Yankee Rebels: The Motivation Behind Sectional IdentityWesley R. Brown

History 498December 13, 2016

Introduction:

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Edmund DeWitt Patterson was born in Lorain County, Ohio on March 20, 1842.1

Typical of families in the area, Patterson’s parents, originally from New England, moved

to Ohio from Massachusetts and Connecticut during the great westward migration in the

early 1800’s.2 Patterson’s father was a farmer during the summer, and a schoolteacher in

the winter and Edmund received a proper education in the local public school system

until the age of seventeen.3 When Patterson was about eighteen years old he attempted to

become a profitable businessman as a traveling salesman, selling book and magazine

subscriptions. Although Patterson was not successful in selling books, he found success

in a new community as a part time schoolteacher and store clerk. Just as millions of other

young American men of appropriate age for military service, Patterson volunteered for

his local unit at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In his journal, Patterson wrote

how he wondered if he would ever see his friends and his Ohio home again as he fought

gallantly for his country on infamous battlefields of Manassas, Fredericksburg, and

Gettysburg.4 In a strange turn of events in the summer of 1863, Patterson did return to

his native state where he was imprisoned on Johnson’s Island, Ohio for the remainder of

the war, merely fifty miles from his boyhood home in Lorain County.5

In many ways, Patterson resembled the thousands of other typical young Ohioans

who joined the Union army to preserve the Union during the American Civil War.

However, Patterson’s story is unique because he was not on the Gettysburg battlefield on

behalf of the Union like the 4,400 other Ohio men who fought to save the Union at

1 Edmund DeWitt Patterson, Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson, Edited by John G. Barrett, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, (1966), 1.2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.4 Ibid. 4.5 Ibid. 125.

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Gettysburg. When Patterson left his home as a traveling salesman in 1859 his business

carried him south, first to Tennessee and then into northern Alabama.6 During the two

years prior to the Civil War, Patterson ambitiously carved out a living and created a new

home for himself as a schoolteacher and businessman in Lauderdale, Alabama.7 When

Alabama seceded from the Union in January of 1861 over issues of states rights and

slavery Patterson made the conscious decision to enlist into the Lauderdale Rifles,

Company D, 9th Alabama Confederate infantry.8

Patterson fought with this unit in a number of major battles until his capture at

Gettysburg in 1863. Oddly enough, Patterson’s awkward reunion with his family

occurred when they visited him at Johnson’s Island prisoner of war camp. Patterson’s

Unionist family neglected to bring their starving kin food, provisions, or other kind

sentiments because they did not support his decision to fight for the Confederacy.9

Patterson’s unique “homecoming” brought his life full circle back to his childhood home

and depicted the odd existence of a small number of Northern Confederates who chose to

fight in the Civil War, for their adopted Southern communities, often absent of any

previous ties or allegiance to southern people or culture.

Most “Northern Confederates” – native northerners who fought for the

Confederacy in the American Civil War – were primarily motivated to preserve the

antebellum South’s social order and racial hierarchy within the region’s slave society in

order to protect their positions of economic capital and social power. A smaller

demographic of Northern Confederates were motivated to join the Confederate army

6 Patterson, 2. 7 Ibid. pg. 9.8 Ibid. pg. 3.9 Ibid. pg. 129.

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through matters of social necessity involving family relations with southern kin or social

threats from members of their local Southern community. However, most Northern

Confederates suspect of social necessity motivations have issues of race and economics

within southern social connections that can be traced back to as primary influences to

back the Confederacy behind their social necessity.

The journals, memoirs, letters, and interviews of many outspoken and opinionated

Northern Confederates expose the sentiments concerning race and society that

reverberated through assumptions about African American incompetence, a general

defense of slavery, and the perceived economic benefits of the “peculiar institution.”

However, some Northern Confederates appeared to be more candidly motivated by

personal economic interests that were not directly related to race relations or slavery, and

this group displayed no expression of sentiments contemporarily viewed as racist in their

discourse. Northern Confederates motivated by economic interests were often incited to

join the Confederate army with the sole intent of defending their treasured financial

security and social capital. Still, for other Northern Confederates, family relations with

southern kin or the potential threat of social ostracism within their local Southern

community played a role in motivating them to join the Confederate army, but there were

almost always underlying alternative motivations of economic interest within social

necessity. In many cases, a combination of these factors inspired Northern Confederates

to fight for the South.

The Motivations of Northern Confederates

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Understanding the motivations of Northern Confederates is a vital and telling

aspect of Civil War history because the personal ideologies and influences of Yankee

rebels speak to the foundations of Confederate nationalism – defined by Confederate

goals and notions that were reflected and expressed by Northern Confederates; primarily

the defense of the South’s slave society. The motivations of Northern Confederates also

expose the general goals and mentality of the Confederacy as a whole. It is especially

interesting that Northern and Southern Confederates shared the same primary motivations

– to defend the South’s social order and racial hierarchy – regardless of where they were

born and raised before the Civil War.

Northern Confederates’ defense of the South’s social order and racial hierarchy,

built upon slavery, exemplified Confederate reasoning and the social advantages whites

were willing to defend in Southern society as opposed to the North. The betrayal of

Northern Confederates of their native states along with family and friends in the North, in

defense of their financial and social welfare, views on race, and political opinions proves

that the Civil War was fought over more than geographic patriotism. It was instead,

fought over personal issues. The war was much deeper than the allegiances determined

by the Mason-Dixon Line.

Examining the motivations of Northern Confederates also depicts some of the

motivation of Confederates who owned a small amount of slaves or no slaves at all.

Although many Northern Confederates had personal economic interests not directly

related to slavery and most did not own slaves, they too believed in viable incentives to

support the Confederacy and defend slavery. Proslavery politicians and publicists

convinced non-slaveholders and small slaveholders of a system of common values, that

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slavery was the common thread, which stabilized all white southern men’s status in

society.10 According to Stephanie McCurry, “They [proslavery politicians and publicists]

repeatedly reminded white southerners of every class that slavery could not be

disentangled from other relations of power and privilege and that it represented simply

the most extreme and absolute form of the legal and customary dependencies that

characterized the Old South.”11 This proslavery argument socially appealed to non-

slaveholders as it thoroughly convinced many white southerners outside of the wealthy

planter class that slavery enforced the social order of the South, in which whites of all

socioeconomic statuses benefitted.

Non-slaveholding men outside the wealthy planter class were also incited to

defend slavery to preserve their power over women in gender relations on the social and

domestic level. Proslavery advocates of the upper class – namely wealthy planters and

politicians – emphasized the common interest of engendered power so that white

southern men of every socioeconomic class could find value in the Confederacy and the

national struggle over slavery. Slavery acted as a metaphor for the subordination of

women in marriage and social hierarchy, and according to McCurry, “No other relation

was more universally embraced as both natural and divine, and none so readily evoked

the stake of enfranchised white men, yeomen and planters alike, in the defense of slave

society.” Slavery acted as a safeguard to men’s position in the household as heads of the

family and southern men of all social classes could find common ground to the

Confederate cause in defending their engendered power on a domestic and social level.

10 Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, & the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1995), 213.11 Ibid. 214.

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Northern Confederates were motivated to preserve their positions of power

afforded to them by the South’s set of societal boundaries that entrenched all African

Americans and women in their subordinated status within the southern social sphere. In

joining the Confederate army, Northern Confederates ultimately aimed to preserve the

social order and racial hierarchy that made up the South’s slave society. Through

identifying Northern Confederate motivations, Confederate nationalism can be more

concretely defined by recognizing the common factors, ideals, and goals that influenced

both northerners and southerners to support the Confederacy.

