3 - “God Only Knows What Will Result from This War”: Wealth Patterns among White Farmers, 1860–1880

Summary

“The political affairs of the nation disturb my mind”, West Tennessee planter John Alexander Taylor confided to his diary in mid-February 1861. Like many large slaveholders, Taylor had mixed feelings during the secession winter of 1860–61. Despite his ambivalence, or possibly because of it, Taylor ultimately sided with the vast majority of his Haywood County neighbors in the state referendum in June, casting his ballot for separation from the Union and representation in the Confederate Congress. He did so, however, with neither animosity nor secessionist zeal. “Better to make our own laws”, he noted in simple justification of his act, “than to be always quarreling”.

Taylor's terse diary entries do not reveal the cause of his initial hesitation. Perhaps, as was true of numerous southern moderates – the prescient ones – he recognized secession's inherent threat to the stability and security of his world. Without question, there was much to be lost should the gamble fail: The Taylors were one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the county. Four days away from his forty-third birthday when Tennessee left the union, John Taylor had lived in Haywood since the age of six, when in 1825 his father, Richard, had moved his wife and three sons from Mecklenburg County, Virginia, to the cotton frontier. An extensive migration of kinfolk followed, and by 1832 his grandfather and four uncles had also built homes in the same neighborhood east of Brownsville.