THE CONFEDERATE STATES
The nation, shaken by those four never to be forgotten years of awful
war, could not return to the thoughts or to the life that had gone
before them. An old age had passed away, a new age had come in, with
the sweep of that stupendous storm. Everything was touched with the
change it had wrought. Nothing could be again as it had been. The
national consciousness, disguised, uncertain, latent until that day of
sudden rally and call to arms, had been cried wide awake by the voices
of battle, and acted like a passion now in the conduct of affairs. All
things took their hue and subtle transformation from it: the motives of
politics, the whole theory of political action, the character of the
government, the sentiment of duty, the very ethics of private conduct
were altered as no half century of slow peace could have altered them.
[Illustration: THE WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY, RICHMOND]
The sheer cost, the unspeakable sacrifices of the desperate struggle,
made ineffaceable record of themselves in the thoughts and purposes of
people and politicians alike. What had been spent to fight the fight
out passed calculation. It had cost the country more than seven hundred
men for every day of all the four long years of campaign and battle:
four hundred killed or mortally wounded on the field, the rest dead of
disease, exposure, accident, or the slow pains of imprisonment. The
federal government had spent thirty-four hundred million dollars upon the
war,—nearly two and a half millions for every day it had lasted; and less
than eight hundred millions of that vast sum had come into its coffers
from the taxes. More than twenty-six hundred millions had been added to
the national debt. The Confederacy had piled up a debt, upon its part, of
nearly fourteen hundred millions, and had spent, besides, no man could
say how much; for the scant yield of the taxes had been supplemented by
direct requisitions on the farmers for the food supplies of the armies;
States had undertaken, so far as they could, to support their own
volunteers in the field; private purses had been opened to pay for the
equipment of sons and brothers sent to the front,—every public and every
private source had been drained.
In the North four men out of every nine of the military population had
been enlisted for a service of three years in the field: in all 1,700,000
out of a military population of 4,600,000. Of these three hundred and
sixty thousand had lost their lives; one hundred and ten thousand by
the actual casualties of the field. But the sacrifices of the South had
been greater yet,—immeasurably greater. The North had spent out of its
abundance; the South had spent all that it had, and was stripped naked
of its resources. While the war lasted it had been stripped naked also
of its men. Nine men out of every ten of fighting age had gone from
country-sides and towns to the field, reckoning only those who enlisted
for at least three out of the four years of the struggle. Before the
war ended mere half grown boys and men grown old were included in the
muster. The total military population of the South was but 1,065,000.
Nine hundred thousand of these she drew into her armies for at least
three years of service. The lives of close upon three hundred thousand
she gave as her sacrifice of blood,—more than one-fourth of all fit for
the field. Ninety-four thousand lost their lives in actual battle. South
Carolina lost one-fourth of her military population by the casualties
of the field. The armed hosts and power of the North increased as the
strength and resources of the South diminished. In 1861 the South had had
98,000 men in the field, the North 187,000; in March, 1865, though their
levies had risen at the culmination of their effort but a little more
than a year before to 471,000, the southern commanders had only 175,000
men to surrender to armies which aggregated 980,000 against them. The
muster of federal forces increased even while the last scenes of war were
being enacted and its tasks drawn to a close. When the surrender of the
southern armies came they had grown by more than ten thousand, and there
were 1,000,516 men awaiting their final discharge.
They were rapidly disbanded: sent home, when once peace was assured, at
the rate of three hundred thousand a month. Only fifty thousand men were
retained as a standing force. They turned to the duties of peace again
and were absorbed into the mass of men whence they had come as quietly as
if even civil war were but an episode in the long story of the national
life. The common tasks of the communities to which they returned had gone
forward, uninterrupted, without them; they returned merely to fill in the
vacant places again and make complete once more the industries of their
homes. The southerners, on the contrary, paroled at their surrender,
and humanely bidden keep their horses for the spring ploughing, turned
back to fields swept bare and desolate, villages whose life had first
languished and then stood still, towns without trade or industry, where
everything waited to be planned and begun anew, as if there had been no
past to place foot upon. Their country had indeed, as General Lee said,
to be “built up on a new basis.” They carried back to it no smallest part
of what the ravages and untold costs of war had stripped away. Their
lives were divested of everything that belonged to the age gone by save
only their thoughts: thoughts of irreparable loss, of principles long
revered but now discredited, of a social order cut up by the roots, of a
life thrust away to be henceforth a mere bitter memory, of a future of
new effort to be faced with all the pains of utter disaster thick upon
them.
[Illustration: JEFFERSON DAVIS]
Travellers from over sea had said that to cross the line between North
and South was like passing from one century to another. In the one
section they found an almost antique order of life, changed scarcely at
all from that which settlers out of the elder England of the Stuarts and
the Prince of Orange had established in Virginia and the Carolinas; in
the other, all that belonged to the modern world,—communities quick with
the movements of a various commerce, busy with mining, manufactures, the
construction of railways, the diversification of industry. The South kept
still the social order and the social and political ideals of an elder
generation. Slavery gave it a touch half mediæval, half oriental. There
was something of the patriarchal way of life in the broad country-sides
where masters of fields and flocks and herds went in and out upon their
errands of superintendence among groups of dusky slaves; something, too,
that recalled the mediæval lord and his serfs. And yet there was the air
of the nineteenth century, too, the touch of democracy, in the plain and
wholesome simplicity of the planters’ lives, and their frank comradeship
with all their neighbors who were of their own privilege of citizenship.
The commerce of the modern world passed in and out at the southern ports
as at those of the North. Southern merchants felt the spirit of the times
in all their enterprises; railways brought the products of every land
and region to their shops and warehouses; the impulses of the world and
of its changing thought stirred there as elsewhere. What held the South
back in the way of the older centuries was its unaltered, its unalterable
social order, which belonged to the age in which the constitution had
been devised, not to that in which its whole spirit and operation had
been subtly changed by the pervasive processes of national growth.