Historiography of Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy

Historians have devoted an enormous amount of research and analysis towards

the personal motivations of Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in the American

Civil War, but existing study on the motivations of these soldiers is predominantly on

northerners and southerners who fought for their home section. Classical historians like

Clifford Dowdey12 and Bill Irvin Wiley13 focus on the political motivations of Civil War

soldiers and ignore southerners’ views on race and society. Cultural historians who

emerged after the cultural turn of the 1980’s, including James McPherson14 and Chandra

Manning,15 have since refuted the arguments of classical historians, instead, emphasizing

that race relations and slavery were at the core of Confederate nationalism, ideology, and

personal motivation. Contrary to the small amount of work done on Northern

12 Clifford Dowdey, Experiment in Rebellion, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1947. 13 Bell Irvin Wiley, The Common Soldier in the Civil War, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1952.14 James McPherson, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.15 Chandra Manning, What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

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Confederates, historians have done a great deal of research on native Southern unionists,

such as Victoria Bynum’s 2001 book The Free State of Jones.16

Existing historically study on Northern Confederates is focused on individuals

rather than northerners in the Confederate army as a specific type of soldier. Most

historical study on Northern Confederates on an individual level exists because many

Northern Confederates played influential roles to the survival of the Confederacy and

retained high-ranking positions. One of the few studies on multiple Northern

Confederates was written by Ed Gleeson and is presented in his book, Illinois Rebels. In

his work, Gleeson provides an comprehensive Civil War history of G Company of the

15th Tennessee Regiment, which was fully made up of 34 Confederates from Marion and

Carbondale, Illinois.17 However, the majority of G Company was originally from

Southern states before they moved north, and therefore is not congruent with the

parameters of this study.18 Historical and academic analysis on the motivations of

Northern Confederates as a group has overall been neglected by the vast majority of

historians for a number of additional reasons.

One of the major reasons for a lack of academic historical study on the

motivations of native northerners who fought for the Confederacy is because men with

characteristics that align with the parameters of this demographic of Civil War soldier

were extremely rare. In order to be considered for this paper, the individual must have

been born in a northern state and lived there at least until they were above the age of ten,

before moving to the South and ultimately joining the Confederacy in some capacity.

16 Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.17 Ed Gleeson, Illinois Rebels: A Civil War Unit History of G Company 15th Tennessee Regiment Volunteer Infantry, Carmel, Indiana: Guild Press of Indiana, (1996), 13.18 Ibid.

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Through discourse, northerners often were not shy about displaying true

sentiments of faith and national patriotism in the Union both prior to and after they had

migrated to the South.19 Many Northern Confederates held public servant positions in

their local community that cooperated with the federal government while living in

northern and southern regions of the country. Many northerners who were veterans of

the federal military, and even some who were currently serving in the United States

Army, at the outbreak of the Civil War joined the Confederate army. Therefore, it made

little sense for many northerners included in this paper to put faith in a newly founded

government and a military that did not exist prior to the secession of Southern states.

Northerners who fought for the Confederacy were also a rarity because along with

deciding to join a movement that contradicted and starkly opposed the government that

many Northern Confederates had devoted at least a portion of their political faith and

patriotism toward, most Yankee rebels knowingly fought against their own family who

still resided in the North. The families of many Northern Confederates vocally

denounced the opinions and actions of family members in the Confederate army.

Edmund Patterson described his awkward family reunion while he was a prisoner of war

saying, “Pa has been here all day… He urges me to give up the cause of the South which

he pronounces to be a doomed one and one which he is willing and anxious to see put

down.”20 Thus, for many, the decision to join the Confederate army and fight against

their own family was a traitorous endeavor.

The current lack of historiographical research on Northern Confederate

motivations might also be largely due to the social factor that Yankee rebels almost never

19 David Ross Zimring, To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, (2014), 172.20 Patterson, 129.

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intentionally acted as a unified group. According to discourse evidence, prior to the war,

it was extremely rare for northerners to work or socialize together within their new

communities in the South. As one northern migrant to Mississippi explained, “But I

frequently meet with Yankees, who are much more numerous here than I had supposed…

but associate little with each other, except in the way of business. Self here is the sole

object.”21 According to this idea, northerners in the South had no need to create expat

communities in their new societies. This speaks to the strong manifestation of

individualism in the nation during the pre-war era, as migrants to the South saw

themselves as “Americans,” rather than foreigners in a distant land. The absence

organized and unified communities of northerners in the South may have deterred

historians from considering the motivations of Northern Confederates as important or

influential. A combination of these factors has led historians to neglect research on

Northern Confederates and their motivations as a group.

However, there exists one comprehensive study on Northern Confederates. David

Ross Zimring’s 2014 book, To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought

for the Confederacy, does examine the motives and sectional identity of northerners

living in the South who chose to either join the Confederacy or remain loyal to the Union

and their home section during the Civil War.22 The groundbreaking research Zimring has

gathered is unprecedented in the historiographical spectrum of Northern Confederate

study. Zimring’s work has been extremely valuable and convenient for this paper.

21 George Lewis Prentiss, A Memoir of S. S. Prentiss. Vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, (1891), 101.22 David Ross Zimring, To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, (2014).

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Zimring claims the primary reason behind Northern Confederates’ choice to join

the Confederate army was malleable sectional identity in the antebellum South. The

flexibility of sectional identity, according to Zimring meant that, “No longer would they

[native northerners] have to see themselves solely as adoptive southerners. Now, in their

contributions toward crafting a new nation, they transformed themselves once again, this

time into Northern Confederates.”23 Although Zimring’s ideas about adopted

southerners’ shifted sectional identity are well supported by his claims and correlating

evidence, his argument that sectional identity was the sole motivating factor for Northern

Confederates fails to analyze the ideologies that influenced the shift. Zimring discusses,

and ultimately denies, the possibility that the economic incentives of slavery could have

been a motivating factor to Northern Confederates decision. He also completely neglects

to analyze their discourse to consider opinions on race and Northern Confederates’

desires to preserve the social order and racial hierarchy within the South’s slave society.

By ignoring the true motivations of Northern Confederates, Zimring allows the traditional

argument that sectional patriotism was the driving factor of Civil War soldiers to persist.

Traditional Arguments for Confederate Motivations

Political ideology and “states rights” arguments are at the heart of the most

popular traditional claims for Confederate motivation made by native southerners and

classical historians. States rights ideology – the belief that state governments could

create and control their own political policies – guided Southern support. The states

rights argument for slavery originated in 1848 as the byproduct of a political argument

23 Ibid.133.

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over an idea known as popular sovereignty when settlers in western territories proposed

that they should decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery.24 Confederate

brigadier general and Georgia native, Edward Porter Alexander, reiterated advocated for

the states rights argument in his personal recollections, stating, “That was the view the

whole South took of it. It was not for slavery but the sovereignty of the states, which is

practically the right to resume self government or to secede.”25 The argument over

whether or not states and territorial entities should be allowed to decide their own

political policies continued throughout the pre-war period as southerners clung to the

political ideology of independence and self-rule.26

Southerners also used the states rights argument to support a romanticized idea of

independence. Many Southerners perceived the Civil War as a struggle for their personal

freedom and liberty as they compared their position as a victimized society with patriots

of the American Revolution in the 18th century. For Southerners, the presidential

election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was their political breaking point on the issue.

Most southerners perceived Lincoln’s policies as overreaching, radical, and tyrannous

because the policies he advocated denied states’ governments the right to make decisions

on the issue of slavery.27 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of

America, justified secession in 1861 stating,

Actuated solely by the desire to preserve our own rights and promote our own welfare, the separation of the Confederate States has been marked by no

24 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1988), 58.25 Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, Edited by Gary W. Gallagher, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, (1989), 25.26 Ibid.27 Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Basic Books, New York, (2014), 389.

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aggression upon others, and followed by no domestic convulsion. The cultivation of our fields has progressed as heretofore a terrible responsibility will rest upon it, and the sufferings of millions will bear testimony to the folly and wickedness of our aggressors. We have entered upon the career of independence.28

Northerners and southerners alike echoed the political arguments for states rights and

romantic strives for independence presented by Confederate elites in defense of their

decision to fight for the Confederacy. Classical historians like Clifford Dowdey

continually reinforced arguments reflective of Jefferson’s justification of Confederate

secession in the 20th century by portraying the South as victims of tyrannous political

oppression.

