Gordon Reid Hale raises some interesting questions, and some important
methodological ones.
Does the 10% figure for southern whites who fought for the United States include
all of the South, or only the 11 states that seceded? If only from the 11 states,
does it also include the United States soldiers from what became West Virginia?
Similarly, if you ask the opposite question: how many men from the United States
fought for the Confederacy, the answer would depend on how you count Ky; Mo., Del,
Md., and West Virgina -- all southern and all slave in 1861.
My guess is that the 10% of the Southern whites who fought for the United States
in 1861-65 is only from the Confederacy, then bulk of them came from Virginia (or
later West Virginia) and Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina. Another
component would be regular army and regular navy men who remained in the service
from privates and common sailors, minor officers, like Washington Seawall, and
senior Generals like Winfield Scott and George H.Thomas, "The Rock of
Chicamauga." All three were Virginians.
Finally, I suppose, we need to ask what constitutes a southerner or northerner?
This is a serious question, and not one to be answered by discussing how long
someone's family has been in one place. Consider, to use an unimportant person,
Caludius W. Sears, born in Mass., appointed to West Point from New York, but
almost a decade before the war lived in Louisiana, teaching at Univ. of La. Does
8 or 9 years of non-military employment in La make him a southerner? And if he
is a southerner, what about the president of his school, William Tecumseh Sherman,
who had lived 10 years in the South over his lifetime and was employed as a
civilian president of what became LSU when the war began? I would argue Sherman
was still a northerner (2 years as a civilian does not change him) but Sears had
become a Southerner after almost 10.
Finally, it is worth noting that the question as phrased points to the fundamental
issue of the war, which many on this list don't like to talk about: slavery and
race. If the issue were not about slavery and race then we would talk about
"white southern men" but southern men, recognizing the 150,000-175,000 black
southern men who fought for the United States.
--
Paul Finkelman
Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Tulsa College of Law
3120 East 4th Place
Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
phone 918-631-3706
Fax 918-631-2194
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Gordon Reid Hale wrote:
> Someone on this site advised that 10% of the whites in the south
> during the Civil War fought for the Union.
>
> Can you advise what percent of northern "Copperhead" fought for the
> Confederacy?
>
> If we are going to go to statistics we should really get all the facts.
>
> Gordon Hale
>
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