Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | страница 13

lower class morale must be levied at the officials themselves, elite women certainly had a part
to play. In the summer of 1863, Jefferson Davis finally acknowledged that the war had
“entered a new stage that would test the fortitude of the people and not just the armies. 10
However, this statement was somewhat overdue. The removal of men from the army had
devastated domestic life, and what was previously poverty had quickly become a "desperate
struggle for survival" 11 . This alone was sufficient to cause a massive downturn in support for
the cause, but the inequity of the exemption system only worked to catalyse the decline in
their patriotic feeling.
The very fact that the concept of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” first emerged in
1862 is evidence enough of the quickly faltering patriotism of the lower classes. Williams et
al., argue that the “attitude that it was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” was so pervasive”
that even the wealthy, whose very lifestyle was dependent upon the compliance of the poor,
saw very little point in pretending otherwise. 12 Despite the continuous labour of poor white
women, they had very little to show for their efforts, and any prior motivations for
participating in the war effort be they honour, the preservation of southern traditions or the
desire to ensure that blacks remained below them in the social hierarchy, did not seem worth
the suffering they endured. The reality was that a Confederate victory would benefit these
women little, this is well demonstrated by a poor white woman’s proclamation of “The
Yankees come down to fight us, 'cause we'se got niggers, and they ain't got none. I wish there
10
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press, 2012, p.180
11
Berlin, Jean V., ‘Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction and Despair on the Home
Front’ in The Collapse of the Confederacy, in Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (ed) Lincoln, University of
Nebraska Press, 2001, p.173
12
Williams,et al., Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War, p.92
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