When they conceived that the time had come to put their right of
withdrawal from the Union into practice, the southern statesmen showed
at once, with a manifest naturalness and sincerity, what generation they
were of. They acted, with an all but unconscious instinct, upon the
principles of 1788. They conceived the unmaking of the constitution to
be, not an act of revolution or of lawless change, but a simple, though
it were solemn, legal transaction, like the formal abrogation of a great
treaty, to be effected by the same means by which it had originally been
adopted. South Carolina, who led in the fateful business, adjourned her
legislature and called a constitutional convention together: a body
like that which had declared her assent to the constitution in the far
year 1788. By formal ordinance of that convention the ordinance of the
convention of 1788 was repealed, and the connection of the State with the
Union authoritatively severed. That was her act of “secession,” taken
in the highest sovereign fashion known to her law and tradition. As in
1788, so now there was no submission of the action of the convention to
the vote of the people for ratification. A representative convention
was as sovereign in South Carolina in 1860 as in 1788. The other States
followed her example as of course. Their theory of constitutional right
and practice was identical with hers. Each State in its turn called
a convention, as in the old days of the formation of the Union, and
committed to it as of course the sovereign determination of the political
connections of the commonwealth. Each convention in turn repealed the
ordinance of the convention which had stood in its place seventy years
before.
[Illustration: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, IN 1862]
And then, because the old process was being reversed and a government
not made but set aside, the same conventions went on to take up the task
of reconstruction, that another government, more to their liking, might
be set up in the place of the familiar one now rejected. They chose
delegates to meet at Montgomery and frame a constitution under which a
government should be established for the seceded States about to be
combined in a new confederacy. When the work of the Montgomery convention
was finished, they ratified and accepted it, without resort to the people
or renewal of their authority. It was a critical time. Those who directed
the unprecedented business were subtly aware, for all their stout theory
of legal right, that the touch of revolution was upon all that they
did. The work was therefore hurried forward. Hot feeling was astir.
Rumors of force to be used, of armed resistance by the North, were in
the air. It was imperative that the new group of States should be ready
as soon as possible with a common organization through which they could
act effectively and to a common purpose. The convention at Montgomery,
therefore, at once chose officers for the new government as well as a
constitution, and gave it an immediate temporary organization; and the
sovereign conventions of the several States unhesitatingly ratified all
that it did. Not until the year was out which had been fixed as the
term of the provisional government was the direct action of the people
asked for, except in Texas, which came to its resolution of secession
while the new confederate government was in process of formation, and
Virginia, which waited until it had been formed. In each of those States
the ordinance of secession was submitted to the vote of the people and
ratified by them. Even when the term of the provisional government had
expired the voters of the new Confederacy were asked, not to ratify the
constitutional arrangements upon which it had been founded, but only the
choice of officers which the convention had made. They chose electors and
members of Congress, merely, and affairs went on as they had been planned.
[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]
There was here no distrust of the people. No one doubted the legal
validity of what had been done or deemed the method revolutionary or
undemocratic. Nowhere else was there such homogeneity of opinion as in
the South, nowhere else so habitual an acquiescence in conservative
and established ways of action. It was not, however, a habit rooted in
lethargy or indifference. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, was there
a more alert political population, a rank and file more keenly alive to
points of political doctrine and practice. Politics were everywhere the
favorite theme of conversation. Many a white man of the poorer class
could read as little as any slave; but he heard his leaders so often upon
every question of moment, whether of domestic or of foreign policy, at
court, on market days, at neighborhood rallies for political discussion
or religious exercise, at public barbecue and festival, that news came
to him without newspapers and the principles of politics without books.
Every matter of large significance or small he heard debated by the best
informed men of the country-side. They gave him, first or last, no small
part of what they had learned by travel, by reading, by service in the
public councils. Through them he knew the characters and the motives of
public men, the gossip as well as the controversies of politics, the
happenings and the humors of the wide world. With such things to talk
about around the fireside and at the cross-roads shop, upon his long
rides from plantation to plantation and with his cronies upon every
casual meeting, he had more than books could have given him.
Southern speakers felt as much put upon their mettle before audiences
gathered at their neighborhood hustings in the midst of a season of
controversy as before any audience gathered in the capitol at Washington.
Southern voters were not likely to be made dupes of. They had elected
the men who sat in the sovereign conventions which cut their connection
with the Union with a full knowledge of the business they were to meet
upon, and did not doubt that the conclusions of those bodies were
their own authentic acts. Political method was not in dispute among
them. They accounted themselves disciples of Mr. Calhoun in respect of
constitutional right and the legal remedy for abuses in the conduct
of the federal government. What he had taught them was in their minds
the commonplace and matter of course foundation of political theory.
They did not doubt that they had the right to secede, or that sovereign
representative conventions were the proper instruments of secession.
[Illustration: THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON]
[Illustration: ROBERT EDWARD LEE]
But many of them had doubted the policy and the occasion. Men forgot
afterwards the sturdy fight made among the southern people for the
preservation of the Union, by men whom all southerners loved and would
upon ordinary occasion have followed right willingly; forgot the doubtful
balance of parties and opinion there had been among them for many anxious
years together. That final breach and agitation between North and
South had begun, not a single short year before, when Mr. Lincoln was
nominated and the Republican party began to gather for its triumph, but
in 1848, when the territory acquired from Mexico was to be disposed of as
between North and South and southern men had insisted that the balance
between the sections, disturbed in 1820 by the compromise concerning
Missouri, should be redressed. Mr. Douglas’s unpalatable doctrine of
“squatter sovereignty” had deepened the mischief. He softened it as he
could, to keep the southern men at his back; but the disguise of his
careful phrases was stripped off by Mr. Lincoln in debate. The searching
questions of a masterful opponent forced him to say that, though no
law of Congress could exclude property in slaves from the Territories,
the unfriendly provisions of territorial law itself might, if the
settlers chose, render its tenure practically impossible. From that day
the southern leaders knew that to act with a party which followed Mr.
