The Plain People of the Confederacy takes a look at three often overlooked demographics of the South: poor whites, whom everyone forgets exist; women; and blacks. As it happens, Wiley has written volumes on each of these categories (poor whites being enveloped by but not defining Johnny Reb’s War), but this is more a condensed version, weighing in at scarcely more than 100 pages. It’s technically divided into four sections, poor white folk being considered at both the front and at home, but parts are not evenly divided: a section on “colored folks” is a third of the book, for instance. The result is a quick and illustrative read, if grim.

War’s hell is not only experienced by the men at the front marching in rags and trying to feed on hardtack infested by weevils and meat so spoiled it sticks to surfaces. Women and children suffered at home because their husbands and sons were at the front fighting, overwhelming women and younger children with the amount of work to be done — and that was before Yankee armies rode through and burned homes or stole stock and supplies out of malice. Wiley writes that the Confederate government’s failure to exempt nonslaveholding men who were the sole means of production in their household was a fundamental mistake. Many men deserted over the course of the war because pleas from their wives about the family plight overrode their sense of duty to ’cause and comrade’. Society as a whole was generally disrupted: if a piece of equipment broke down, it might not be possible to fix because the local blacksmith was off at the war, or if he were present he had no access to needed supplies. Common household supplies were in want, both because of the lack of men and material: there were vanishingly few tanners who could continue creating leather, for instance. Even cotton, the prewar South’s signature crop, was unusable for cloth production without steel cards produced by Northern factories. Wiley includes many letters from home from women who plead with their government to send aide, or at least return their husbands to them: they sound like grist in the mill, crying as they are ground up. The section on women is entirely about the deprivations caused by the homefront.

The closing section, “colored folks”, illustrates David C. William’s claim that slavery was done from the moment the South seceded: not only were there fewer men to maintain ‘order’, but the proximity of Yankee armies invited more and more slaves to make themselves “contraband“. There were, however, many ‘colored servants’ who remained affectionate and loyal to the households they’d served — even help hiding valuables from the marauding bluebellies. Wiley notes that this loyalty came from privileged house slaves, however, and not field hands. Slaves who accompanied their masters to the front sometimes threw themselves eagerly into the fight against the hosts of the North. If that is baffling to the modern reader, Wiley also notes that Yankees did not necessarily treat freedmen or ‘contrabands’ well: when escaped blacks joined the Union army, they were assigned the worst details at inferior pay, and Union troops often refused to march with the ‘colored’ battalions.

This was an interesting little book, though once I read Confederate Women and Southern Negroes (1860 – 1865), I may find it’s merely a collection of excerpts from those, just as Wiley borrows liberally from Johnny Reb’s War for the section on soldiers. We shall see, though! I purchased a used copy of one and sent for an ILL copy of the other, so I may end the year on an unexpected Civil War binge. I began James McPherson’s legendary Battle Cry of Freedom on the eve of Thanksgiving, and it’s a proper tome that I’ll be feeding on for at least a week, I think.

Related:

The Life of Johnny Reb Bell I. Wiley
The Confederate Reader: The War as the South Saw It, Richard B. Harwell
Johnny Reb’s War: Battlefield and Homefront, David C. Williams
A People’s History of the Civil War, David C. Williams

Quotations

Malaria, typhoid, smallpox, pneumonia, scurvy, and pulmonary tuberculosis each took a considerable toll from Rebel ranks. One private remarked in 1862 that “Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever.’ And a prominent Confederate doctor who made a careful study of medical records after the war estimated that for every soldier who died as a result of battle there were three who perished from disease.

And even in defeat the spirit of some remained indomitable. A few years ago when this writer visited relatives near Pulaski, Tennessee, he was escorted to New Zion churchyard to see the grave of a Confederate veteran named Tom Doss. The grave lies north and south with the headstone at the south. This unorthodox arrangement was of Tom’s own planning. Shortly before he died he made his family promise that they would bury him with his feet to the north, so that when Gabriel blew the trumpet on the morn of resurrection he would be in a convenient position to give the Yankees a resounding kick.

Govner Vance, I set down to rite you a few lins and pray to God that you will oblige me. I ame a pore woman with a posel of little children, and I will hav to starv or go neked—me and my little children—if my husban is kep away from home much longer. I beg you to let him come. Tha dont give me but thre dolars a month, and fore of us in the famely. Thay knit forty pare of socks fo the solgers, and it take all I can earn to get bread. If you cud hear the crys of my little children, I think you wod fell for us. I am pore in this world, but I trust rich in heven. I trust in God, and hope he will cos you to have compashion on the pore.

P.S. Apples are good but peaches are better
If you love me, you will write me a letter

Much of the love-making was done at church functions, particularly at summer revivals.

In view of the close association between soldiers and body servants, it is not surprising that the latter became thoroughly imbued with war ardor. So much so, indeed, that in a number of instances the blacks picked up guns during the pitch of battle and indulged themselves in a few pot shots at the Yankees. Several servants boasted of taking Federal prisoners.