Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Volume 52 (Autumn 1993), p. 223
Disloyalty and Class Consciousness
in Southwestern Arkansas,
1862 - 1865
CARL H. MONEYHON
IN writing about the southern Confederacy, historians sometimes assume the existence of significant dissension within the South and have attributed the ultimate Confederate loss to internal friction. Personal rivalries, regional jealousies, ideological conflict, and struggles between the states and central government all existed and have been considered important factors in the southern defeat. Recently scholars have emphasized the existence of widespread popular antagonism to the war as at least one of the major factors hampering the Confederacy's war effort. The opposition appeared in almost every southern state and was demonstrated by a variety of actions, including desertion, draft-dodging, and outright rebellion against Confederate authority. Determining the bases for these displays of hostility has been one of the more important problems faced by historians. A major outbreak against the Confederate government took place in Arkansas in the spring of 1863, and an examination of that event expands our understanding of the nature of the domestic discord in the Confederacy (1).
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Carl H. Moneyhon is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas
at Little Rock.
1. For discussion of the varieties of centripetal forces at work in the Confederacy see E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950), 374-404; Clement Eaton A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: McMillian Company, 1954); David Donald, "Died of Democracy," and David M. Potter, "Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat," in David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 79-90; Richard E. Beringer, et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Carl Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), offers an overview of sources of internal opposition to the Confederate government. Ideas concerning class conflict are presented in Emory Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), especially see pp. 233-236.