Douglas was to lose the constitutional battle they had fought a long
generation through for the balance of power between North and South.
There was steadfast love for the Union in the South as in the North.
Mr. Calhoun had loved it, and it had broken his heart that he could not
save it upon the principles which he conceived to be its heart and life.
Men who knew the South only by some casual glimpse of southern men,
some brief journey through the southern country, some transient sojourn
of a single season, deemed the southern people as unstable, as easily
stirred to rash action as a Gallic populace, so passionately did they
seem to respond to the appeals of their orators, so eagerly did they
yield themselves to the excitements of every agitation. But they were
an English folk, strengthened here and there by the sober Scots-Irish
strain and the earnest blood of the steadfast Huguenot. They held to
their principles, their habits, their prepossessions with a simple,
instinctive, undeliberate consistency which no excitement of the moment
really touched or unsettled. They had been schooled, as all the nation
had, in a loyal allegiance to the Union which their own statesmen had
done so much to set up and make illustrious. Whatever their old-fashioned
view of the character of its constitution or of the rights of the States
as members of the great partnership, no ordinary occasion, no sudden gust
of passion could have torn their thoughts from those old moorings. It had
taken a long twelve years of agitation to get them in revolutionary mood,
and men whom they equally loved and heeded had stood all those critical
days through on the one side and on the other in determined combat, some
to save, some to break the Union. It was by appealing to their very
conservatism, their attachment to the older models and theory of their
government, that the advocates of secession had won.
[Illustration: THE SHELL ROAD, MOBILE]
It had been a battle of statesmen and orators, and only at the last
had the advocates of secession triumphed. Many an influential planter
in the South was by sheer instinct of class and tradition a Whig, and
held himself, alike by interest and by natural obligation, an ally, not
of the democracy to which Mr. Jefferson had given life, but of men of
property and of vested right everywhere. If his neighbors and the small
farmers and the tradesmen of the towns were Democrats, even they chose
their party alliances by a conservative instinct: because they deemed
the Democratic party a conservator of old views, the most trustworthy
opponent of newfangled doctrine and revolutionary change. Many a Whig
planter believed devoutly in the sovereign rights of his State, and the
preservation of those rights was at the very heart of every southern
Democrat’s creed; but love of the Union and reverence for law underlay
the thought of all alike and stuck fast in the stubborn fibre of an
English race. It was such a people that went to school to its orators to
learn the issues and the final purposes of the fateful decade 1850-1860.
A few resolute men turned them to secession.
[Illustration: ARLINGTON, THE RESIDENCE OF GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE]
[Illustration: WILLIAM LOWNDES YANCEY]
A single figure stood for a while, almost alone, at the front of the
coming revolution, the figure of William L. Yancey, of Alabama. Before
Mr. Calhoun died Mr. Yancey took up the theme which had darkened the
last utterances of the aged Carolinian like a prophecy of ruin,—took it
up, not as a counsel of despair, but as a counsel of duty. Compromise
between North and South, he declared, was out of the question. In 1846 he
resigned his seat in Congress because he would not act with any party
which so much as debated the exclusion of slavery from the Territories;
and went home to spend the remainder of his life and every power of
his strong mind in the advocacy of a course which once and for all
rejected compromise and accepted only the doctrines which should forever
safeguard the constitutional rights and material interests of the South,
even though such a course should lead to a disruption of the Union. He
was a man of no majesty of presence, no adventitious grace of manner;
never studied his art as agitator or sought to catch the people by any
assault of passionate appeal; but burned with a conviction which had
its own dignity and irresistible might; used the ways of frank, direct,
engaging speech which went most naturally with his open, unaffected
nature; argued his case to the bottom, plead it with whole-souled ardor,
as a thing not of expediency but of right, and was careless where it
should take fire of itself. Above all, his words rang, upon every theme
he touched, in a voice whose slightest tone thrilled along the blood,
so rich, so flexible, was it, so compact of the quiet passion of the
mind. While others wavered, caught now at this expedient and again at
that to turn the current he was setting against them,—against the Union
itself,—he held steadfast, undoubting, to his simple theme. Majorities
followed him and left him; conventions heard him now with acquiescence
and again with deep disquietude and passionate dissent; but no man could
decline to listen when he spoke, and none who heard him could long steel
himself against the charm and power of his appeal. It was the tones of
his voice, the resonant echo of his theme, that seemed to linger in the
air after every controversy. It was he more than any other who taught the
South what Douglas really meant; he, more than any other, who split the
ranks of the Democratic party at Charleston, made the election of Douglas
impossible, and brought Mr. Lincoln in.
He had foreseen what must come, and hesitated as little after the event
as before it. He was for immediate and final secession; and, though he
had to carry the fight to the very floor of the convention of his State,
met to make the final critical decision, he won it there, by an initial
majority of eight votes. Twenty-four members of the convention stood
out against the action to the very last, and refused to put their names
to the fateful paper which cut their connection with the Union; but the
people accepted the decision of the majority, and he had his way. Men
whom they had followed through many a long year, when Mr. Yancey was only
their incomparable orator, not their leader, the people now rejected;
and their own capital town of Montgomery saw the government of the
Confederacy set up.
Georgia had been won by a like slow and stubborn contest, doubtful
till the very last. Even Mr. Stephens had held stoutly, indomitably to
the side of the Union until the final movements of the fight had been
lost and won,—the slender, delicate, singular man whom the convention
at Montgomery made Vice President of the Confederacy: a man whose
fragile, shadowy body seemed scarcely able to endure the keen flame of
his thought. He admitted the legal right of secession, but he turned
upon every argument of expediency or necessity urged in its favor a
searching light of ridicule, criticism, satire which it was hard for any
man to stand in and not flinch. The piercing tones of his high-pitched,
feminine voice seemed to add to the cutting force of his words. But men
of a different sort had overborne him. One figure in particular took the
imagination and ruled the spirits of that susceptible people, the figure
of Thomas R. R. Cobb. The manly beauty of his tall, athletic person;
his frank eyes on fire; his ardor, as of a man not arguing a case of
politics or expediency but given over to a cause not less sacred, not
less fraught with the issues of life and death, than religion itself;
his voice, as musical and as sure to find its straight way to the heart
as Mr. Yancey’s, made his words pass like a flame from country-side to
country-side.
