Maj. Gen. Samuel G. French, born in New Jersey in 1808, was a Mexican War veteran and served the American Confederacy in the eastern theater as well as in the Army of Tennessee. Below he comments on the unfortunate postwar view that the South was a “slavocracy.”
What Slavocracy?
“The white population of [the Southern States] was, in 1860, was about 8,300,000, which included some 346,000 white people who owned African slaves. These figures represent and include men of all ages, widows and minors; as well as young married women who owned a servant given to them. Only one person in twenty-four was a slaveowner in 1860,” and this doesn’t account for women, orphans and old men who owned Africans. He follows this with a computation that in a regiment of 1000 men, there might have been forty men who owned slaves; in the entire Southern army of 600,000 there might have been only 24,000 men who owned slaves.
So let it be known that the Confederate army was not an army of slaveholders but mainly composed of men free from the interests of African slavery as were the men living in sight of Bunker Hill. These Southern men were contending for an object far dearer to them than any arising from African slavery.
They had seen the accumulated funds of the United States treasury expended annually in making harbors for towns on the great northern lakes and appropriations for little creeks called rivers, while the harbors of Southern cities were neglected.
Then, again, the tariff almost invariably discriminated against the South, even to the extent of nullification by South Carolina some thirty years prior to the War. The Fugitive Slave Act was openly nullified by the laws of northern States, and “underground railroad” was a term used to express how African slaves, enticed from their owners, were conveyed northward under cover of the night.
Further, the North openly declared that the United States Constitution was a “compact made with the devil,” and that the hatred of the North and the immigrant-settled West was so widespread that through a purely sectional party vote they elected a President with only 39% of the popular vote and antagonistic to the American South. As an example, North Carolina with less than a 1% foreign-born population gave its 10 electoral votes to Democrat John C. Breckenridge.
When Lincoln determined upon his policy of coercion against the political independence of the homogenous South, the latter mobilized some 576,000 soldiers who for four years fought for the right of their people to govern themselves in their own way. Their deeds are now a matter of history that will, by them, be recorded, contrary to the past rule, that the conquerors always write history.”
Appomattox only terminated the shooting war – it was not a court to adjudicate the right of political secession – but its sequence established the fact that secession was not treason or rebellion, and that it yet exists, restrained only by the question of expediency.
The charge that slaveholders, so few in number, forced secession, or that 576,000 non-slave holders who constituted the South’s army fought and died to maintain slavery, is a popular error.”
(Two Wars: The Autobiography and Diary of Gen. Samuel G. French. Confederate Veteran, 1901. pp. 356-357)