The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (31 page)
Read The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 Online
Authors: Emory M. Thomas
Tags: #History, #United States, #American Civil War, #Non-Fiction
The Confederacy’s military-industrial revolution was briefly successful and preeminently Southern. The relatively small group of men who managed the South’s short-lived economic transformation were hardly entrepreneurs whose acquisitive instincts fit the Yankee stereotype. On the contrary, the South’s war industrialists tended to be “traditional intellectuals”— schoolteachers, natural philosophers, and military scientists—as opposed to “organic intellectuals”—industrial managers, mechanical engineers, and the like.
67
And because the military maintained control of the industrialization process, the profit motive was less a factor. Joseph R. Anderson, for example, had been master of the Tredegar Iron Works since 1858, but before he had become an industrialist Anderson had been a West Point graduate, a civil engineer, and a state legislator. When the war broke out he volunteered for the artillery and rose to the rank of brigadier-general. A battle wound sustained during the Seven Days forced him to resign from the army and return to Tredegar. In 1865 he offered to give the works to the government in the hope that Tredegar might run more efficiently. Anderson’s actions were hardly those of a model industrial capitalist. Apparently he identified with the planter-aristocratic tradition to the detriment of his entrepreneurial self-interest.
68
Other examples deserve mention. Gorgas, for all his success at managing the Ordnance Bureau, failed at a postwar business venture in ironworks and devoted the last fourteen years of his life to higher education in the South.
69
George W. Rains, manager of ordnance operations in Augusta as a Confederate, also sought a postwar career in education. Rains taught chemistry at the Medical College of Georgia.
70
John M. Brooke, director of the naval gun works at Selma and inventor of the Brooke gun, and Matthew Fontaine Maury, who developed and produced torpedo mines and purchased naval equipment for the Confederacy, spent their postwar years at Virginia Military Institute.
71
Confederate Quartermaster General Lawton resumed law practice after the war and pursued Democratic politics.
72
These men, some of the most important and successful Confederate military industrialists, did not choose to put their wartime experiences to use during the “age of enterprise” after the war. Instead they chose more traditional Southern pursuits which had characteristically earned prestige and respectability in the ante-bellum South. It would seem from this that the war industry of the Confederate South not only sprang from a preindustrial economy but also received direction from preindustrial men.
73
The transformation worked upon the Southern political economy was a pragmatic response to the demands of industrial war. It evidenced an unconscious recognition that the Confederacy’s war effort had become total, encompassing just about every aspect of Southern national life—from the military command structure to the dearth of bread in cities and towns. In the last analysis, however, the Confederacy depended for its life upon victories on the battlefields, and as the campaigning season of 1863 began, prospects of those victories and the ultimate victory of independence appeared, to Confederates at least, bright indeed.
1
Walter Lord (ed.),
The Fremantle Diary: Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Coldstream Guards, on his Three Months in the Southern States
(New York, 1954), p. 164. Jefferson Davis went so far as to state in his first message to Congress in 1863, “we have every reason to expect that this will be the closing year of the War.” Davis to Congress, January 12, 1863, James D. Richardson (ed.),
Messages and Papers of the Confederacy
, 2 vols. (Nashville, Tenn. 1906), I, 277.
2
Kate Mason Rowland, Ms. Diary, Confederate Museum, Richmond, Va.,
Report of the Commissioner of Patents
(Richmond, Va., 1864).
3
For Randolph’s accomplishments see Archer Jones, “Some Aspects of George W. Randolph’s Service as Confederate Secretary of War,”
Journal of Southern History,
XXVI (1960), 299–314.
4
The Randolph-Davis correspondence is in Dunbar Rowland
(ed.), Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches,
10 vols. (Jackson, Miss., 1923), V, 371–372, 374–375. On the status of cabinet secretaries and clerks, the Richmond
Examiner
(November 17, 1862) commented, “Indeed, if cabinet ministers are to continue mere automations, it matters little by what names those machines are called.” Among historians, Jones (“Randolph’s Service”) blames Davis for the incident; Rembert W. Patrick
(Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet
[Baton Rouge, La., 1944], pp. 127-131) blames Randolph.
5
Patrick,
Davis and His Cabinet,
pp. 131-149; Roy W. Curry, “James A. Seddon, a Southern Prototype,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
LXIII (1955), 123-150.
6
Patrick,
Davis and His Cabinet,
pp. 132–135; For assessments of Davis, Johnston and theater command, see Frank E. Vandiver,
Rebel Brass: The Confederate Command System
(Baton Rouge, La., 1956), pp. 34–37; Archer Jones,
Confederate Strategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg
(Baton Rouge, La., 1961), pp. 96–110; and Thomas L. Connelly,
Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1868 (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), pp. 30–38.
7
Davis to Lee, December 8, 1862, Rowland (ed
.), Jefferson Davis,
IV, 384.
8
For Davis’ travels see Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis,
3 vols. (New York, 1955–1959, 1964), II, 343–356; and Jones,
Confederate Strategy,
111–122.
9
Richmond
Enquirer,
January 7, 1863, cited in Rowland (ed.),
Jefferson Davis,
V, 390–395.