[Illustration: THOMAS R. R. COBB]
[Illustration: FIRST PAGE OF THE ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF
THE CONFEDERATE STATES]
There could be no doubt what the constitution of the Confederacy should
be. The advocates of secession had not rejected the constitution of
the United States as it had been in the first days, when read, as they
conceived, in its simplicity and original import, but only the corrupt
interpretations which had been put upon it, the leadership of parties
which would have wrested its meanings to the South’s destruction. They
made a constitution at Montgomery, therefore, which they meant to be in
all essential things a counterpart of the constitution of the Union which
they had abandoned,—except that in their own document what they held to
be the implicit meanings of that constitution were made explicit, and
its errors and weaknesses of detail corrected. “We, the people of the
Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent
character,” ran its preamble, in order that the rôle of the States in
the free partnership might not again be questioned. Protective tariffs
it specifically prohibited, as well as all internal improvements at the
general charge; and the power to emit bills of credit it did not grant.
The recognition and protection of slavery in all territories of the
new government it made an explicit principle of fundamental law. The
importation of negro slaves from foreign countries, on the other hand,
it explicitly forbade; and the Congress was given power to prohibit
the introduction of slaves from any State or Territory of the older
Union. New States were to be admitted only by a vote of two-thirds of
each house of Congress, “the Senate voting by States.” Every state
legislature was accorded the right to impeach confederate officials whose
duties lay entirely within its own territory. The demand of “any three
States assembled in their several conventions” was made sufficient to
secure the calling of a convention of all the States for the amendment
of the constitution. It was thought best, in view of experience in the
older Union, to extend the presidential term to six years, and to make
the President ineligible for re-election. The President was explicitly
given authority to remove at his pleasure the principal officer in
each of the executive Departments and all persons connected with the
diplomatic service; but he was empowered to remove other civil officers
only for dishonesty, inefficiency, misconduct, or neglect, or when their
services were unnecessary, and he was required to report to the Senate
his reasons for removal in every such case. He was granted the right
to veto individual items in appropriation bills; and the Congress was
forbidden, except by a two-thirds vote, to make any appropriations not
asked for and estimated by the heads of the executive Departments, unless
such appropriations were for the legitimate expenses of Congress itself
or for the payment of just claims against the government which had been
judicially determined. Congress was authorized to grant seats upon its
floor and the right of debate upon all public measures to the heads
of the several executive Departments, in order that Congress and the
Executive might act in closer harmony and easier co-operation than had
been possible in the old Union.
[Illustration: ANDREW JOHNSON]
There was to be no time of peace, it turned out, in which to make test
of these new provisions. They bespoke men as their authors who had kept
an observant and sagacious eye upon affairs, and who had perceived
very clearly where some of the dangers and inconveniences of the older
system lay; but no work of criticism or of reconstruction was of much
avail amidst the furious storms of war into which the new government
was plunged from the very outset. Whatever frame of government they
might have devised, the Executive must have stood supreme at the front
of all action while war held, a war for very existence. A nice balance
of constitutional adjustment was out of the question. Counsel was
hastened, debate postponed; the exigency of each occasion determined the
means and the mode of action. Constitutional safeguards gave way to the
mere problem of making the existence of the government good upon the
battle-field. Critics of what was done might for a little while affect
opinion out of doors or at a distance from the field, but they could not
change the course of affairs. Moreover, war itself altered the whole
atmosphere of opinion. No doubt at first the people had been persuaded,
perhaps overruled, by a handful of leaders, and had assented with a vague
hope rather than with any confident purpose to the radical courses of
secession, resentful of the wrongs they conceived themselves to have
suffered in the Union rather than desirous of independence or of a new
government set up in rivalry to the old upon that familiar seaboard.
They had been assured that there would be no permanent separation: that
new terms and a stricter understanding of rights must be had with the
northern partners, and that better terms could be made out of the Union
than in it, by secession than by submission. No doubt their leaders had
themselves believed this, had actually hoped to see their States re-enter
the old Union with a new security for their interests, a firmer, more
definite position of right. Only the actual use of force against them had
changed their temper and their hope; and war had wrought as deeply upon
the spirits of the people as upon their own. When once the call to arms
was made, doubts dropped away, the spirit of a whole people leaped within
them, the very provisions of their new constitution became for the time
almost a matter of indifference. Debate was over, and spontaneous action
had begun, touched with a new ardor and a terrible enthusiasm.
Not every one, indeed, was caught by the new passion. Here and there
groups of men held stubbornly off from the desperate business and would
not be drawn into it. In one of the northern counties of Alabama, Mr.
Yancey’s own State, Union men outnumbered secessionists four to one and
maintained themselves in military organization. A southern county of
Mississippi accepted the doctrine of secession, indeed, but interpreted
it in its own behoof, and itself solemnly seceded from the State and
from the Confederacy rather than send its men to distant battle fields.
And yet the real burden of the war fell, not upon the spirits of men,
but upon the resources of the country. Though the South should call upon
every man of her fighting population to go into the field, she had but
one-fourth as many men fit for the field as the North. Armies must be
fed and clothed, besides, and the South was put to the utmost strain to
keep her men as well even as the ragged levies of the Revolution had
been kept, who had deemed it a plentiful bounty to escape starvation. A
four years’ war was of necessity a war of resources, and the South was
but an agricultural region, its population spread widely abroad over a
great area, only here and there a railway, its matchless stores of coal
and iron almost untouched, no manufactures set up, save here and there
a cotton mill or a woolen factory, its own cotton woven, for the use of
southerners themselves, chiefly in the great manufacturing centres of the
North.