Many Southerners were also concerned with what they viewed was “Yankee

meddling” in regional affairs that would destroy the South’s agricultural way of life.29

Although economics were strongly connected with agriculture, Southern agriculture and

economic systems were based on slavery, making the South socially and economically a

“slave society.” The backbone of the South’s antebellum economy was in agricultural

and cash crops such as cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco, and hemp. Cotton in particular,

reigned supreme as the dominant source of profit within the Southern economy. While

prices and production of tobacco and sugar gradually increased between 1850-1860,

cotton value rose by more than 50%; and consequently, cotton production doubled to four

billion bales annually by the late 1850’s.30

The real catalyst of Southern and Northern economic strength was the use of free

African American slave labor. In 1850 there were over 3 million slaves in the South, the

28 Jeffrson Davis, 1861, Jefferson Davis’ First Innaugural Address, in “The Papers of Jefferson Davis” Digital Archives, Accessed December 13, 2016, https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=88. 29 Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era, 100.30 Battle Cry of Freedom, 100.

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overwhelming of whom worked on highly profitable cotton plantations.31 Southern

slaveholding states became completely dependent upon slave labor to support their state’s

economy and lavish lifestyle of the wealthy aristocratic upper class. James Hammond, a

South Carolinian governor and plantation owner, exclaimed, “The slaveholding South is

now the controlling power of the world. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores command

the world… No power on earth dares to make war on cotton. Cotton is King.”32 Wealthy

southern planters took pride in their agricultural dominance and were ultimately

motivated and highly incentivized to fight in order to preserve personal economic

interests coupled with the system of racial hierarchy. Subsequently, wealthy proslavery

advocates successfully recruited yeomen farmers and other poor freemen to defend

slavery by presenting their arguments in a conservative Christian frame. (209)

In the South Carolina Low Country, cotton and rice plantations were highly

profitable for the planter class, yet for the majority of poorer white citizens in the region,

these yeomen farmers usually only had enough goods and crops to support themselves.33

Yeomen families were trapped in their low socioeconomic status because 95 percent of

property yeomen owned was the least desirable high pine land which had little value and

was only suitable for the cultivation of provision crops and range land for livestock.34

This trend was not limited to the South Carolina Low Country and common all across the

South.35 Although the planter class hoarded distribution of quality land, and

consequently wealth, non-slaveholders and small slaveholders were still convinced of the

31 “XIV. Statistic of Slaves,” United States Census Bureau, (1900). 32 John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, (1979), 134.33 McCurry, 27.34 McCurry, 27.35 Ibid. 29.

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social benefits of slavery. According to Stephanie McCurry, in South “male yeomen

demonstrated an unequivocal commitment to hierarchical social order and to their version

of Christian conservative proslavery discourse promoted [by southern elites].”36 Non-

slaveholding and small slaveholding males across the South prescribed to wealthy planter

rhetoric and proactively defended slavery as white southern men by joining the

Confederate army in order to defend their cherished social and domestic positions they

believed were cemented in society by the institution of slavery.

Traditional arguments for Confederate motivations that revolved around political

and economic ideology were conceived with the intent of defending white southerners’

well being. However, the defense of slavery can be directly traced to the root of almost

every factor that influenced northerners and southerners alike to support the Confederacy.

Understanding that the South’s social order and economic systems during the antebellum

era revolved around slavery and racial hierarchy is crucial to historical interpretation of

Northern Confederates’ personal discourse and motivation to support the Confederacy.

Comparing and contrasting the ideologies of northerners and southerners who believed in

the South’s “slave society” and fought for the Confederacy allows the true motivations

and goals behind Confederate nationalism and sectional identity to be identified and

historically analyzed.

Northerners Migrate South

Although three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free

northern states by 1850, there were also a large amount of northerners who moves to the

South by this time.37 During the pre-war period, from 1830 until the outbreak of the Civil

36 Ibid. 225.37 Battle Cry of Freedom, 91.

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War, around 350,000 northerners migrated to the southern region of the United States.38

This pre-war migration south was similar to the great migration movement from the east

coast states to the mid and far west during the early 19th century.39

Many northerners who picked up and moved their lives in this second great

American migration of the 1800’s migrated south out of a sense of personal ambition in

order to find a community where they could create a new and successful life. Most

Northern Confederates in this study were well educated, receiving a quality formal

education in the North before they moved south.40 Northern Confederates’ wide ranging

skills, a result of their high levels of education, afforded them various opportunities in

business, law, engineering, politics, and medicine.41 Most northerners who migrated

south travelled alone, carving out a new chapter of life in southern communities

independently and becoming a part of an emerging Southern middle class with minimal

connection to slavery.42 Rather than slave-owners, traders, or buyers, members of the

new Southern middle-class acted as social liaisons to the wealthy planter class and white

non-slaveholding class.43 Northerners who entered the emerging Southern middle-class

took financial advantage of southern social and racial hierarchy and acted as spokesmen

for the defense of the slavery to the lower classes because the institution was intertwined

in all social and economic factors in the South as a slave society.44 The South’s social

order, based upon secure racial hierarchy, allowed educated white Northerners to easily

mingle with and imbed themselves into southern society.

38 Zimring, 11.39 Ibid. 24.40 Ibid. 20.41 Ibid. 21.42 Ibid. 15.43 Zimring, 24.44 Ibid. 20.

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In addition to migrating south for new lives, some Northern Confederates

analyzed in this paper traveled south on military assignment serving with the United

States Army prior to the war. John C. Pemberton, a native of Pennsylvania and

commander of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil

War, was assigned to U.S. army post in Norfolk, Virginia where he met his southern wife

before the war.45 Thirty-two northerners who graduated from the United States Military

Academy at West Point became Northern Confederates including Samuel Cooper,

Franklin Gardner, Bushrod Johnson, Francis Shoup, and many more high ranking

Confederate generals.46 As did their civilian counterparts who migrated south seeking

economic success, many northern military men also quickly assimilated into southern

culture and adopted the region’s views on race and politics. Some northerners who

retired from their careers in the U.S. army stayed in the South to pursue financially

business opportunities available to them by connections with southerners made before the

war.

Finally, there were some northerners who found themselves in the South through

family connections with native southern kin or by marriage. Even in the case of family,

Northern Confederates proved well educated and most had an even easier transition, than

those who migrated for economic success or because of military maneuvers, into

southern culture and society, through local connections. Family migrants from the North

also often benefited economically through the generosity and community networks of

their family members. It is possible that some family migrants felt inclined to align their

identity and ideologies with their adoptive community and state. George Eggleston, a

45 Michael B. Ballard, Pemberton: The General Who Lost Vicksburg, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, (1991), 64.46 Zimring, 20.

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native of Indiana, moved to live with his wealthy family in Virginia in 1858 where he

adopted the region’s views on politics and race.47 Many other northerners who migrated

south assimilated their political ideologies, views on race, and personal economic

concerns as they transformed their sectional identity. Consequently, many of the reasons

that caused northerners to migrate to the South often correlated with the influential

factors that motivated Northern Confederates to support the Confederacy.

Race and Slavery at the Root of Northern Confederate Discourse

The most popular factor that motivated the average northerner to join the

Confederate Army was the political rhetoric that surrounded the issue of slavery.

Accordingly, the viewpoints of both northern and southern Confederates that slavery was

morally, economically, and politically justified were displayed in formal discussions,

speeches, and writings. For example, Indiana native Francis Shoup vocalized his defense

of slavery and states rights before and after the war even more so than many

southerners.48 The rhetoric that termed slavery as an acceptable necessity and the South

as a rightful slave society convinced many northerners that supporting the Confederacy

rather than their native state was the right decision.

