white southerners owned little W r i t i n g

please respond to this discussion post! And please be as specific and detailed as possible!

The degree to which I do I believe that the Civil War was “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” is that while the Southern slave states did have very wealthy planters, whose 1 % median wealth was three times higher than the richest 1 % of Northerners, there was no significant difference in wounds/deaths in regards to occupation, or wealth. (http://jur.byu.edu/?p=10403 (Links to an external site.)) However, this expression came into fruition for a reason and that was due to the fact that there was a law called the “Twenty-Slave” law that permitted one white man from a planation with either 20 slaves or more to evade serving during the war. This law was created in order to prevent a event similar to the Nat Turner revolt, but it was not a popular as the Confederate Congress has hoped it would be. This was due to the fact that most white Southerners owned little to no slaves therefore the law has no beneficial effect on them. There are also the total number of soldiers enlisted on each side with the Union totaling 2,128,948 and the Confederate with 1,082,119 soldiers, so even with wealthiest of men being three times richer than the wealthiest northern men, clearly there were more variables to consider other than pocketbooks. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (Fogel 1992, 15) who conducted a test on the theory of a “rich man’s war”, it found “significant increases in the probability of battle related death or injury as a function of age, number of battles fought, and term of enlistment” and that in terms of those recruited in the total population, every socioeconomic group was represented. This more-or-less debunks this expression since it does not take away the fact that the war caused immense hardship on the lower- class and it is widely acknowledged that the Civil War was catastrophic in terms of money and lives lost on both sides.