Marching Masters Quotes

“percent of households owned slaves, as did 25 percent of households in the states that joined in the spring and summer of 1861.7 When compared to non-slaveholders who joined the Confederate army, men of the master class were overrepresented. In his research on the Army of Northern Virginia, Joseph Glatthaar has shown that one in ten enlisted men owned slaves (double the percentage of slave owners in the population as a whole), and half of officers did so. A historian of John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade asserted that two-thirds of the officers in that unit were slaveholders. Men’s connection to slavery was not limited to personal slave ownership, however. Glatthaar has put the percentage of men who lived in slaveholding families at 36 percent, and if one also considers men’s economic ties to slavery, whether through the hiring of slaves or selling goods to planters and other slaveholders, the percentage of men directly engaged in the slave economy rises much higher.8 Whether or not men owned African Americans, Confederate soldiers believed that slavery was an economically beneficial, divinely ordained institution that maintained a racially structured social order in the South.”
― Colin Edward Woodward, Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War