10
On Davis and public morale see Bell I. Wiley
Road to Appomattox,
(New York, 1968), pp. 28–31, 105–108.
11
Connelly,
Autumn of Glory
, 44–68; Grady McWhiney
Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat: Field Command
(New York, 1969), pp. 349–373.
12
Davis, on the night he returned to Richmond, referred to the “victory” at Murfreesboro (Rowland [ed.],
Jefferson Davis,
V, 392). The President’s instructions to Johnston are contained in letters of January 22 and February 19 (Rowland [ed.],
Jefferson Davis,
V, 420–421, 433–435). Johnston’s account is in his
Narrative of Military Operations,
ed. by Frank E. Vandiver (Bloomington, Ind., 1959), pp. 161–162. To Texas Senator Louis T. Wigfall, Johnston wrote on March 8, 1863: “I am told that the President and Secretary of War think that they have given me the highest military position in the Confederacy, that I have full military power in all this western country…. If they so regard it, ought not our highest military officer to occupy it? It seems so to me that principle would bring Lee here. I might then, with great propriety be replaced in my old Command.” (Louis T. Wigfall Papers, University of Texas Archives, Austin) See also Gilbert E. Govan and James W. Livingood,
A Different Valor: The Story of General Joseph E. Johnston, C S A.
(New York, 1956), pp. 166–174.
13
Wilfred Buck Yearns,
The Confederate Congress
(Athens, Ga., 1960), pp. 155, 37–38, 228; “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” 1 Congress, II Session,
Southern Historical Society Papers,
XLVI, 9, 110; William M. Robinson, Jr.,
Justice in Grey: A History of the Judicial System of the Confederate States of America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1941).
14
See Alvy L. King,
Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater
(Baton Rouge, La., 1970), pp. 157–160, 166–168.
15
See Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 73–78. The Congress too often led in the degree of rancor as well. The Supreme Court bill sparked a brawl in which Georgia Senator Benjamin H. Hill hurled an inkwell at Alabama Senator William Loundes Yancey (King,
Wigfall,
p. 150).
16
James M. Matthews (ed.),
The Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America … Third Session … First Congress
(Richmond, Va., 1863), pp. 102–104, 127–128.
17
Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer,
The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influences of Member Chracteristics on legislative Voting Behavior, 1861–1865
(Nashville, Tenn., 1972), pp. 139–144; Yearns,
Confederate Congress
, pp. 116-120. See also Harrison A. Trexler, “The Opposition of Planters to the Employment of Slaves as Laborers by the Confederacy,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
XXVII (1940), 211-224.
18
Memminger to Thomas S. Bocock, January 10, 1863, in Raphael P. Thian (comp.),
Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury of the Confederate States of America, 1861-1865,
Appendix III (Washington, D.C., 1878), 99-115.
19
Richard Cecil Todd,
Confederate Finance
(Athens, Ga., 1954), p. 198.
20
See
ibid.,
pp. 110-111
21
Matthews (ed.),
Statutes at Large … Third Session … First Congress,
pp. 97-98, 99-102.
22
Todd,
Confederate Finance,
pp. III, 119-120, 198. From hindsight Charles W. Ramsdell once stated, “If I were asked what was the greatest single weakness of the Confederacy, I should say, without much hesitation, that it was in this matter of finances. The resort to irredeemable paper money and to excessive issues of such currency was fatal, for it weakened not only the purchasing power of the government but also destroyed economic security among the people.” (
Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy
[Baton Rouge, La., 1944], p. 85).
23
Matthews (ed.), Statutes at Large … Third Session … First Congress, pp. 115–126. Todd, Confederate Finance, pp. 136–141.
24
Todd,
Confederate Finance,
pp. 141–148. Todd estimates the value of taxes in kind collected from 1863 to 1865 at $62 million (p. 148). See also James L. Nichols, “The Tax-in-Kind in the Department of the Trans-Mississippi,”
Civil War History,
V (1959), 382–389. On the larger issues of Confederate fiscal policy see three articles by. Eugene M. Lerner, “Monetary and Fiscal Programs of the Confederate Government,
“ Journal of Political Economy,
LXII (1954), 506–522; “Money, Prices, and Wages in the Confederacy,
“Journal of Political Economy,
LXIII (1955), 20–40; and “Inflation in the Confederacy, 1861–1865,” in Milton Friedman (ed.),
Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money
(Chicago, 1956), pp. 163–178.
25
The strength totals for December 31, 1862, and December 31, 1863, are in
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,
70 vols, in 127 (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), ser. IV, II, 278, 380.
26
Among the numerous specific accounts of wartime privation in the Confederacy, two general works are basic: Ramsdell,
Behind the Lines;
and Mary Elizabeth Massey,
Ersatz in the Confederacy
(Columbia, S.C., 1952).
