Return to First Page---ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 52 (Autumn 1993), p. 224
The most common explanation for internal conflict within the South has characterized it as an expression of individual discontent. Ella Lonn, for example, explained desertion as the result of personal suffering and the undermining of civilian morale in particular sections of the Confederacy. Albert Moore linked resistance to conscription with the hearty individualism of southerners and the failure of this policy to harmonize with the "individual instincts of southerners and with their conception of manhood (2)."
Historians have also emphasized regional conflict as another source of the broadly-based popular dissent which plagued the Confederacy. Carl Degler stressed that the hostility of mountain and non-plantation residents toward planters and planter-interests fed the strong Unionism of inhabitants in parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Residents of these areas joined the Union Army, groups such as the Arkansas Peace Society, and partisan bands who fought Confederate troops in these areas (3).
- More recently, historians have seen growing antagonism between social
classes as another factor promoting internal opposition to the Confederacy.
Studies that have focused particularly on southern towns have found that
at least by 1863 poor whites particularly were disillusioned with the war,
and as a result they participated in food riots, evaded the draft, and
resisted the collection of taxes. The discovery of class conflict as a
source of wartime political dissension emerged from urban studies, by some
recent work such as Wayne K. Durrill's War of Another Kind, a study
of Washington County, North Carolina, have found considerable strife among
planters, yeoman farmers, and the poor in the countryside as well (4).
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- 2. Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: The McMillan Co.,
- 1924) 17; Ala Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (New York: The McMillan Co., 1928), 3-20.
- 3. Degler, The Other South, 184; for Arkansas see Ted R. Worley, "The Arkansas Peace Society of 1861: A
- Study of Mountain Unionism, " Journal of Southern History 24 (November 1958): 445-456.
- 4. Some early studies emphasizing class conflict in the urban setting include Stephen E. Ambrose, "Yeoman
- Discontent in the Confederacy," Civil War History 8 (December
1962): 259-268; and Paul D. Escott, "Southern Yeoman and the Confederacy,"
South Atlantic Quarterly 77 (Spring 1978): 146-158. See also Wayne
K. Durrill, War of Another Kind : A Southern Community in the Great
Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
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