Southerners knew themselves dependent on Europe or the northern States
for almost every yard of cloth, every coat or shoe or hat that they wore;
for their agricultural implements, carpenter’s tools, wagons, cordage,
nails, harness, saddles, axes, tubs, buckets, their very chemicals and
medicinal drugs,—for everything except their bread and meat. The war
shut them close within their boundaries. The cordon of blockading fleets
all but sealed their ports; the steady extension of the federal lines
down the valley of the Mississippi River and across the broad reaches
of the States of Mississippi and Tennessee to the southern spurs of the
Appalachians at Chattanooga thrust their western frontier in to the
mountains. Between that impenetrable wall and the closed seas they were
pent up, with no markets, no means of life or comfort or subsistence, no
military supplies save such as they could themselves make or take from
their enemy. They could get no more railroad iron, no more locomotives,
no more railway carriages or cars for freight, no more steam boilers
or engines, no more telegraph wire, no more spades to use in the
trenches, unless, in the midst of war, they created out of hand an entire
industrial system, for which they had neither trained master mechanics
nor fit workmen.
[Illustration: CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, IN 1862]
Her cotton, her tobacco, and her rice, had supplied the South with
the wealth with which she had paid the prices of the world for her
clothing and her tools and all the varied product of the factories. Of
the great staples rice and cotton she had almost a monopoly. Her cotton
fields supplied half the world; her rice and tobacco found their way
into every market. Nearly one-third of the Indian corn of the country,
moreover, came from her plantations. But, without markets, the crops
were valueless. The value of the cotton exported in 1860 had been
$202,741,351. In 1861 it was but $42,000,000; in 1862 but $4,000,000.
The value of the rice exported in 1860 had been $2,567,399. The value of
that exported in 1862 was $156,889. The rice fields, moreover, lay upon
the exposed southern coasts, where the federal fleets gathered stronger
and stronger month by month, and had presently to be abandoned. It was no
slight embarrassment and bred a great disturbance of values that there
was no way, so long as she was thus shut in, by which the South could
replenish her stock of specie. Some specie there was, of course, in
the banks; some came in at the outset by way of loans obtained abroad,
before the blockading fleets were numerous enough to intercept it; but
its quantity was insignificant as compared with what was needed to hold
the currency stable when treasure was being poured out for the war. The
bulk of it was paid out almost at once to meet foreign balances. Private
individuals hoarded all they could lay their hands on, and it practically
passed out of circulation. Paper money took its place, the promises of
States as well as of the confederate government itself; grew in volume
from month to month with startling rapidity; and sank in value as the old
continental paper had sunk in the days of the Revolution. No man knew for
how much he was selling his crops when he sold them for paper. No man
could guess how much of that questionable currency would be necessary to
pay his debts another year. Postal clerks at Richmond presently found
themselves obliged to resign because they could not live on a salary of
nine thousand dollars.
Abundant harvests of grain filled the fields all the anxious four years
through. The smiling valley of the Shenandoah and the fertile fields of
central Georgia had been the chief granary of the South. The Shenandoah
was swept from end to end by the contending armies; the grain of central
Georgia ripened just in time, in 1864, to feed the army of General
Sherman as it pushed southward to the sea. But other fields supplied what
the ravages of war destroyed. Cotton being no longer salable, provident
planters sowed corn in its stead. What seemed next to impossible was to
get the grain to market. The railways were in constant use by the armies;
the common roads were falling into utter disrepair; wagons and teams were
at the front with the soldiers; many a household within but a few miles
of well-filled granaries found itself put to sore straits to get food.
It was hard, moreover, to live on maize alone. Very little wheat grew
in the southern fields; very far from enough to supply all the southern
country with wheaten bread. Southern housekeepers were put to their wits’
ends to devise means to diversify the diet of their households and make
it wholesome. New food stuffs were brought into requisition: peas that
had before been offered only to cattle, roots that had hitherto been
thought only curious or medicinal. Coffee and tea were shut out with the
closing of the ports, and every possible substitute was tried.
[Illustration: A STREET HUCKSTER IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
And yet to get food was a simpler matter than to get shoes and clothing.
Looms which had not seen thread since the Revolution were brought forth
out of attics and put to the task of making “homespun” for a whole
household. Since tanneries were few and used their primitive processes
with infinite slowness, leather could scarcely be had; and when shoes
wore out there was nothing for it but either to go barefooted or
substitute rude wooden clogs shod with iron. Men followed the armies
to pick up for the tanner the hides of the animals slaughtered for the
soldiers’ food. Riding saddles were stripped of their skirts that no
piece of leather might be wasted. In mild weather the children could
go without shoes; in severe weather they were kept within doors. The
very cards with which the cotton fibre was carded for use on the looms
had teeth of steel wire which could not be replaced when they wore
out, and every card was guarded and mended like a priceless treasure.
Infinite care and a novel ingenuity gave to every domestic duty a new
significance. Every plantation had its smoke-house, and before the
war came on carefully cured hams and sides of bacon had furnished the
commonest dish of meat, whether for the table of the slave’s cabin or of
the master’s house; but the South had then imported its salt. There were
but one or two salt mines within the borders of the Confederacy; and when
armed men and ships had been drawn about those borders there was not salt
enough for the smoke-houses. There was scarcely enough for the kitchen.
The very floors of the smoke-houses were scraped for the salt that might
be got from the drippings of past years; and gentle and common alike went
without their accustomed dish of bacon.
[Illustration: SELLERS OF FIREWOOD IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
The armies, of course, suffered most from every kind of want that had
come upon the land. To march without shoes, to make shift with torn and
ragged clothing which there was little hope of replacing, to fight and
endure hardship on half-cured bacon and a scant dole of hard corn bread,
to go without coffee or any stimulant, and finally to lack even healing
medicines in the inevitable hospital put men of the stoutest constitution
to tests more fatal oftentimes than those of the battle-field itself.
