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The average age of enlisted personnel is 27. If you assume their parents had them at age 30 on average, that would mean that their grandparents were born around 1938, which is probably a little early. 1938 was 73 years after the Civil War ended. Their grandparents would have grown up around people who remembered the Civil War in the same sense that someone born in 1991 grew up around people who remember World War I; I was born earlier than that and I don't recall a single instance of anyone talking about memories of WWI. The oldest people in my life, who were well into their 80s by the time someone born in 1991 would have been old enough to remember anything about world events, were themselves not old enough to have any meaningful memories of WWI. The last Civil War veterans reunion in 1938 at Gettysburg attracted 2,000 people. The average age was 94. Coincidentally, my own grandmother and great aunt's grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and I only know this because of genealogical research I did when I was in my 30s. Keep in mind that they were born in 1913 and 1911, respectively, and he died in 1920 at age 80, so that gives you an arbitrary example of when a fairly typical Civil War veteran would have passed, and how old one would have to be to have any memory of them being alive.
Anyway, I can't find good numbers on this, but a report from Brown University on the state of origin of people serving in post-9/11 wars at least points in the right direction. Assuming their work is representative, while the fact that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers is true, your thesis doesn't hold when you look at things at a more granular level. Most of this is driven by three states—Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—that have vastly disproportionate numbers. But Florida gets an asterisk since its population didn't start taking off until well after the Civil War and relatively few of its present-day residents are culturally Southern, with only 43% born in the former Confederacy. Alabama is in the top-ten per capita, but Mississippi isn't; it's close to the national average, as are Arkansas and Louisiana, which has the highest native-born population of any Southern state at 78% born in-state.
Even if the effect does exist to the extent, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect when applied to the military as a whole. The top four states in terms of total enlistees mirror the top four states in population: California, Texas, Florida, and New York, in that order. Nine of the top ten are the same; Pennsylvania takes the biggest drop, from 5 to 9. Michigan, tenth in total population, is replaced by Virginia which is twelfth in total population. South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii punch above their weight when it come to producing enlistees, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't move them much on the list. South Carolina moves from 23 to 17. Alaska moves from 49 to 44. Hawaii moves from 41 to 39. The correlation between population and number of enlisted is 0.98. You can criticize the numbers because they are only a snapshot of a certain subset of enlisted men taken at a certain time and not representative of say, everyone who has served in the past 20 years, but I would expect variation due to sample size to smooth out with better data, not go in the opposite direction.
This is fair enough! You're correct that World War One is very far from us today, and World War Two is much further than the time I was a boy. But I think that cultural habits persist long after people are dead. The average age in the US is 39, and you can very quickly find Southerners much younger than 39 expressing sympathy for the Confederacy, less out of any neoconfederate ideological alignment and more out of nativist sentiment. One gentleman I spoke with once told me that he would have fought for Virginia even though he thought it was in the wrong. And so given those attitudes I am liable to give credence to the idea that other cultural attitudes might have hung on for just as long.
This is a respectable argument, but I don't think your more granular analysis tells the whole story.
How would we measure a cultural angle? It's hard, but I don't think impossible to probe the idea. We could look at whose tactics and strategy was emulated and studied by the US military. (Realistically, I think the answer here is disproportionately German.)
Or we can look at current people in elite positions. For instance, we can look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff right now. But illustrating my point above, some of it's fuzzy. For one thing, Lunday is from South Carolina, but he's from the Coast Guard and so merely an attendee of the JCOS. I'm not sure where Wilsbach was born, but it seems likely he grew up in Florida. And Smith is from Plano (Texas), but was born in Missouri. So generously, 4/9 JSOC members are Southern - SOUTHERN BIAS CONFIRMED! - but conservatively, only 1/8 (Caudle, from North Carolina).
Or, we can look at historical commanders of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command). JSOC has had 18 commanders, and we should expect those commanders to have a lot of influence in the modern US war machine. By my count, 5 of those came from the former Confederacy (including 2 from Texas, 3 if you count McRaven who moved there in elementary school). If JSOC perfectly represented current population trends, we would likely expect it to have 6 from the South, but on the flip side, 5 probably is a slight overrepresentation of the population in 1980 (when JSOC was stood up, and the South was closer to 25% of the population). Things get funny if you look at SOCOM: 6/14! Nearly half! Wild overrepresentation! But this is only if I exclude Raymond Smith since he was only in office for 41 days as acting commander - which I think is fair enough - and INCLUDE Holland, born in WEST VIRGINIA. I'll leave it to you to decide if that counts as a former Confederate state.
