Alan J. Pitts
Best in the Ranch
Wed Jul 4 10:50:20 2001


Another story from the Corinth battlefield has always been appealing to me. The passage appears in the first volume of Shelby Foote's Civil War, and includes some remarks by the Union commander, General Rosecrans:

Near Battery Robinette, having bared his head "in the presence of brave men," Rosecrans came upon an Arkansas lieutenant, shot through the foot and propped against a tree. He offered him a drink of water. "Thank you, General; one of your men just gave me some," the Confederate replied. When the Federal commander, glancing around at the heaped and scattered corpses in their butternut rags, remarked that there had been "pretty hot fighting here," the rebel Westerner agreed. "Yes General, you licked us good," he said. "but we gave you the best we had in the ranch."

William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama had some interesting things to say about motivation of the typical Confederate fighting man. Oates says that a declaration that the war was being fought to preserve slavery would have caused the armies to disband. "The men would have laid down their arms and gone home."

"The brave men who filled the ranks of Confederate armies volunteered to fight for home rule, local self-government, for seperate national independence -- with the institution of slavery as an important incident of the struggle." Oates goes on to describe men of the planter class who main purpose in pursuing secession was preservation of slavery "as a means of wealth". "...a great majority of the soldiers in the ranks -- the men who handled the msukets and did the killing -- were not of that class."

He then moves to a further description of the practical motivation of the average soldier: "Besides their other grievances, the apprehension those poor men had of the consequences of emancipation of four million of negro slaves in their midst, and they to be given the franchise and elevated to political and social equality with the whites, was horrifying to their proud spirits, and those who never owned a slave fought for slavery to avoid such direful consquences. Southern pride was offended, and the blood was made to boil at the idea of enforced equality of an inferior race."

Oates completes this thought by saying that these fears were realized during Reconstruction. "...the negroes were freed and enfranchised, and directed by a horde of plundering carpet-baggers and native scalawags, general bankruptcy came and general ruin threatened all homes in the South. It was a realization of the grave apprehension of he poor white men in the Confederate ranks."

This interesting line of thought may be found in Otes' chapter on the "Negro Slaves as Soldiers", 498-99 of his book, The War Between the Union and the COnfederacy".