There was coarse food enough in the country, but the government had
scant means of paying for it and had no efficient commissariat through
which to make sure of supplying the armies even with such things as
it could obtain. One difficulty that immensely increased from year to
year was the utterly insufficient means of transportation. There were
a few long lines of railway which linked the main towns and sea-ports
of the country together; but the armies could not be always lying close
to these, and there were few side lines by which to reach the camps if
the movements of the war drew the armies to a distance. Such lines as
there were, moreover, hopelessly deteriorated from month to month. Such
iron and steel works as the Confederacy contained or could build while
the war lasted had to be used almost exclusively for the manufacture of
cannon and military supplies, and could not have been drawn off from
that indispensable work to make new rails and locomotives and car trucks
for the railways even if there had been iron enough. And there was not
iron enough. The country had to be stripped of every spare scrap of iron
to make and repair the weapons of war. When rails wore out they could be
replaced only by tearing up sidings and minor lines of road. When rolling
stock fell into disrepair no new cars could be had. When the war was over
little more seemed left of the railways than their graded road-beds and
odds and ends of their rolling stock hardly fit for further use.
The commanders in the field often found themselves as hard put to it to
obtain military stores as to get food and clothing. The devoted women
at home sent thousands of homespun garments to the front for their sons
and husbands and brothers, and warm socks without number knitted with
their own hands; even cut their carpets up to be sent to the camps for
blankets; but the women could not make powder and guns. Considerable
supplies of arms and munitions had been got in from England before the
blockade was drawn tight about the ports, and across the border through
Mexico before Texas and the Gulf ports had been cut off from the rest of
the Confederacy by the pressure of hostile armies down the valley of the
Mississippi. At the first act of secession southern forts and arsenals
had been seized with large supplies of arms. General Jackson made rich
prize of military supplies at Harper’s Ferry; and many another success
in arms swept the booty of the field into the confederate chests and
armories. But with all this there were not arms enough for the great
musters that went to the front. Cannon and arms had to be made, and made
without materials except such as were already at hand. Every brass bell
that could be found went to the foundry to be melted down and cast into
cannon. Devoted housekeepers even contributed their brass preserving
kettles and every piece of household brass that could be spared. Private
fowling pieces were used when muskets lacked, and ancient muskets and
side arms came once more into use which had hung upon the wall as curious
heirlooms ever since the days of the Revolution.
[Illustration: A SUPERANNUATED DARKY IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
All the fire-arms used by the confederate armies were muzzle-loaders,
and the mere supply of percussion caps became a matter of no small
difficulty. A mechanic at the Richmond arsenal, the chief factory of
arms, ingeniously contrived a machine by means of which a million caps
could be pressed and filled every twenty-four hours; but the loss of the
copper mines of Tennessee followed the occupation of Chattanooga by the
federal forces, and the supply of sheet copper out of which the caps
were made was suddenly cut off. An officer was despatched, accordingly,
to North Carolina to buy and forward to Richmond every turpentine and
brandy still he could find in the State, and the copper from these
supplied all the caps used by General Lee’s army during the closing year
of the war. The caps were usually filled with fulminate of mercury;
mercury could be had only from abroad; and the supply gave out. Diligent
experiment was made, and it was discovered that a combination of chlorate
of potash and sulphuret of antimony could be successfully substituted.
The inventive genius and practical resourcefulness of men and officers
alike were quickened by the extraordinary exigencies of those fearful
years to make the most of what they had. Common glass demijohns were
converted into contact torpedoes to close the channels of the southern
rivers, and did their work with terrible execution. An assaulting party
rolled bales of cotton before them for shelter as they worked their way
forward to the storming of a position. Skilful and experienced mechanics
were lacking, foundrymen, ship carpenters, engineers,—for the South had
hitherto had no need of these; but every man of education in the armies
turned his wits and knowledge to practical account upon occasion and
supplied the lack as best he could.
[Illustration: A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS IN ILLINOIS]
Almost every white man of fighting age, and many who were too young
or too old for the field, came first or last into the ranks, and the
war seemed to be using the whole capacity of a proud and capable
race. Hundreds of thousands volunteered; the rest were drawn in by
conscription. Where it was necessary to use the entire fighting
population it was impossible to rely on voluntary service, and the
South, with its scant numbers for the field, resorted to conscription
sooner than the North. It was absolutely necessary, of course, to leave
some men at home to do the indispensable work of peace by which homes and
armies alike were to be supported; but men enough even for that were not
left at last, so inexorably had a drastic conscription swept the country
of every possible soldier. So early as April, 1862, the confederate
Congress had made all between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five
subject to military service; in September of the same year it extended
the obligation to men of forty-five; and before the end of the war it
had called upon boys of sixteen and old men of sixty. Slaves served the
armies from the first as body servants, teamsters, hostlers, cooks, and
laborers on the fortifications. Before the war closed the confederate
Congress, in its straits for men, authorized, with something like general
approval, the enrollment of slaves as armed troops; but not until the end
was at hand and the measure too late to be of practical importance.
Such measures were but a proof of how the southern country was being
stripped of everything, its men and its resources alike. There was
proof in every action of the new government they had set up of the
exigent difficulties, the utterly disconcerting perplexities brought
upon the southern people by that unparalleled upheaval of civil war.
In all counsels southern men had stood foremost in the advocacy of a
central government of strictly defined and carefully limited powers,
which should give to individuals and States the utmost possible latitude
of independent privilege compatible with the maintenance of political
authority and social order. They had flung out of the Union because the
federal government had seemed to them to go too far in the arrogation
of power. And yet the government they themselves had set up by way of
protest became, amidst the entanglements of a war which involved its very
existence, a power centralized beyond example in the history of America.
Not only did all authority centre at Richmond, but all power at Richmond
centred in the President and the heads of the executive Departments,
particularly the Secretaries of the Treasury and of War.
