When I said that the South's Achillies Heel was the South, was I meant that the South had developed totally fantastic ideas of itself. This is perhaps best embodied in the opening words of Margaret Mitchell epic "Gone with the Wind" where she says that the ante-bellum South "only wanted to be beautiful." Slavery in the South was in many ways the least of its worries. Between the Slave and Planter was a huge segment of Southern Society abysmally as dirt poor as the slaves with no one to provide for them in hard times except the church societies and charity from the planter which little differed from the dole of the slaves. Indeed the institution of slavery was necessary in this case to provide a buffer for the poor white to gild his miserable condition with the self satisfying statement that they were at least above those "n….s on the plantations. Thus you can understand the oft repeated complaint about the North wanting to take away their (blacks) and make them all slaves. Indeed that was precisely what would happen. The only opportunity for many of these very poor whites was to enter the plantation system as overseers or as "captive vendors" to the planters who the planters could manipulate by the very debts they owed them that is the fact of non Payment. If you read John Mack Farraghers "Sugar Creek: The population of the Indian frontier" you see that most of the settlers of this region and Illinois was from the upper south and they were fleeing the grinding poverty of the slave system. This made them eager and fertile fields for abolitionists, but that meant that they hated slavery, they did not love the slave.
The other factor was that the South in the Union had developed for itself a privileged position CONSTITUTIONALLY which was going to exert its power ONLY so long as the South Remained in the Union and could avail itself of those benefits of 40 years of constitutional jobbing. All of that disappeared when they left the union. What the South wanted was in fact the untrammeled right to determine who and what positions could be held in running for president.
The third illusion was that they had wealth of any sort. When it comes to liquidity the Plantation owner was as poor as his sharecroppers or even his slaves. Beyond the manufacturers of the North, it was thejobbers of th cotton trade who controlled the prices he could sell for his produce and each plantation was heavily in debt to English banks who simply traded on credit.
The final problem was that underneath it all the family histories these planters appropriated to themselves were likewise as much a work of fantasy. People calling themselves Francoise, Tacredi, Fuentes-Tourmalihe Dupaine, and Efferton- Palaver- Marcuse a generation before had been called Buts, Potts, and Mushmouth and one could stills ee the grubby-necks below the white white collars. Curiously their "myths of origins" traced back to the Normans of the Norman Conquest, a natural aristocratic class who brought civil government to the brutish half animal Anglo-Saxons. After the war they switched around and they became the poor oppressed blonde haired blue eyed Anglo Saxons suffering under the now conquering (Northern) Yoke.
The south lived by fantasy and once war pricked that bubble there was nothing left.
The whole myth of the "Lost Cause" the "Grey Ghost" and the noble struggle are just a continuation of that.
NO!!!! They were not evil. They were not bad men, they were not vile oppressors. They did not even struggle for a bad cause or the worst of them. They simply let their glasses become rose-tinted and blind them to realities.
Every body does it.
The abolitionists of the North in many ways were just as deluded.
But that's the history of mankind, always setting into play forces he cannot control and then bearing the consequences.
completes a Confederate river ironclad.