Most northerners adopted and believed the arguments for secession, based upon

states rights and economic necessity, presented by southern leaders in the Democratic

Party. Many Northern Confederates seemed to take the argument for states rights to

another level, possibly in an effort to assimilate into and be accepted by their local

47 George Cary Eggleston, A Rebel’s Recollections, New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875.48 James W. Raab, Deliverance from Evil: Genderal Francis Asbury Shoup, C.S.A, New West Conshohocken, PA, Infinity Publishing, (2012), 13.-Francis A. Shoup, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Forty Years After,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, (1893).

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community. George Cary Eggleston, a former student of Asbury University, and adopted

Virginian expressed his own opinion of the war and the southern perspectives in his

book, A Rebel’s Recollections.49 According to Eggleston, “The Southerners honestly

believed in the right of secession, not merely as a revolutionary, but as a constitutional

right of every state when any people finds the government under which it is living

oppressive and subversive.”50 Like Eggleston, many northerners in the South agreed and

advocated for states rights because they were surrounded by an echo chamber of political

rhetoric in defense of slavery and southern independence.

Numerous other Northern Confederates reflected identical sentiments in defense

of states rights. Robert Hatton, an Ohio-born Tennessee lawyer, Congressman, and later,

a brigadier general in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia expressed his southern

sympathies in a letter to a friend in 1861 in claiming, “If it cannot be preserved-the North

will not yield to us what are our rights–will not guarantee us those rights-destroy the

Union, by destruction of what it was intended to secure and establish-then, we will have

no alternative but to look to ourselves-rely upon our own strength for security.”51

Northern Confederate, Joseph Garey was a native Pennsylvanian who moved to

Cockrum, Mississippi in 1860 claimed himself a true “Southerner” in his wartime diary,

writing, “We are fighting for our unalienable rights & for them we inaugurated war.”52 In

their own words, northerners claimed to have served in the Confederate army for the

49 Eggleston, 56.50 Ibid. 51 James Vaulx Drake, Life of Robert Hatton, Including His Most Important Public Speeches, Together With Much of His Washington & Army Correspondence, Nashville: Marshal & Bruce, (1867), 320.52 Joseph Garey, A Keystone Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Joseph Garey, Hudson’s Battery, Mississippi Volunteers, Edited by David Welker, Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, (1996), 95.

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same reason southerners did: to preserve those southern rights being encroached upon by

a radical and oppressive northern government. Just as many southern Confederates and

classical historians did, Northern Confederates too, claimed they were motivated to fight

for the Confederacy by portraying the South as a section of victimized people who’s

rights had been unjustifiably infringed upon by a radical northern government.

The political argument for states rights and southern victimization, although real

to most southerners, also failed to address the underlying issue of race relations and

slavery. Although some Northern Confederates did not specify the specific in their

diaries and letters, the specific political rights they aimed to preserve, others did describe

that their opinions on northern political interferences in southern affairs were motivated

by the preservation of slavery.

According to the personal discourse of several Northern Confederates, leading up

to the Civil War northern personal liberty laws were the most opposed and influential

political policies that drove northerners to support the Confederacy.53 Several northern

states passed personal liberty laws were passed by the late 1850’s in order to counter the

Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 that provided for the return of slaves who escaped

from the South into free states and territories.54 Each state personal liberty law opposed

53 Battle Cry of Freedom, 40.54 Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, “An Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters,” United States Congress (1793), in Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Digital Collections, accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_An_Act_respecting_fugitives_from_justice_and_persons_escaping_from_the_service_of_their_masters_1793.-The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “An Act to amend, and supplementary to, the Act entitled ‘An Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters,’ approved February twelfth, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three,” United States Congress (1850), in Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Digital Collections, accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_An_Act_to_amend_and_supplementary_to_the_Act_entitled_An_Act_respecting_Fugitives_from_Justice_and_Persons_escaping_from_th

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the federal fugitive slave laws differently. Some allowed jury trials for escaped slaves

and others, forbid state authorities from cooperating in the capture and return of fugitive

slaves.55 Edward Wells, a Massachusetts-born Northern Confederate who moved to

Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, only a year before the firing on Fort Sumter, claimed

the personal liberty laws were an insult to southern power in instances of political

jurisdiction.56 Even before South Carolina officially seceded from the Union, Wells was

a vocal advocate for secession, stating, “The Yankee States had already vilified the Union

with acts like the personal liberty laws.”57 In a similar tone, Northern Confederate Henry

Richardson, a native of Maine living in Louisiana, wrote to his parents arguing, “The best

solution involves the North repealing their unconstitutional personal liberty laws.”58 Both

men believed that the policies imposed on the South by northern government inflicted

unfair and oppressive treatment upon their adopted states. Within their personal

discourse, many Northern Confederates expressed discontent with northern policies and

echoed rhetoric that argued for southern political independence and states rights

perspectives.

e_Service_of_their_Masters_approved_February_twelfth_one_thousand_seven_hundred_and_ninety-three_1850. 55 “An Act for the Defense of Liberty in this State,” Connecticut (1854), “An Act to Protect the Rights and Liberties of the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Massachusetts (1855), “An Act to protect the rights and liberties of the inhabitants of this State,” Michigan (1855), “An Act to further protect personal liberty,” Maine (1855), “An Act to secure freedom and rights of citizenship to persons in this State,” New Hampshire (1857), “An Act to prevent kidnapping in Ohio,” Ohio (1857), “Of the Writ of Habeas Corpus Relative to Fugitive Slaves,” Wisconsin (1857), “An Act to secure freedom to all persons within this State,” Vermont (1858), in Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.56 Zimring, 121.57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.

Brown 21

Many Northern Confederates were motivated to join the Confederacy with the

goal of preserving southern slavery because they openly opposed abolitionists and

defended, or at least attempted to justify, the peculiar institution. Northerners living in

the South before the Civil War viewed abolitionists as a great danger to the antebellum

system of racial hierarchy built upon the South’s slave society. The abolition of slavery

was a direct threat to the social hierarchy that allowed white northerners to easily

transition into southern society, and for northerners who owned plantations in the South,

threatened to outlaw the institution of free labor that afforded them great fortunes.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809, Albert Pike travelled throughout the west

during his early adulthood until he settled in Arkansas in 1833.59 Pike was commissioned

as a brigadier general and given Confederate command of the Indian Territory on

November 22, 1861.60 Before and after the Civil War Pike worked as a politician, poet,

and administrator to the Free Mason Society. Prior to the secession crisis he told a

northern audience, “Let us, and our slaves, alone. Let the whole matter of slavery alone.

We are as humane as you, and as intelligent as you, and will do the very best we can with

that which is with us to be dealt.”61 Pike attempted to justify the institution by comparing

southern slavery with the cruel treatment and harsh conditions he had seen northern

industrial wage laborers receive in the North, asserting that, “Pauperism, in your

[northern] cities, separates more families than slavery does on our plantations.”62 Pike’s

argument is flawed because unlike white industrial workers in the North, southern slaves

had no agency or possibility to advance in the South’s social sphere.

59 Ibid. 112.60 Zimring, 112.61 Ibid. 118.62 Ibid. 112.

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Although his views changed after the war, native Hoosier turned Virginia attorney

George Eggleston also explained how he justified and defended the institution by

claiming that, “Slavery, which indeed exhibited its least oppressive features in Virginia,

was a good institution, or at least productive of more good than evil.”63 Both men

considered slavery an economic necessity and morally acceptable, and continued in their

rhetoric for the general preservation of the institution throughout the war. Many

Northern Confederates’ advocated for the justification of slavery in their personal

discourse, defending the social order and racial hierarchy that provided themselves with

opportunities as public servants and cemented southern racial hierarchy in work relations.