[Illustration: A SELLER OF RABBITS AND HARES, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
The North had a like taste of the consequences of war. Mr. Lincoln
himself could not curb the wilful mastery of his Secretary of War.
The rights of individuals gave way before the orders of an executive
department: the supremacy of the war party and the power of the army were
the law of the nation’s life. But there was a limit. The courts were
open; the law was not silenced; men lived their ordinary lives and were
unmolested so long as they kept their hands from affairs which touched
the government. Trade and peaceful employment were not throttled by a
cordon of fleets and armies drawn about the land. Opinion moved openly
and was outspoken, and every man could draw for himself the limits even
of a government grown despotic to save the Union. But in the South war
was, for the time being, the occupation and absorbing interest of a whole
people. No man could draw wholly apart and live his own life. It was
necessary, moreover, that the action of the war should be ordered, not by
legislation and debate, but by executive authority, central, efficient,
unquestionable. It was no time to stand on the punctilios of law. There
was no certain means, indeed, of determining what the law was. The
supreme court provided for by the constitution of the Confederacy had not
been organized. War had come too soon. Litigation was postponed to the
necessary first task of making the government sure of a chance to live at
all.
The houses could exercise no real restraint upon the Executive, because
they did not put themselves into a position to understand or control
it. Mere hereditary jealousy of executive influence made them unwilling
to act upon the provision of their constitution which authorized them
to bring the heads of the executive departments into their sittings
to answer questions and take part in debate. There was, therefore, no
intimacy of common counsel between Congress and the Executive; and the
Executive, standing in the midst of affairs, standing where action was
imperative, power necessary, debate perilous, stood at the centre of
all initiative. Congress had no choice but to uphold its hands, and
back it with the measures which the time, not statesmen’s preferences,
made necessary. Bitter debates from time to time marked its action.
Sharp criticisms which cut to the quick of motive and policy rang in
its halls. Many a battle of will against will disturbed the relations
of the President and the houses. But more and more did the drift of war
sweep all counsel into its current. Year by year the houses were emptied
of their abler members, as the continental Congress had been in the old
days of the Revolution. They were more needed for service in the field
than for debate at Richmond. It grew less and less possible, moreover,
to discuss the exigent matters of the war with open doors, through which
voices of censure and doubt, of discord and protest, might get abroad,
to the demoralization of opinion and the heartening of foes. From the
first, when subjects of defence were under discussion, the sessions of
the Congress had been secret. More and more did every question seem to
become a question of defence, until at last secret sessions became the
rule, open sittings the exception.
[Illustration: A WOOD PEDDLER, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA]
It was in part the prudence of defence, not against enemies in the
field, but against opinion within the Confederacy itself, that led the
houses to close their doors so often. Opinion moved very uneasily under
the masterful action of the government. Men were silenced rather than
convinced. The right to the writ of _habeas corpus_ had been promptly
suspended in the South, as in the North. Those who showed themselves too
openly out of sympathy with the government soon learned that arrest would
follow a frank expression of their views. Even freedom of movement from
place to place was restricted: no one could stir far abroad from his home
without a passport from the government. There was little to wonder at
if men chafed hotly under restraints which kept the hand of government,
it seemed, upon every individual’s thoughts and affairs. It had never
been so before in the history of America. It almost passed belief that
it should be so now in the South, where men loved individual dignity and
independence with an abiding passion. It was singular how docile proud
men became. Only once was there any notable instance of resistance to the
government’s sweeping acts of power. Governor Brown, of Georgia, when
the conscription laws seemed to him to have passed all reasonable bounds
of exaction, refused in set terms to allow the confederate recruiting
officers to put the law into execution within the State. For the rest,
there was hardly more than quiet distress and muttered protest.
The financial measures of the government showed the straits to which it
was put to support the struggle, and the extraordinary lengths to which
the exigencies of the war were stretching its powers, quite as clearly
as its wholesale drafts of men and its arbitrary arrests in rebuke of
dissent. In its need for money the government had resorted to every
expedient known to finance, even the most drastic and desperate. Money
it knew from the first to be scarce. The banking capital of the South
was but one seventh that of the North; the accumulation of specie and
of stocks of goods out of all proportion smaller, and more restricted
in geographical distribution. At the very outset provision was made for
the payment of taxes in kind. When its redundant issues of Treasury
notes failed to add enough to the direct taxes to meet the necessities
of the exchequer, the government sought and obtained of the planters
loans from their crops,—promises of the payment into the Treasury of a
certain proportion of the yield of their fields, in return for eight _per
cent._ bonds. When the time came in which the crops could not be sold for
lack of a market, the government directly purchased the products of the
fields, paying for them with bonds, for lack of anything else to pay. The
several States themselves took supplies from the people for the troops
they had undertaken to maintain in the field, and paid for them only with
their own certificates of indebtedness. The property of all alien enemies
was confiscated. In 1863, as it came to the final pinch of necessity,
Congress authorized the seizure of food supplies at rates fixed every
sixty days by state commissioners. There was hot protest and indignation
at this, but necessity had become the law of the land. Some might
grumble, and even make as if they would resist, but there was in fact no
limit to the devotion of the people to the cause they had espoused. Women
gave their very hair to be sold for the support of the government their
men had sworn to establish.
Before the end came that government had thrust its hand into practically
every affair, whether public or private, that touched the sources of
life. It had even gone into trade. When all money was spent loans and
taxes came into its hands in the shape of the crude products of the
soil. Cotton and food stuffs were a kind of legal tender in trade, but
the stocks which accumulated in the government store-houses were too
great and bulky to be made currency of in the purchases of the executive
departments. The cotton, especially, it could not get rid of unless
some exit could be made to foreign markets. The Treasury Department,
therefore, would grant no clearance papers to any vessel preparing for
the desperate attempt of running the blockade which did not make up at
least one half its cargo out of the government stores. Blockade running
became a sort of government monopoly, either in the hands of the state
governments or in the hands of the government at Richmond. Both what
should be taken out and what should be brought in were determined by
those who had charge of public affairs.