Or you can look at the Blue Angels, if we assume that they are likely to represent the best America has to offer - the South puts up 2/6 pilots (about right statistically), 7/17 officers on the team, (a bit more than we would expect, particularly if you drop the two not born in US states; one is Puerto Rican and one is from the Philippines); and, finally, 51 or 52/134 enlisted, depending on if you count West Virginia, and if you remove people born in Puerto Rico or otherwise overseas you lose about 10 people - that number is about what we would expect based on current demographics.
I don't think these are slam-dunk arguments - they suggest to me that the South might be slightly overrepresented in elite US military institutions if we control for birth year, but while I don't particularly find them hugely persuasive I at least find them to be entertainingly granular. The military is an institution, and when you're looking at how a culture impacts the military, analyzing it like intellectual history is, I think, a valid approach.
I was going off of the good old USA.gov (that's also why I specified enlisted; officers matter too, of course): https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/
It (in turn) is pulling yearly enlistment data from 2022. This makes it a good snapshot of the current sorts of people who are entering the military (but not necessarily of who is in the military as a whole). So this might be better at grabbing trends, while your dataset might be better at grabbing the long view.
Florida, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi are above the national average (for enlistments ages 18 - 24, anyway) in that order, although Mississippi and Louisiana are not notably so. Arkansas and West Virginia are below.
California is above, but less than even Mississippi and Louisiana - practically average. New York is notably below. Other items of note:
Top ten US states by enlistment per capita, by my eyeball:
So the former CSA takes 6/10.
Now, to be clear, I think this is an oversimplification if you present this entirely as an artifact of Southern martial culture - for instance, I am sure that a lot of the recruits in Texas are Hispanics with no particular direct attachment to the martial culture of the antebellum South (although I do believe culture transmits horizontally as well as vertically). As [your least favorite politician] said (probably), the world is a complicated place, with a lot of things going on. But I do think that there's something going on, rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the peoples there, and at least some of that is causally downstream of the Civil War, and much of it is downstream of events far beyond it in time.
Just as a preliminary matter, I got that from the US Census Bureau's State of residence by Place of Birth data for 2019. The charts just list each state's total population and the number of people born in each state or territory and the number of foreign-born. This means that I had to tally up the numbers from each CSA state to get an estimate. I only did this with Florida, as it seemed particularly likely to have a lot of people from outside the South. I also checked the number of people born in-state for each CSA state since this was much less tedious, and I got some interesting statistics. Florida by far had the highest proportion of "foreigners" as only 36% of residents were born there. Virginia was next at 49%. Texas was higher than I would have thought at 59%. The rest are basically desirability rankings, as most fell in the 55%–60% range before Alabama, at 69%, Mississippi, at 71%, and Louisiana, at a whopping 78%. I would note that none of these states, with the possible exception of Virginia, have the confounder of having large suburbs of a major city that's located in another state, as I'd imagine a large number of lifelong Northern Kentucky residents were born in Cincinnati.
To get back to the crux of your argument, to ground ourselves, the original contention was that the statistical overrepresentation of Southern states had to do with a "hard times make strong men" type trauma that has to do with humiliating defeat in the Civil War and the generational memory of it. To the extent that the Confederacy remains prominent in the South, it is more as a cultural and contemporary political symbol that has little to do with the actual Confederate States of America. It isn't comparable to the Quebec or Scottish independence movements. The one group that has any prominence, the League of the South, is basically just a right-wing extremist group. It's similar to how Texas secession only seems to come up when a Democrat is in office, except with even less public profile. It's safe to say that most people waving Confederate flags wouldn't vote to leave the US if there were any realistic chance of it happening.
With that out of the way, it's certainly and odd argument to make that if that were the case, and there were lingering resentment among Southerners, that they would respond by disproportionately participating in the military of the country that conquered them, unless your argument were that they intended to use their positions to launch some kind of military coup, which I think we both can agree is ridiculous. If you want to make an argument that the overrepresentation is due to cultural factors I can get on board with that argument, I just don't think it has anything to do with the Confederacy, and I don't think modern Confederate symbology has anything to do with it either.