Some Northern Confederates expressed fear for what might happen to the social

hierarchy of the South if slavery were abolished as an explicit motivator. Southerners

and Northern Confederates were strictly influenced to preserve the southern system of

racial “subjugation,” the South afterall was a slave society. According to Larry Logue,

“Soldiers on both sides often simply echoed their leaders’ justifications for the war, but

beneath Confederate soldiers’ political rhetoric lay a deeper, more personal concern for

racial equilibrium: the fear of life with the bottom rail on top echoes through southerners’

explanations of why they were in the army.”64 This southern fear originated largely from

numerous slave uprisings in the South dating back to the early 1700’s. Slavers tortured,

hanged, and beheaded fifty slaves after an uprising in 1739 near Charleston, South

Carolina.65 In 1831 insurgent slaves led by Nat Turner, an enslaved lay preacher, killed

63 Eggleston, 12.64 Larry, Logue, “Who Joined the Confederate Army? Soldiers, Civilians, and communities in Mississippi,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 3, (1993), pg.611.65 John R. Howe, Allen F. Davis, Peter J. Frederick, Allan M. Winkler, Charlene Mires, and Carla Gardina Pestana, The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, Pearson Education, Inc., New York, (2008), 314.

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almost sixty whites in Southampton County, Virginia during a two-day revolt, including a

baby in a crib and ten children in a log-cabin school. In retaliation, white troops executed

about fifty African Americans, many of whom had not participated in the rebellion. (the

half 208) The memory of slave revolts caused white southerners lived in constant

vigilance and fear of slave rebellions, blacks with guns, and black men raping white

women. This fear created developed into a theory that if slaves were freed in the South,

blacks and radical northern abolitionists would incite a revolution that would completely

reverse the South’s social and racial hierarchy. Although many Northern Confederates

had not been in the South for an extensive period of time before the war began in 1861,

some expressed adopted the same strong concerns about the loss of racial subjugation and

a reversed racial hierarchy in the South.

Francis Shoup was born in Laurel, Indiana and, like his northern peer, George

Eggleston, attended Asbury University. However, Shoup later secured an appointment to

the United States Military Academy at West Point where he graduated in 1855 with the

rank of 2nd lieutenant of artillery.66 While practicing law and commanding local militia in

the Indianapolis area, Shoup foresaw the coming conflict between the states and fled to

Florida right before the secession crisis in 1860. Speaking retrospectively, Shoup

explained that his, “whole nature rebelled against the Republican Party, as I had great

horror of abolitionism.”67 Although Shoup was living in the North when he expressed

these sentiments, many northerners shared southerners’ fear of black competition for

jobs, resources, and influence in politics.68 By the 1830’s, blacks were competing with

66 James W. Raab, Deliverance from Evil: Genderal Francis Asbury Shoup, C.S.A, New West Conshohocken, Penssylvania: Infinity Publishing, (2012), 13.67 Ibid. 15.68 The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 313.

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immigrants for occupations commonly held by lower class whites– coachmen,

stevedores, barbers, cooks, and house servants. Additionally, ninety-three percent of free

northern blacks lived in states where they were kept from voting polls so that whites

could reserve political control by 1840. Exemplified by Shoup, many northerners

expressed the same fear southerners felt toward abolitionism, which incentivized some to

join the Confederacy in its defense of slavery and racial hierarchy in the South.

After the war Shoup spent many years as a professor at the University of the

South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Even then, Shoup abhorred the social progress of African

Americans within the nation. Rather than conceding the idea that the South had lost the

war, Shoup framed the post-war era as one which the white race was victim in a southern

society now ruled by freed African Americans. In 1893 Shoup wrote an article, “Uncle

Tom’s Cabin Forty Years After.” In it, Shoup claimed that, “In the train of wreckage,

there had come upon the South a threat of and, in many case, the actual domination of the

whites by the blacks through the elective franchise bestowed upon the latter.”69 In

essence, Shoup believed that the North victimized the South before the Civil War, which

motivated him to support the Confederacy. After the war, he continued to express his

belief that the South was victimized, but now at the hands of freed blacks. Shoup likely

discarded his responsibility in the conflict because he believed that he and the South had

lost their control of social order.

Many other Northern Confederates expressed a sense of fear that white

southerners would be socially and economically “enslaved” in a new social order if

abolitionists were able to successfully free African Americans. White southerners had

69 Francis A. Shoup, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Forty Years After,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, (1893), 103.

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such a strong grasp on the South’s racial hierarchy that they believed freed slaves and

radical northerners would retaliate against white southerners by taking everything they

owned and replacing them in their position of high social status. Adopted South

Carolinian, Edward Wells, claimed that the purpose of the North was to, “enslave a free

& noble people [white southerners] so [we] will oppose them, to the bitter end…If

contending for the rights of free men is treason, than every honorable man is a traitor.”70

Wells and other Northern Confederates who expressed this defense ignored the hypocrisy

of their ideology; that they considered white southerners a “noble people” whose freedom

should be preserved, yet they defended their perceived right to enslave African

Americans in the South in order to ensure that white southerners could forever hold

higher position in southern society.

Additionally, the belief held by many northerners and southerners that whites

were racially superior compared to African Americans acted as evidence to their

argument.71 Many northern whites, like southerners, also believed that blacks were

inferior and depraved race and were often vocal about this opinion in defense of their

jobs and social status. After George Eggleston moved from Indiana and lived on his

family’s plantation for two years, he was convinced that, “Negroes are unfit to be free.”72

In his 1893 article, Shoup went so far as to say that, “For a time, the African dominated

Caucasian; - but, as water put on top of oil will not stay there, so the higher laws of

nature prevailed and the white blood worked its way to the top.”73 Northern Confederates

such as Wells, Shoup, and Eggleston felt strongly about the system of racial hierarchy of

70 Zimring, 121.71 The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 314.72 Eggleston, 11.73 Shoup, 103.

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the antebellum South and exemplified the desire to preserve and maintain racial hierarchy

shared by many northerners. Northern Confederates’ journals, letters, and discussions

displayed that a burning concern about racial hierarchy in the South was a major concern

that ultimately motivated their decision to back the Confederacy and join the Confederate

army.

Northern Confederates’ harsh views of blacks were most evident in debates over

the addition of colored troops to Union military forces. In 1862, as the war progressed,

the Union added black regiments-known as the United States Colored Troops-to the

federal army with the Militia Act, passed by the 37th Congress.74 According to James

McPherson, the bill, “empowered the president to enroll ‘persons of African decent’ for

‘any war service for which they may be found competent’ – including service as soldiers,

a step that would horrify conservatives and that the administration was not prepared to

take.”75 This bill gave the war new perspective and meaning for African Americans

because as it gave them agency and a participatory role in freeing their enslaved race in

the South. According to one Indiana senator, African Americans could “never live

together equally” with whites because “the same power that gave them black skin, with

less weight or volume of brain, has given us white skin with greater volume of brain and

intellect.”76 Therefore, the Militia Act also challenged many northerners’ and

74 The Militia Act, approved by the 37th Congress in July of 1862. “An Act to amend the Act calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections, and repel Invasions, approved February twenty-eight, seventeen hundred and ninety-five, and the Acts amendatory thereof, and for the Purposes,” in Freedmen & Southern Society Project digital archives, accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/milact.htm. 75 Battle Cry of Freedom, 500.76 The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 314.

Brown 27

southerners’ views on race: for the first time African Americans were being recognized

by the Union government as a “competent,” capable, and proficient people.

