I am strongly recommending this Twitter thread, which is first, about how much capital you needed to have in today’s money to own a slave in 1860, and then about Confederate military service and whether lower-class whites supported it. The writer is a historian of labor and Reconstruction.

5. And you wanna know how much a slave cost in 1860 in today’s (2011) terms?

An astounding $130,000: https://t.co/FPC57eg2Mw pic.twitter.com/ZPoJdakqDE

— Keri Leigh Merritt (@KeriLeighMerrit) August 17, 2018

I’d note that in my family, one of my g-g-g-g-grandmothers and her children, including my early teenage g-g-g-grandfather, were burned out of their home in Arkansas in the winter of 1862-63 for supporting the Union. They walked with only the clothes on their back to Fort Smith, where the two oldest boys signed up for the US Army. One of the boys died of some disease (I’m thinking it was diptheria) before he shipped out. My g-g-g-grandfather didn’t hang around much longer than that, running away from the family before the end of the war and ending up in Texas. But yeah, they would have been poor white people who did not have slaves and had no chance of ever owning slaves.