico, and leave poor Maximilian to his fate—a warning for weak men thirsting for empire.