Along with horrifying many Unionist, Confederates were even more appalled by

African American federal troops. The enlistment of colored union troops also further

motivated non-slaveholding Confederates because black soldiers taken prisoner were

held as private property of their captors.77 One Texas corporal explained the goal of one

of his men, “Never a slave-owner but always wishing to be, he decided then and there to

make use of his opportunities and capture and confiscate two colored soldiers.”78 In

response to many instances of murder or enslavement of black captives at the hands of

Confederate soldiers, President Lincoln considered implementing capital punishment for

Confederate prisoners but decided against it in order to prevent further Confederate

retaliation.79 In the words of Edmund Patterson, an Ohio born corporal in the Army of

Northern Virginia,

Some Northern journals state that there will not be any more [prisoner] exchanges until our government consents to treat captured negroes as prisoners of war. If this be the case, then I hope that there may never be another exchange. If Yankee government will persist in arming the negroes of the South and sending them against us, I believe it will amount to the ‘Black Flag.’ One thing I think is very certain and that is that the army in Virginia will not take negro prisoners.80

Patterson echoed the opinion of most average Confederate soldiers as he advocated for

the killing or enslavement of colored Union troops rather than the exchange of

Confederate prisoners, even as he was a starving prisoner of war in a northern camp at

the time of this journal entry. Without any direct connection to slavery – ownership of

slaves or employment by slaveholding southerners – Patterson and other Confederates

77 Manning, 67.78 Manning, 67.79 Battle Cry of Freedom, 794.80 Patterson, 128.

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displayed a truly cruel opinion on blacks that lived at the core of Confederate nationalism

and mentality.

For many Northern Confederates, it is indisputable that the defense and

preservation of the South’s social order and racial hierarchy prove to be a paramount

concern within their personal discourse. Although Zimring considers slavery as a

motivating factor for Northern Confederates, he ultimately neglects to analyze Northern

Confederates’ general opinions on race and falls back on his argument that adoptive

southerners fought for the Confederacy because their sectional identity was changed.

However, the Northern Confederates whose discourse is analyzed above confirms that the

average northerner who fought for the Confederacy was genuinely concerned with many

issues dealing with race relations and slavery as they attempted to justify their racist

arguments through political and social hierarchical frames. Some Northern Confederates

even displayed their direct racism toward the African American race. Therefore, it is

evident that many Northern Confederates’ joined the Confederacy because they were

motivated, or at least influenced, by racist personal behind their new southern sectional

identity.

Northern Confederates Directly Motivated by Personal Economic Interests

There is greater evidence that a separate group of Northern Confederates, more so

than others, were more directly incentivized to join the Confederate army by the need to

protect their personal economic interests within the southern states. By the time of the

secession crisis, many adoptive southerners who would become Northern Confederates

had found financially successful lives in a variety of fields in their new state. In addition

to protecting the raw capital they had worked so hard to earn, it is likely that many

Brown 29

Northern Confederates joined the Confederate army in order to preserve their newly

acquired business and social connections in the South. By identifying and analyzing the

economic interests that supported the livelihoods of many financially successful

northerners in the South, it is evident that this group of Northern Confederates was

motivated to protect their personal economic interests in the South, more directly than

other northerners living in the South before the Civil War.

Northern Confederates in the wealthy southern planter class who owned a large

amount of slaves or had sizeable financial investments in the institution were incentivized

by a combination of ideologies, the preservation of southern social and racial hierarchy,

coupled with a desire to protect their personal economic interests. Many adoptive

southerners who became Northern Confederates acquired large tracts of land used for

agricultural cultivation and took full advantage of the free labor of African American

slaves on their plantations in the South. Some Northern Confederates were economically

invested in the stock of slaveholding plantations or were in a position to receive a

plantation and the slaves that worked on the property through marriage. The motivations

of this group of Northern Confederates who owned slaves or were invested in the

institution proves most representative of the claim that Yankee rebels were primarily

motivated by race and economics – to preserve the South’s racial hierarchy and their

enslaved work force, hence protecting their financial livelihoods.

Although most Northern Confederates who had economic interests involving

slavery still had family and other social connections in northern states, they chose to

defend their cotton plantations and financial well being that was dependent upon slave

labor. Northern Confederate and native of Pennsylvania, Charles Dahlgren, is an prime

Brown 30

example of this group of Yankee rebels motivated by the preservation of slavery and

protection of his personal economic interests. After moving south, Dahlgren worked as

an official with the Bank of the United States at Natchez, Mississippi and eventually

became the owner of around 7,100 acres and more than two hundred slaves.81 Dahlgren’s

biographer wrote, “He would not forsake the South when his domain in Louisiana had

produced one thousand bales of cotton in 1860.”82 Similarly, by the time of secession

crisis in the South, Maine native Zebulon York had moved south then established himself

as a prominent lawyer and successful cotton planter who owned six plantations in

Louisiana and Mississippi that were worked by over fifteen hundred slaves.83 York

profited highly and gained a fortune on the backs of slave laborers on his plantation,

producing thousands of bales of cotton annually.84 New Jersey born Samuel French

resigned from the federal army in 1856 to manage a plantation in Mississippi he obtained

through marriage.85 Pennsylvanian, Robert MacClay, a West Pointer who only acquired

his plantation in Louisiana in 1860 after resigning from the federal military, then joined

the Louisiana militia in 1861.86 Although these men hailed from states that were

strongholds to the Union cause during the Civil War, these Northern Confederates made

substantial fortunes through slavery and defended their personal economic interests

accordingly. Although there is little to no known personal discourse evidence speaking

to their explicit motives, preservation of the South’s racial hierarchy and protection of the

81 Hershel Gower, Charles Dahlgren of Natchez: The Civil War and Dynastic Decline. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s Inc., (2002), 37.82 Gower, 37.83 Ibid.84 Ibid.85 Ezra Warner, Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, (1959), 347.86 Ibid.

Brown 31

personal economic interests of slaveholding Northern Confederates cannot be ignored as

a primary source of influence in joining the southern army.

Many other Northern Confederates were explicitly motivated to join the

Confederate army to protect their personal economic interests, yet did not own slaves,

have affiliation with the institution, or political ties to issues regarding race. Most

Northern Confederates in this category were well-educated and savvy businessmen who

found financial success in local niche markets within their adoptive southern

communities. Northern Confederates motivated by personal economic interests

independent of slavery made up unique part of a new and developing southern middle

class that helped bridge the gap of Confederate nationalism between the wealthy

slaveholding planter class to white southerners within the non-slaveholding lower class.87

Similarly to slaveholding Northern Confederates in the South, these men were directly

influenced to join the Confederate army to protect their economic interests, rather than

return to the North, start their financial life from scratch, and abandon the livelihoods

they had worked so hard to gain in the South.

One extremely intriguing Northern Confederate who was directly motivated to

defend his economic interests in the South was Bushrod Rust Johnson. Having been

raised in an industrious Quaker family and environment, Johnson was born in Belmont

County, Ohio in 1817, yet surprisingly later attended and graduated West Point in 1840.88

As a source of proof that Johnson was not motivated to fight for the Confederacy to

preserve the institution of slavery, he displayed antislavery convictions throughout his

life and often aided his brother in Underground Railroad activities in Ohio and Indiana by

87 Zimring, 20.88 Cummings, Charles M. Yankee Quaker Confederate General: The Curious Career of Bushrod Rust Johnson. Columbus, OH: The General’s Books. (1993), 47.

