war service, and cattle, hogs, and fowl were carried off and consumed by
soldiers of both sides in the conflict. Fences, the ubiquitous necessity in
a region where the range remained open, were torn down by soldiers (on
both sides, again) to make way for traffic, but especially for firewood. Most
important, the fires of war consumed also the institution of slavery. Nearly
million human chattels were appropriated by the federal government
with no compensation of their monetary value to previous owners. The
white southern class that had made the war suffered consequences indeed
—as they indeed should have.
Adult males of the planter class were a minority of the South’s popu-
lation. In the Confederate Congress, enacting the nation’s first con-
scription legislation, exempted from military service heads of households
with twenty or more slaves. The law’s rationale included that home security
and food production were best left to planters accustomed to command-
ing servants, yet the law embittered the nonslaveholding majority of white
southerners, who may have invented the caustic, always applicable dec-
laration, ‘‘It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.’’ Nonetheless the
planter class suffered enormous mortality in the war, as did other white
classes. Mississippi presented the most gruesome unbalancing of the sex
ratio. During midsummer , no less than percent of the white male
population between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were dead, maimed,
or still missing, months after the war’s end. Immigration from abroad pre-
sumably righted the northern sex ratio imbalance within a few years. But
the former Confederacy endured something approaching the European ex-
perience following the – holocaust—a generation of women without
men, without prospect of marriage, companionship, and progeny. We know
that upper-class white women descended from pedestals to direct planta-
tions and businesses—not unlike the fictional Scarlett O’Hara. Others be-
came clerks, teachers, writers, and editors. Other women became, simply,
farmers on lands where once, before widowhood, all farmers had been
female.
Yet for all the carnage, loss, grisly death, and dislocation, the planta-
tion tradition of extensive commodity production with less-than-free labor
persisted. Surviving and new planters with cash and/or access to reason-
able credit maintained centralized estates with black wage labor. This was
the case in Louisiana’s sugar country as well as among many Chesapeake
grain plantations. Dr. Richard Eppes, for example, returned to Appomattox
Manor after the war to find it a shambles. His fences were long gone, his
outbuildings had been stripped of siding, and his livestock were gone ex-