I think we CAN "get into their heads". And, I believe on a very practical and understandable level, they made decisions based on what they perceived as their personal and their family's safety, i.e. “the turning loose upon society, without the salutary restraints to which they are now accustomed, more than four millions of a very poor and ignorant population, to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” and "Who can describe the loathsomeness of such an intercourse;—the constrained intercourse between refinement reduced to poverty, and swaggering vulgarity suddenly elevated to a position which it is not prepared for?”

Then there is the opportunity to work as "dirt farmers" without the competition of an additional impoverished class, i.e. freed slaves and "He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an equality with himself and his family.” BTW, I don't agree with the the statement regarding "proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste", rather, I believe the poorest of whites, motivated to fight for the Confederacy, were attempting to protect their meager and scratched out existence.

I believe the poor and non-slaveholding whites who voluntarily fought for the Confederacy were driven by reasonable and understandable fears and concerns. There was real terror in the South, amongst both the rich and poor, of the "freeing" of blacks into communities where they would prey on or compete with the Southern poor and violate the homes and estates of the rich.

Jim