Composition of the Confederate Army

Excellent, detailed post on the role of slavery in the Confederate Army. One of the great unmentioned tragedies of the Civil War was the conscription of poor Southern whites into a Confederate Army dedicated to the preservation of the legal regime of slavery, a regime that fundamentally excluded those poor whites from wealth and property. Effectively, conscription forced many poor Southerners into treason in defense of slavery. While I’m not an evangelist for Cold Mountain, it does effectively present the brutality of conscription in the Confederacy.