These young men were without medieval visions. They were going out to fight because they had heard that the Yankees were coming down to tromp their fields and tear up their barns. They were the plain people, the freest people in the South, whom the cotton snobs referred to as the "pore white trash." And they were going away, leaving their steadings to their women-folks, to defend their particular way of life, although they would not have spoken of it in such flat terms. These men made up the largest body of people in the South. There were some four millions of them living in the hill country, on the borders of the plantations, and in the newly settled states like Arkansas and Missouri. The only difference between them and the cotton snobs was that of a generation or two, and the difference that the rich snobs were ashamed of their pioneer ancestry and they were not. Davis and his advisers made one great mistake that overshadowed all the othererrors of policy: they chose to rest the foundations of the Confederacy on cotton and not on the plain people.
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forest and his Critter Company
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