It is certainly baffling that non-slaveholders in the South would fight for the Confederacy, but Manning does seem to make a good case for why the poor, white Southern man would go to war to protect an institution he didn’t have a direct stake in. However, what was more interesting about Manning’s discussion of the thoughts and motivations of Confederate soldiers was their ideas in the later years of the war, and how much changed over time from the very beginning of the war to the year 1864, after the Emancipation Proclamation had ensured that a successful Union would mean an end to slavery in the South.
Confederates were, at first, very patriotic; mostly because the Confederacy promised white Southern men everything they could ever want. Manning quotes “Georgia soldier Josiah Patterson” as saying that he went to war to ensure that his sons “grew up under a government that would facilitate their ‘hopes of becoming great and good men.’” (30) Southern men went to war because they “believed that their personal interests were best served and their families best protected by fighting for a Confederacy more attuned to white Southerner’s individuals needs.” (31) The Confederacy was simply the best choice for the Southern man, with a new government formed with the intention of protecting the white man’s interest first and foremost. Of course, the issue of slavery was still a reason these men went to war, even if they didn’t own slaves. “Slavery undergirded white Southerner’s convictions of their own superior moral orthodoxy.” (32) It was the presence of slaves that gave white Southerners a sense of equality, for they were “equal in not being slaves” (33) Even if a southern man didn’t own slaves himself, slavery was still a major part of his life in the South, so much so that it was worth fighting for.
However, later in the war Confederate soldier’s views of their government began to crumble, with good reason. Of course, as early as 1862 there were reasons to doubt the Confederacy; in fact, “the Confederacy’s particular variety of patriotism” was one of the only things holding together the government after “divisions like localism and class fissures” threatened to end it. But by 1864, Confederate troops were having a harder time believing in their government’s earlier promises. Originally Confederate soldiers would have “never dreamed that the authorities” would fail to protect their families, but by March 1864 one Pvt. Peter Cross’s wife “was so desperate that Cross had to ask his parents to plead with the North Carolina state government for money to buy a little salt and grain.” (167) The Confederacy also began requiring the reenlistment of soldiers when their terms were due to expire, a move that caused white Southern men to feel as though it “robbed them of control over their own actions, a key attribute of white manhood.”(167) Some Confederate soldiers, like Pvt. Noble Brooks, began to question slavery, but were too “worried that publicly criticizing slavery might lead to trouble” (171) for their families. The Confederacy had gone from being a government built to support the white man to an almost oppressive force in the minds of some Confederate soldiers, failing to support their families and even going so far as to strip them of the very freedom and superiority they had hoped for initially. Even in the light of these changes, however, white Southern men were still determined to fight for the Confederacy, if only because they could not “imagine a South without slavery” (171). Confederate troops did not believe that their families “could be safe in the absence of slavery” (172), and therefore clung on to their original views of slavery and the South, even in the face of “high prices, food shortages, social unrest, and ‘desolation and ruin’” (172), because they simply could not accept any other way of life. So, even as late as 1864, and even as Confederate troops’ patriotism began to crumble, the continuation of slavery was one of the reasons white men still went to war for the South.