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helping fugitive slaves cross the Ohio River to escape bondage in West Virginia and

Kentucky.89 Johnson moved south after a stent as an officer in the federal military and

became superintendent and professor at the Western Military Institute in Georgetown,

Kentucky before he negotiated a merger and relocation of the academic institution with

the University of Nashville in 1855.90 Along with earning a reputation as a quality

educator and director of these military schools, Johnson also slowly acquired a great deal

of capital through his student’s tuition and investments in other southern educational

institutions. As Johnson’s biographer, Charles Cummings explained,

He [Johnson] told the 1860 census taker on June 18 that he owned $5,000 in Nashville real estate and $1,200 in personal property which would have included riding horses, carriages, jewelry, household effects, stocks and securities, and his interest in the school store. The South had made Bushrod the wealthiest of the Johnson clan. Johnson had almost three times as much property in the South as he held in the North – a potent economic motive for choosing the side he did.91

By the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnson’s wife was dead and had ensured his son’s

safety by sending him to live with his northern kin in Indiana.92 Without any display of

romantic allegiance to the South, his adoptive state of Tennessee, or family in the area to

protect, Johnson’s motivation can be strongly tied with his desire to preserve his personal

economic interests, which he would fail to protect in the defense of Tennessee’s capital

city in 1864.93

Two former Wabash College students serve as excellent examples of Northern

Confederates who were motivated to join the Confederate army by personal economic

interests that were not directly related to race or slavery. The most interesting and

89 Ibid. 57.90 Cummings, 140.91 Ibid. 168.92 Ibid.93 Ibid.

Brown 33

romantic of which, William Tribbett, spent his life as a world traveler, adventurer, and

business entrepreneur. According to a 1925 article in the Kokomo Tribune Diamond

Issue, Tribbett was born with the given name of David Trabue in Howard County,

Indiana on August 2, 1828.94 While a student at the preparatory school of Wabash

College, Trabue abruptly disappeared from Indiana altogether after a supposed

“disappointment in a love affair” and embarked on an adventurous journey in which he

travelled to New Orleans, Cuba, France, and Australia.”95 By the time Trabue had

returned to the United States, he had changed his whole name to “William Tribbett” and

failed in a failed endeavor to create a jewelry business in Mobile, Alabama. 96 Tribbett

then decided to return home to his family in Indiana, but was interrupted when he stopped

in Terre, a the small Mississippi town where he settled and began a singing school, taught

part-time at a subscription school, and started lucrative financially successful dry goods

company.97 Tribbett finally returned to Indiana, visiting his family in August of 1860,

where he stayed until after the Civil War was well underway.98 According to the Howard

Tribune, “word came that a Federal force was about to swoop down upon the town. In an

effort to protect his store, he gathered a little money and a few pieces of jewelry, hurried

to the nearest Confederate post, and enlisted.”99 Tribbett ultimately was captured on three

separate occasions; escaping Union custody the first two times he was taken prisoner.100

94 Kokomo Tribune Diamond Issue, “David Trabue Made his Life Real Romance, His Career Full of Stuff Which Story Books are Made, He Got Many a Thrill, Lived Most of Life Under an Assumed Name and Left Relatives a Fortune,” October 1925, in Wabash College Archives, alumni box, William Trabue folder.95 Ibid.96 Ibid.97 Ibid.98 Ibid.99 Ibid.100 Ibid.

Brown 34

After the war, Tribbett’s dry good business and successful investments would

yield him a fortune of nearly $300,000.101 Tribbett’s general store and educational

endeavors in Terre, Mississippi were the first of his successful business ventures that

would eventually lead to a substantial fortune, even compared to contemporary standards.

However, Tribbett would have never gained his wealthy status without his store and

small adoptive southern community. Accordingly, Tribbett had a great amount of

incentive and motivation to join the Confederate army for the sole purpose of defending

his livelihood and personal economic interests in his new southern community.

Another former Wabash College student, Lucas Trafton, relocated from

Evansville, Indiana across the Ohio River to Henderson, Kentucky to practice law in

1853 after losing his left arm when his gun exploded during a hunting accident.102 By the

age of twenty-two, Trafton was elected as the Henderson County judge in 1859 and

according to Henderson County historical records, “During the summer of 1862, he

joined the Confederate Army, and was with General Morgan at his capture, near

Buffington Island, Ohio, in 1863.”103 As a northerner, and especially because he was an

elected official in a staunchly Confederate county, Trafton needed to ensure the people of

Henderson County that he was a loyal representative of their community. Trafton’s

decision to fight for the Confederacy was also a conscious will to defend his

advantageous position in society, cemented by slavery and his adoptive community’s

system of racial and social hierarchy. Therefore, Trafton had a great incentive to join a

101 Kokomo Tribune Diamond Issue.102 Henderson County Historical Society, History of Henderson County, KY, 751. Wabash College Archives, alumni box, Lucas Trafton folder.103 Ibid. 752.

Brown 35

local Confederate unit explicitly to protect his social status and economic well being in

his adoptive community.

Northern Confederates such as Dahlgren, Johnson, and Tribbett were motivated to

join the Confederate army to protect their economic investments, opportunities, and

profit. Northern Confederate slaveholders’ had no desire to remain pro Union in order to

ensure their benefit from the fugitive slave act because many expressed their anger about

northern personal liberty laws that refuted the fugitive slave laws. Even though many

Northern Confederates did not have direct connection to race and slavery, their

motivation to join the Confederate army to explicitly protect their personal economic

interests cannot be removed from slavery. Racial hierarchy through the enslavement of

African Americans was inherent to the social status and economic success of all white

southerners and northerners living in the South. Therefore, even Northern Confederates

with personal economic interests lacking affiliation to slavery were directly motivated to

defend the South’s social order and racial hierarchy in which they benefitted from in their

new southern communities. In total, personal economics interests prove to be one of the

core motivating factors for northerners to join the Confederate army, regardless of their

ties with slavery or lack of direct affiliation with the institution.

Northern Confederates and Social Necessity

Social necessity, used as a broad term, refers to the need of northerners to

preserve friendly relations with southern kin, in-laws from marrying a southern woman,

their members of their new local communities, or limitations created by unique social

situations. In analyzing the lives of Northern Confederates who were likely to have been

motivated by social necessity, it is evident that those influenced by southern in-laws or

Brown 36

kin were usually members of the wealthy upper class, and sometimes slaveholding

plantation owners. However, through investigation of Yankee rebels’ discourse, it seems

that a very small number of Northern Confederates might have been inclined to join the

Confederate army due to threat of social ostracism.

There are several Northern Confederates who were influenced to join the

Confederate army in order to preserve good relations with their southern in-laws or kin.

In many cases, these Northern Confederates were in line to receive their in-law’s capital

along with plantation land and slaves. As previously mentioned, New Jersey native and

Confederate Major General Samuel French had obtained his Mississippi plantation

through marriage and surely would have desired to preserve his highly profitable source

of income afforded by his in-laws.104

Hoosier native, George Eggleston, first travelled to Virginia in 1857 after being

expelled from Asbury University and was then invited by relatives to visit their lavish

estate.105 Within a week of Eggleston’s arrival, two of his Virginian uncles volunteered

to pay his tuition for college and law school in Richmond.106 After Eggleston’s

aspirations of a college education were seemingly dashed in Indiana, his wealthy

southern family offered to provide him a second chance at the future he had originally

failed to attain. Without his family’s financial generosity and having ideologies parallel

with Confederate nationalism, Eggleston felt inclined to join and fight for the section that

his southern kin were native and loyal to.

Another Northern Confederate influenced by southern in-laws in his decision to

fight for the Confederacy was the infamous commander in charge of defending the

104 Warner, 347.105 Eggleston, 10.106 Ibid.

Brown 37

crucial western Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg along the Mississippi River, major

general John C. Pemberton. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a wealthy northern

family on August 10, 1814, Pemberton was later directly appointed attendance to West

Point by the president and graduated in 1837.107 Pemberton met his future wife, Martha

Thompson in either 1844 or 1855 while stationed at a federal army base in Norfolk,

Virginia.108 Pemberton’s marriage to a southern woman played a vital role in his decision

to join the Confederacy, as displayed in a letter Pemberton’s mother sent to another

daughter-in-law during the midst of the secession crisis, “As long as he remains [in

Washington], he will do he says, anything he is ordered to, except going to attack and fire

upon Norfolk – if he is ordered to do that he would resign at once.”109 Pemberton’s

mother made it clear that her son would perform any task the military asked him,

including assignments detrimental to the South’s early uprising, as he displayed by

raiding and seizing Virginian steamboats after the state’s secession as a way to test his

loyalty to the federal army.110 On the surface of primary source evidence related to

Pemberton’s decision to support the Confederacy, it seems evident that he was likely to

have been influenced by social necessity to appease his wife and new southern family in

Virginia.

