Hardships on the home front fell most heavily on the poor. The draft stripped yeoman farms of men, leaving the women and children to grow what they ate. Government agents took 10 percent of harvests as a “tax-in-kind” on agriculture. Like inflation, shortages afflicted the entire population, but the rich lost luxuries while the poor lost necessities. In the spring of 1863, bread riots broke out in a dozen cities and villages across the South. In Richmond, a mob of nearly a thousand hungry women broke into shops and took what they needed.

“Men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives & children to starve,” one Southerner observed. Although a few wealthy individuals shared their bounty and the Confederate and state governments made efforts at social welfare, every attempt fell short. In late 1864, one desperate farmwife told her husband, “I have always been proud of you, and since your connection with the Confederate army, I have been prouder of you than ever before. I would not have you do anything wrong for the world, but before God, Edward, unless you come home, we must die.” When the war ended, one-third of the soldiers had already gone home. A Mississippi deserter explained, “We are poor men and are willing to defend our country but our families [come] first.” (See “Documenting the American Promise.”)

Yeomen perceived a profound inequality of sacrifice. They called it “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The draft law permitted a man who had money to hire a substitute to take his place. Moreover, the “twenty-Negro law” exempted one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves. The government intended this law to provide protection for white women and to see that slaves tended the crops, but yeomen perceived it as rich men evading military service. A Mississippian complained that stay-at-home planters sent their slaves into the fields to grow cotton while in plain view “poor soldiers’ wives are plowing with their own hands to make a subsistence for themselves and children—while their husbands are suffering, bleeding and dying for their country.” In fact, most slaveholders went off to war, but the extreme suffering of common folk and the relative immunity of planters increased class friction.

The Richmond government hoped that the crucible of war would mold a region into a nation. Officials actively promoted Confederate nationalism to “excite in our citizens an ardent and enduring attachment to our Government and its institutions.” Clergymen assured their congregations that God had blessed slavery and the new nation. Jefferson Davis claimed that the Confederacy was part of a divine plan and asked citizens to observe national days of fasting and prayer. But these efforts failed to win over thousands of die-hard Unionists, and animosity between yeomen and planters increased. The war also threatened to rip the southern social fabric along its racial seam.