27
See Mary Elizabeth Massey,
Refugee Life in the Confederacy
(Baton Rouge, La., 1964)
28
In his message to Congress on January 12, 1863, President Davis resorted to hyperbolic statement to express a desperate hope: “Our fields, no longer whitened by cotton that cannot be exported, are devoted to the production of cereals and the growth of stock formerly purchased with the proceeds of cotton.” Davis to Congress, January 12, 1863, Rowland (ed.),
Jefferson Davis,
V, 415. For the economic legislation of state legislatures see May Spencer Ringold,
The Role of State Legislatures in the Confederacy
(Athens, Ga., 1966), pp. 40–45.
29
This factor, so obvious as to be often overlooked, is pointed out in Frank E. Vandiver,
Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy
(New York, 1970), pp. 238–239. The standard work on agriculture is Paul W. Gates,
Agriculture and the Civil War
(New York, 1956).
30
See Ramsdell,
Behind the Lines,
pp. 1–41.
31
On the conditions of Southern railroads the classic work is Robert C. Black III,
The Railroads of the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952). For government regulation see Richard D. Goff,
Confederate Supply
(Durham, N.C., 1969), pp. 104–111.
32
The Richmond
Dispatch
(January 29, 1863) estimated that a family food bill had increased during two years of war from $6.65 to $68.25.
33
Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital
(Austin, Tex., 1971), pp. 111–114, 117–119.
34
Emory M. Thomas, “The Richmond Bread Riot of 1863,”
Virginia Cavalcade
(Summer 1968), 41–42; and
Confederate Richmond,
p. 119.
35
Mrs. Roger A. Pryor,
Reminiscences of Peace and War
(New York, 1904), pp. 251–259; F. N. Boney,
John Letcher of Virginia: The Story of Virginia’s Civil War Governor
(University, Ala., 1966), pp. 189–190.
36
Thomas, “Bread Riot,” 44; Thomas,
Confederate Richmond,
pp. 119–120.
37
Varina Howell Davis,
Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife
, 2 vols. (New York, 1890), II, 373–376.
38
bid.
39
Richmond
Dispatch
April 3, 1863; John Withers to W. S. Morris, April 2, 1863, and John Withers to the Richmond Press, April 2, 1863,
O R.,
ser. I, XVIII, 958; S. Bassett French to James A. Seddon, April 10, 1863,
O.R.,
ser. I, XVIII, 977–978; Judith W. McGuire,
Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War
(New York, 1867), p. 48.
40
Mobil
e Register and Advertiser,
March 25, 1863. Frank Moore,
The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events,
11 vols. supp. (New York, 1861, 1868), VII, 48; VIII, 67. E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America, 1861–1865
(Baton Rouge, La., 1950), pp. 423–424.
41
Richmond,
Whig,
April 4, 1863.
42
Louis H. Manarin (ed.),
Richmond at War: The Minutes of the City Council, 1861–1865
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), April 2 and 9, 1863; Mobile
Register and Advertiser,
September 5 and 23, 1863. See also Emory M. Thomas, “Welfare in Wartime Richmond, 1861–1865,”
Virginia Cavalcade
(Summer 1972), 22–29; and William F. Zornow, “Aid for the Indigent Families of Soldiers in Virginia, 1861–1865,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
LXVI (1958), 454–458.
43
Thomas,
Confederate Richmond,
pp. 167–169, 145–147.
44
Goff,
Confederate Supply
, pp. 54–55; Frank E. Vandiver,
Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance
(Austin, Tex., 1952), pp. 159, 179.
45
Seddon to Davis, January 3, 1863;
O R.,
ser. IV, II, 291–292. Davis underscord his war secretary’s sentiments in his message to Congress: “Dependence on foreign supplies is to be deplored, and should, as far as practicable, be obviated by development and employment of internal resources.” Davis to Congress, January 12, 1863, Rowland (ed
.), Jefferson Davis,
V, 413.
46
See Goff,
Confederate Supply
, pp. 54–55; Thomas,
Revolutionary Experience
, pp. 79–80.
47
In a report to War Secretary Seddon in January 1863, Ordnance Bureau Chief Gorgas revealed that public and private armories would soon be producing equal numbers of small arms per month. Gorgas to Seddon,
O.R.,
ser. IV, II, 299. Except for Tredegar, public installations naturally led in production of heavier weapons and specialized items.
48
See Raimondo Luraghi, “The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society,”
Civil War History,
XVIII (1972), 230–550.
49
John Hardy,
“Selma: Her Institutions and Her Men”
(Selma, Ala., 1879), pp. 46–48, in Malcolm C. McMillan,
The Alabama Confederate Reader
(University, Ala., 1963), pp. 288–291.
50
For case studies in state versus central government control of these installations and their products, see Vandiver,
Gorgas,
pp. 66–73.
51
Ibid.,
pp. 105–154.
52
William N. Still, Jr.,
Confederate Shipbuilding
(Athens, Ga” 1969), pp. 9–16; Vandiver,
Gorgas,
p. 170; Tom Henderson Wells,
The Confederate Navy: A Study in Organization
(University, Ala., 1971), pp. 53–54.
53
Goff,
Confederate Supply
, pp. 65–76.
54
Jackson Daily Southern Crisis, March 3, 1863, cited in John K. Bettersworth,
