Editing White trash (section)

===During the Civil War===
During the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], the [[Confederate States of America|Confederacy]] instituted conscription of all men between the ages of 18 and 35, to raise soldiers for its army – this was later expanded to all men between 17 and 50. There were numerous exemptions, including for any slave-owner with more than 20 slaves, political officeholders, teachers, ministers and clerks, and men who worked in valuable trades. Poor white trash Southerners had little opportunity to avoid the draft, sometimes served as paid substitutes, and were looked down on as cannon fodder. Poor southerners said that it was a "rich man's war", but "a poor man's fight." While upper-class Southern "cavalier" officers were granted frequent furloughs to return home, this was not the case with the ordinary private soldier, which led to an extremely high rate of desertion among this group, who put their families' well-being above the cause of the Confederacy, and thought of themselves as "Conditional Confederates". Deserters harassed soldiers, raided farms and stole food, and sometimes banded together in settlements, such as the [[Free state of jones|"Free State of Jones"]] (formerly Jones County) in Mississippi. When found, deserters could be executed or humiliated by being put into chains.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=159, 163–65}}

Despite the war being fought to protect the right of the Southern elite to own slaves, the planter class was reluctant to give up their cash crop, cotton, to grow the corn and grain needed by the Confederate armies and the civilian population. As a result, food shortages, exacerbated by [[inflation]] and hoarding by the rich, caused the poor of the South to suffer greatly. This led to food riots of angry mobs of poor women who raided stores, warehouses, and depots looking for food. Both the male deserters and the female rioters put the lie to the myth of Confederate unity, and that the war was being fought for the rights of all white Southerners.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=165–66}}

Ideologically, the Confederacy claimed that the system of slavery in the South was superior to the class divisions of the North, because while the South devolved all its degrading labor onto what it saw as an inferior race, the black slaves, the North did so to its own "brothers in blood", the white working class. The leaders and intellectuals of the Confederacy called this "mudsill" democracy, while they lauded the superiority of the pure-blooded Southern slave-owning "cavaliers" over the sullied Anglo-Saxon upper class of the North.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=157–60}} Some of the military leaders of the North, especially Generals [[Ulysses S. Grant]] and [[William Tecumseh Sherman]], recognized that their fight was not only to liberate slaves, but also the poor white Southerners, so they took steps to exploit the class divisions between the "white trash" population and plantation owners. An Army chaplain wrote in a letter to his wife after the Union [[siege of Petersburg|siege of Petersburg, Virginia]] that the war would "knock off the shackles of millions of poor whites".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=157–60, 172}} After the Civil War and his presidency, in 1879 during his world tour, Grant said that he had hoped that the war would have freed the "poor white class" of the South from "a bondage in some respects even worse than slavery", but concluded "they have been as much under the thumb of the slave holder as before the war".<ref>[[Ronald C. White|White, Ronald C.]] (2016) ''American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant''. New York: Random House, pp.608-609 {{isbn|978-0-8129-8125-4}}</ref>