Maximum possible white resistance against the confederacy

samcster94

Banned
What is the maximum level of white resistance by white Southerners that can be made against the Confederacy??? I am talking about guerrillas, Unionists(early) and military deserters, especially 1864ish onwards. None of this was about racial enlightenment, but much of it was motivated by ideas that involved opposing Davis, the draft, and the fact the Confederacy was a disaster.
 
We had considerable resistance in OTL, of course. Historians, tainted by the Lost Causers rarely talk about it, but the CSA had widespread resistance from many whites. The largest example of course is West Virginia which actually broke away entirely! But you had similar problems in the hills of Tennessee and North Carolina. Draft dodging was vast and widepsread throughout the South, doubly so in rural areas where going after them was basically impossible due to terrain, local sentiment and lack of money.
 

Pax

Banned
I'd say IOTL was about as far as it would go. Even in WV it took physical Union occupation to get the counties to actually secede, and even then the Confederates were able to recruit a decent amount of people from the territory. The problem is that the people living in Appalachia and elsewhere were not really Unionists so much as against the planters. If the Union did something to piss them off, which they frequently did, then they weren't going to get much help.
 
The "Free State of Jones" situation offers something of a glimpse at class-based resentments held by the common man towards the aristocratic leadership of the Confederacy. For those who don't know the story a farmer from Mississippi named Newton Knight deserted the Confederate army allegedly because he was outraged about a Confederate law that exempted men who owned more than 20 slaves from military service. He eventually formed a guerilla band of other deserters and fugitive slaves and started bushwhacking Confederate supply wagons and state tax collectors who were confiscating property from the local population.

So perhaps if more of the poor Southerners who owned no slaves were introduced to a class-conscious ideology before the war we might see more resistance to the war effort on the grounds of not wanting to die for rich plantation owners.
 
Have the Federal forces help the unionists as priortity number one--this includes West Virginia, East Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, etc.

We had considerable resistance in OTL, of course. Historians, tainted by the Lost Causers rarely talk about it, but the CSA had widespread resistance from many whites. The largest example of course is West Virginia which actually broke away entirely! But you had similar problems in the hills of Tennessee and North Carolina. Draft dodging was vast and widepsread throughout the South, doubly so in rural areas where going after them was basically impossible due to terrain, local sentiment and lack of money.

There's plenty of historians nowadays who will discuss that, and quite a few happen to teach at many universities in the modern South.

But an important problem is that unionists were involved in the system of slavery. East Tennessee, a noted unionist bastion, might have tried to secede from the rest of Tennessee, but a lot of East Tennessee's agriculture was going toward ensuring plantation owners could cheaply feed their slaves. A few counties in East Tennessee even voted for secession. And in the end, East Tennessee failed to secede from the rest of the state. There wasn't enough effort on the part of the Union Army to help East Tennessee give the middle finger to Governor Isham Harris and his fellow planters, even if his opposition was willing to support the East Tennessee Convention
 
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