This is a good question, and one that historians are still grappling with. How is it that small farmers and poor whites in the Civil War south willingly put their lives on the line to protect slavery, an institution that they seemingly did not benefit from? How is it that they largely supported secession, a move made to protect slavery, when so many of them never held a single person in bondage?

There’s that classic quote from a confederate soldier — cited by everyone from pop historian (and mild southern apologist) Shelby Foote to venerable and renowned Civil War historian James McPherson — who, when asked by a Union man why he was fighting, responded “because y’all are here.” But that doesn’t really illuminate things much to a person who understands that the Union was “here” to bring back into the fold the states that had seceded to protect slavery (McPherson brings this up in his masterful Battle Cry of Freedom).

The reality is that a large portion of white southerners, including those of humble means, felt an investment in the South’s way of life and institutions, built as they were on a foundation of human bondage. They were not, for the most part, reluctantly defending a society from which they felt alienated, motivated only by the threat of invasion. They voted for secession and fought in the confederacy because they believed it served their interests to do so. But why? Only a third of Southern whites held any people in bondage at all, and a majority of those less than 10. What was going on?

Historians have differing views on this question. Let’s take a look at two books that sought to answer the question of why humble South Carolin whites supported secession and the confederacy: Masters of Small Worlds by Stephanie McCurry, and The Origins of Southern Radicalism by Lacy Ford.

Ford argues that South Carolina whites, despite the massive class gulfs that separated them, were united in a sort of Herrenvolk Democracy, a loosely democratic society bound together by a shared small-r republican heritage and racial identity. The notion that the interest of the large slaveholding planters was different from that of the small farmers and poor whites wouldn’t have made sense to them because “the dominant ideal in [South Carolinian] society was not the planter ideal or the slaveholding ideal, but the old 'country-republican' ideal of personal independence, given peculiar fortification by the use of black slaves as a mud-sill class. Yeoman rose with planter to defend this ideal because it was not merely the planter's ideal, but his as well" (372). A small farmer might have been poor compared to his mighty slaveholding planter neighbor, but he was an active participant in political life, even in a political culture as aristocratic as antebellum South Carolina. His identity as a white man gave him certain privileges— particularly “independence,” the cherished ability to work for ones self — and a sense of shared interest with the fabulously wealthy slaveholders who effectively ruled his state. This status, this sense of shared interest, depended on a permanent underclass (what pro slavery fanatic James Henry Hammond called a “mudsill class” in a speech in the US Senate) that ensured, by its existence and labor, that all white men were “equal” if only nominally. The end of slavery offered only disadvantages in the minds of white yeoman, but its preservation ensured their status as men with votes, voices, and equality even with the aristocratic planters whose wealth so thoroughly dwarfed theirs.

McCurry’s analysis deals much more heavily with gender. A historian I spoke to recently sort of scoffed at her thesis and called it “edgy” with big scare quotes, but I think there’s a whole lot of worthwhile stuff in her research even if you don’t agree with the conclusion. I’m afraid I don’t have my copy of Masters of Small Worlds on hand but I can grab some specific quotes for you later if you’re interested. She argues that the social relations in Southern households were built on the domination of “dependents” (women, children, enslaved people) by white men, who however small their property holdings could still claim their own limited form of mastery. It was this mastery, McCurry argues, particularly over women that gave white Southern men a sense of political solidarity. Far more than a shared political tradition of republicanism, it was the feeling that a threat to slavery, the bedrock dependency of the south, was a threat to yeomen’s domination of their wives and children that prompted them to vote for secession, to volunteer for gruesome death in defense of slavery.

What is undeniable, whoever’s analysis you agree with, is that the majority of Southern whites, whether or not they enslaved anyone directly, felt that slavery did benefit them, that it was worth defending. “Because y’all are here” is no complete answer for why a farmer with 40 acres of land willingly rushed into Union rifle fire, bellowing his rebel yell.