Getting back to the data, I think you can construct any number of just so stories to support the thesis of "hard times breed hard men" or whatever. As you said earlier, blacks are overrepresented as well, and they had it bad, and Native Americans are overrrepresented even more, and we know they had it bad, and Hawaii is the most overrepresented state, and, well, look at the island's history, etc. The problem with this argument is that that there are a lot of underrepresented groups that it doesn't seem to apply to. Since you provided better data, I was able to take a gander at it, and I made some interesting discoveries. First among them is that the 2015 report is much more readable in that it appears it was written as though someone actually might read it and had several insights. The first is that while blacks are overrepresented in the armed forces relative to their share of the national population, blacks from underrepresented states are underrepresented in terms of their share of the black population as a whole. For example, New York as the third-highest share of black 18–24 year-olds, with 6.6% of the national total. Yet it only produces 66% of the black recruits one would expect based on its population. The story is the same in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Florida produces 147% of the expected black recruits.
Similarly, I ran my own correlation analysis where I compared per-capita recruitment numbers with state median household incomes, and it was less than -0.2. The 2015 broke recruitment down based on median household income of the recruits' home census tracts, and found that recruitment levels were disproportionately low for those from the lowest quintile areas. Each of the next three quintiles was overrepresented, with the numbers increasing as you went up. The highest quintile was the most underrepresented. In other words, people from the second-highest quintile were most likely to enlist, and military enlistment is generally a middle-class phenomenon.
As far as Hawaii is concerned, another interesting finding is that its ascension to the top of the list appears to be relatively recent; in 2015 it ranked 5th in representation ratio with 1.15, still respectable but not ridiculous. Along similar lines, the report contains regional data going back to 1973, and while the South always accounted for the highest share of recruits, the gross percentage increased nearly 15 points between 1976 and 2015, though this may reflect increased migration to the Sun Belt (the West also increased, though not as dramatically, while the Northeast and Midwest declined). Also related to the Hawaii thing was to compare per-capita representation to proportion of the state's population consisting of active-duty military, on the theory that since military service is often generational states with more military bases have more military brats who enlist when they're old enough. I couldn't confirm this, as the correlation was only 0.45. There were also some really wild differentials. North Dakota is near the top of the list for most active service military per capita, yet its recruitment numbers were at or near the bottom for all the years I looked at. Meanwhile, Alabama has relatively few active duty military stationed there but produces a disproportionately high number of recruits. The upshot is that I wouldn't put too much stock in this theory. Just so you know, Hawaii does rank highest in terms of active duty military with an index number (per capita multiplied to eliminate leading zeros) of a whopping 3.9. The state with the biggest dearth of military is Iowa, with an index number of 0.0076. The average is 0.49, and the state closest to the average is Nevada. The median, though, is Rhode Island, with an index of 0.35.
Finally, this isn't really related to any of my arguments, but since you brought up elite military I thought I'd bring it up. The 2015 report also looked at states by percentage of quality recruits. And the results were more or less that the states with the highest quality recruits were the ones with significant underrepresentation. They define High Quality Ascessions as ones with a Tier 1 education who score in at least the 50th percentile of aptitude exams. The top six states for quality are Montana, Idaho (the only state in the top half), Vermont, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Utah. The bottom six are Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia. If this were culturally driven I would expect the opposite to be true, as recruiters in states where it's harder to recruit would presumably have incentive to lower their standards to meet numbers, while recruiters in states with a lot of applicants would have the pick of the litter. I can think of two explanations for this discrepancy. The first is that it isn't so much that individuals are more likely to enlist in certain areas as it is that the practices of recruiters are different, and recruiters in the South simply have lower standards, leading to higher numbers. I don't think that this is particularly likely, but it's interesting to think that the differences may have more to do with the culture of recruiters than the culture of the local population.
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Hawaii and Nevada are also going to be confounded by having a large active military population. I recall hearing somewhere that Joint Base Hickam would be the second most populous city in Hawaii (behind Honolulu) if it were a city.
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