However, personal economic interests through southern ties come into play once

again in this Northern Confederate’s decision as well. Pattie’s family had retained a

107 Ballard, 10.108 Ibid. 40.109 Pemberton, Rebecca. Letter by Rebecca Pemberton to Carry Pemberton, April 20, 1861, in The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library, John C. Pemberton Papers, 1814-1942. Accessed September 15, 2016. http://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/00586/.110 Ballard, 84.

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fortune in their ownership of a thriving shipping business in Norfolk.111 As Pemberton’s

biographer Michael Ballard explains, “Marriage proved beneficial to John Pemberton,

even in the area of personal economic affairs, which he had always managed so badly.

Pattie insisted that her family money be budgeted so as to eliminate her husband’s

debts.”112 Similarly to other Northern Confederates, Pemberton owed a debt of gratitude

to his new family in the South for their generosity in sharing their financial wealth toward

improving the economic well being of their new family member who was native to the

North. These Northern Confederates who were all at least partially motivated to join the

Confederate army by social necessity through family ties in the South were also strongly

incentivized by the need to appease their southern kin who had generously improved

these northerners’ personal economic interests.

Contrary to Northern Confederates who were influenced to join the Confederate

army out of social necessity due to southern family connections, Yankee rebels who were

motivated by the need to avoid social ostracism were extremely rare. Although there

could have been others who did not reveal this type of social necessity motivation in their

personal discourse, there is only one known Northern Confederate who explicitly states

threat and pressure from members of his adoptive southern community as one of his

motivations for joining the Confederate army. Ohioan Edmund Patterson had moved

south as a travelling book salesman, but after failing in this venture established himself as

a schoolteacher and general store clerk at a store in Waterloo, Alabama.113 According to

his diary,

111 Ballard, 41.112 Ibid. 65.113 Patterson, 2.

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By this time, politics was the all absorbing topic and persons from the North were looked upon with suspicion, so that I decided to return to Ohio, but before I was ready to start I had a personal difficulty arising out of a political discussion caused by an insinuation that I might be a spy, which caused me to remain. The war came on and in May 1861 I enlisted in a company called the Lauderdale Rifles, afterwards Company D, 9th Alabama Infantry.114

In his own words, Patterson explains how he came to his decision to enlist in the

Confederate army in order to prove to the members of his adoptive community that he

was not a northern spy and cement his identity as a southerner within his local society.

Proving his loyalty to his community by serving the Confederacy was Patterson’s only

option to avoid social ostracism considering his decision to stay in Alabama.

Although the previously mentioned Bushrod Johnson was strongly incentivized to

join the Confederacy to protect his personal economic interests in Tennessee, a rather

unique and odd form of social necessity also assuredly had strong influence toward his

decision in choosing sides. While serving as Assistant Commissary of Subsistence in

Vera Cruz with the federal army during the Mexican-American War, Johnson wrote a

letter to his commanding officer in New Orleans on July 1, 1847 in which he requested

“500 barrils [sic], 2 or 3 hundred boxes of Sale Soap and about 100 boxes of Candles” to

sell to the men and that he would turn over his net profit between 1200 and 1500 dollars

to his commanding officer.115 Although Johnson intended no harm or dishonesty in his

request, as he stated this acquisition would cause “no injustice to the army’s interests,” he

was ultimately accused of selling contraband goods and forced to resign from the army in

October of the same year.116 Therefore, Johnson’s situation was extremely unique even

compared to most Northern Confederates. Unlike practically every northerner in the

114 Patterson, 3.115 Cummings, 22.116 Ibid. 23.

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South during the secession crisis, rather than having the ability to choose returning to the

North and join the Union army, Johnson’s only choices were to either sit out during the

conflict or utilize his vast military experiences and training to serve in the Confederate

army. Furthermore, it is very likely that Johnson was incentivized to join the Confederate

army in order to protect his personal economic interests in Tennessee along with

exercising his odd form of social necessity due to a fourteen-year-old resentment against

the high command of the federal army.

In conclusion, although many aspects in the lives of Northern Confederates point

toward their choice to join the Confederacy due to social necessity, the decision of almost

all Yankee rebels analyzed above can be traced back to alternative pressing motivations.

The decision of Northern Confederates who may have been influenced by southern kin or

in-laws was also intertwined with issues of personal economic interests. Northern

Confederates who received plantations from their southern kin or in-laws were

incentivized by desires to protect their source of financial stability as well as the

preservation of the South’s system of racial hierarchy and the institution of slavery.

Northern Confederates likely did not record their experiences with social pressure and

threats within their adoptive southern communities because they did not want to be seen

as retaining their northern identity along with possibly having a thoroughly converted

expression of motivation to match their southern peers. In addition, even though one

Northern Confederate who explicitly stated social pressure as one of his motives,

Patterson also had a personal mentality that included economically, politically, and

racially based alternative motives aligning with traditional Confederate ideologies.

Therefore, rather than acting as the sole proponent to their decision, social necessity

Brown 41

generally played a role as an additional incentive in pushing adoptive southerners to join

the Confederate army, further affirming their motivations to preserve the South’s

antebellum social hierarchy of racial oppression and personal motivations.

Conclusions and Review

David Ross Zimring claims that a transformation in sectional identity shaped the

decision of northerners to serve in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Although

there is truth in Zimring’s argument of transformed sectional identity, in both the North

and South, that identity was often made up of a view that African Americans were not

competent to be free members of society. Northern Confederates also defended slavery

and their personal economic interests to preserve the social order and racial hierarchy,

which was built upon the South’s slave society that they socially and economically

benefitted from in southern communities. It is apparent that northerners who joined the

Confederate army were primarily motivated to fight for the Confederacy by a number of

issues-the preservation of racial hierarchy and the slave society in the South, the defense

of economic interests, a desire to gain acceptance by southern communities, and family

allegiance. In many cases, a combination of these factors, motivated Northern

Confederates to fight for the South.

It is apparent that Northern Confederates share many of the same motivating

factors that influenced the actions of southerners in the Civil War, primarily to preserve

the South’s system of racial hierarchy and slave society. Although some factors that

motivated Northern Confederates were unique because they were not directly related to

issues of race or slavery, preservation of the South’s social order proved to be at the heart

of all Northern Confederate influences. Similar to southern Confederates, Northern

Brown 42

Confederates expressed a concern and desire to the South’s system of social and racial

hierarchy within the South’s slave society. Chandra Manning explains, “Slavery

stabilized an otherwise precarious social structure…Nonslaveholding Confederate

soldiers’ willingness to fight for slavery grew from white southern men’s gut-level

conviction that survival – of themselves, their families, and the social order – depended

on slavery’s continued existence.”117 Southerners believed the preservation of slavery

would have assured continuous social dominance of white southerners, which proved to

be an especially pressing concern for northerners who retained an insecure position in

society as newcomers in their adoptive southern communities. Northerners and

southerners alike also shared equal incentive to protect their personal economic interests

in the South, regardless of whether they were slaveholders or not. Therefore, because

northerners and southerners who fought for the Confederacy shared these motivations

and ideologies, “Confederate nationalism” can be more concretely defined as a primary

concern and desire to preserve the antebellum South’s social order and racial hierarchy

built upon slavery along with being directly motivated to defend personal economic

interests.

The factors that motivated northerners to join the Confederate army are reflective

of the economic concerns and views on race that ultimately materialized in producing

America’s bloodiest conflict. The fact that Northern Confederates hailed from places

distant from the Confederacy’s border also proves that the ideologies characteristic of

Confederate nationalism were not limited by geography. Northern Confederates acted

decisively upon these sentiments, changing their lives forever and also motivating them

117 Manning, 32.

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to provide a variety of impactful contributions, both negative and positive in nature, to

the short lived existence of the Confederate States of America.

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