He says, at p. 239 of his "Military Studies": "How was it under very
similar circumstances with the South Africans? On Confederate showing,
they are a braver, a more patriotic, and self-sacrificing race!" He
goes on to show that the Boers had in actual service more than 1 in 4 of
their population; while, if it be true that there were only 600,000
Southern soldiers in the Confederacy, there was only 1 out of 12 at the
front. This, he thinks, would be discreditable to Confederate manhood;
he cannot believe that the Southerners of that period were a race of
such "mean-spirited, stay-at-home skulkers."
In answer to this I shall undertake to show in the following pages that
Mr. Adams' figures are very wide of the mark, so that the proportion of
fighting men in the Confederate army was enormously greater than he
admits in this passage, not less than 1 in 6 of the population. But the
fact is that the conditions in the cases of the Boers and the
Confederates were about as dissimilar as they well could be. In the one
case there was a small, compact population, for the most part half
civilized, and occupying a territory less than a quarter of that
included in the Confederacy. They had no highly differentiated
civilization to support. In the Confederacy there were eleven States,
each of which was organized as a distinct government and each of which
required a large number of men to fill its offices and to maintain its
civilization. Large numbers of men were also needed, as I shall show,
for purposes of manufacture, and to supply the army with food and
munitions of war. To compare a small community of 323,000 (Boers) with a
nation of 5,000,000 whites, besides 3,000,000 blacks; a perfectly
homogeneous people with one containing divers elements; a semi-civilized
people with one whose civilization was highly differentiated; a people
accustomed to live on the veldt in the saddle, with one dwelling largely
in towns and cities and engaged in diversified occupations--is to make a
comparison illusory in a high degree.
In confirmation of the preceding statement, I add the following passage
from a letter addressed to me by my friend, Colonel Archer Anderson, of
Richmond, Va.:
"My argument was that the comparison of the Confederates with the Boers
was not fair, the Boers being at a primitive stage of civilization--a
pastoral and agricultural people with no arts, no culture, and no wants
beyond a bare subsistence. Such a people can call out a large proportion
of its population, and in their case there was the particular advantage
that through their relations to the great mining region operated by
foreigners, they had accumulated a vast treasure and a great stock of
European munitions of war, and for a long period were able to draw what
they further needed from Europe through their railway communication
with the Portuguese port on Delagoa Bay. You have shown that the
Confederates on the other hand were highly civilized, with national,
State, and municipal institutions to maintain, and, being cut off from
supplies from the outside world, obliged to extemporize varied
manufactures of powder, cannon, small arms, clothing, shoes, hats, and
every sort of material needed by their railway systems and their people
at home as well as the armies in the field. The maintenance of civil
government, and such a task of production over and above the yield of
agriculture, required the abstraction of a vast number of men from
military service."
It is instructive, in considering this argument to recall what a great
historian tells us of the Helvetii, in their contest with Cæsar. He
says,
"The whole population of the assembled tribes amounted to 368,000 souls,
including women and children: the number that bore arms was 92,000."
(Merivale, History of the Romans, vol. I, pp. 242-3.)
Here is a real historical parallel between two peoples at a not
dissimilar stage of civilization. Their numbers were very nearly the
same: in one case 323,000, in the other 368,000; and their fighting
strength was about in the same proportion,--one in four of the
population; 89,000 in one case, 92,000 in the other.
It may be added that if Mr. Adams is right in estimating the Southern
armies at nearly 1,300,000 men, then we face the remarkable fact that a
white population of a little more than 5,000,000 people sent to the
front almost as many men as a population of over 22,000,000. For Colonel
Livermore tells us there were 2,234,000 individuals in the United States
army; but of these, 186,017 were negroes, 494,000 foreigners, and 86,000
from the Southern states; so that the North only sent into the field
1,467,083.
Judged then by the numerical standard, the patriotism and devotion of
the Southern people, according to this showing, was to that of the North
as four to one. And this takes no account of the many thousands who
served the South as mechanics, laborers, etc.