The wealth and resources of the North increased and were multiplied, the
while. Four million seven hundred thousand acres of the public domain
at the West were taken up by new settlers, who moved forward to occupy
them as if in a time of peace. Nearly four thousand miles of railway
were built. The value of imports leaped up to a sum which presently
almost equalled for the North alone the total value of the imports of the
whole country in 1860, the South included. Manufactures flourished as if
under a new stimulation. Though it was spending blood like water, the
population of the North was replenished; though money was poured out as
if drunk up by the very soil of the battle fields, wealth kept pace with
the demands made upon it, and more than kept pace.
One of the most distressing evidences of the straits the South had been
brought to was the state of the prisons in which she was forced to keep
the thousands of prisoners who fell into the hands of her armies. More
than two hundred thousand, first and last, were taken; and only some
sixteen thousand of these were paroled upon the field. There were as
many southern soldiers in the northern prisons. Not until the war seemed
turning towards its end could an exchange of prisoners be arranged. The
federal authorities knew their superiority in fighting population and
did not care to lose it by returning fighting men to the South. If her
soldiers died in southern prisons, they were dying for their country
there, General Grant said, as truly as if they lost their lives in
battle. Thirty thousand men died in the confederate prisons; as many
more in the prisons of the North: the numbers almost exactly balance,—in
the South, 30,156, out of 196,000 who were prisoners; in the North,
30,152, out of 227,000. But the causes were different. In the northern
prisons the bitter chill of winter claimed as many lives as the rigors
and privations of prison discipline. In the South there were not prisons,
there were not guards, there was not food enough. Men could not be spared
from the field to guard the prisons, and many thousands were crowded
together under a handful of men. Proper sanitary precautions were in the
circumstances impossible. The armies themselves lacked food and went
without every comfort, and the prisoners could fare no better,—inevitably
fared worse, because they were penned within a narrow space and lacked
the free air of the camp. A subtle demoralization touched the government
of the Confederacy itself as the war went its desperate course, and those
who kept the prisons felt that demoralization with the rest.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MR. LINCOLN’S AUTOGRAPHIC COPY OF THE
GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, MADE BY HIM FOR THE SOLDIERS’ AND SAILORS’ FAIR AT
BALTIMORE, IN 1864]
No one could wonder to see even a people such as the southerners had
shown themselves to be lose heart at last, acknowledge the bitter
fortunes of those last days intolerable, and yield in a sort of despair.
It had taken all the vigor and audacity of their government to keep them
to the hopeless business as the year 1864 disclosed what it had in store
for them. Not a little of the dogged perseverance and undaunted action
of those closing months of the struggle had been due to the masterful
characteristics of Mr. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy.
He had served a distinguished apprenticeship in arms in the Mexican war,
a still more distinguished apprenticeship in affairs in the cabinet and
in the Senate of the United States. He had the pride, the spirit of
initiative, the capacity in business which qualify men for leadership,
and lacked nothing of indomitable will and imperious purpose to make
his leadership effective. What he did lack was wisdom in dealing with
men, willingness to take the judgment of others in critical matters of
business, the instinct which recognizes ability in others and trusts it
to the utmost to play its independent part. He too much loved to rule,
had too overweening a confidence in himself, and took leave to act as if
he understood much better than those did who were in actual command what
should be done in the field. He let prejudice and his own wilful judgment
dictate to him the removal of Joseph E. Johnston from the command at
Atlanta, the only man who could have made Sherman’s march to the sea
impossible. He sought to control too many things with too feminine a
jealousy of any rivalry in authority. But his spirit was the life of the
government. His too frequent mistakes were the result as much of the
critical perplexities of an impossible task as of weakness of character.
He moved direct, undaunted by any peril, and heartened a whole people to
hold steadfast to the end.
The end came with every sign of sheer exhaustion and despair. Many a
southern man had gone into that terrible contest against his better
judgment, not wishing to see the Union broken, but yielding to his
neighbors’ views and the challenge of the summons to arms. Such men were
a minority, here and there very strong, but nowhere strong enough to
make their will prevalent in affairs; and they had very loyally offered
their lives and their property for the cause they would rather have seen
vindicated in some other way. When those last days came they took heart
to acknowledge the inevitable, and to urge peace as a mere means to avoid
utter destruction. While they cried to their rulers peace seemed to come
almost of itself. The southern armies melted away by wholesale desertion.
There was nothing to eat, there was next to nothing to put into the guns
themselves; the women and children at home were starving as well as the
men in the camps, their only helpers and protectors. It was more than the
human spirit could bear. Men turned by the hundreds, by the thousands,
by the tens of thousands from the camps to the roads which led homeward.
The end had manifestly come. There was no need to stay to see it come.
If they stayed at all, how could they leave until it came; and how could
the women and children wait? When the surrender came federal rations had
to be served out to those who were left to save them from the helpless
weakness of starvation.
And so their land was to be “built up on a new basis,” as General Lee
said. The South had thrown her life into the scales and lost it. There
had been extraordinary devotion and heroism and mastery on both sides,—in
the South a devotion and sacrifice hardly to be matched save in some war
of religion; armies of the same race and breeding had met and neither had
known how to yield; the end could not come until one or the other was
overwhelmed; the South had been overwhelmed; and the most terrible war
of modern times was over. Statesmen and patriots might well look about
them and see with a sort of dismay what there was to be reconstructed
throughout the whole fabric of the national life. The Union had been
saved; it was yet to be rehabilitated.
Most of the _authorities_ for this chapter are to be found
mentioned under the _sources_ at the end of Chapter IV.; but
there are a few which should here be added: J. L. M. Curry’s
_The Southern States of the American Union_ and _Civil History
of the Government of the Confederate States_; J. C. Schwab’s
_Confederate States of America_ (chiefly a financial history);
Frank A. Montgomery’s _Reminiscences of a Mississippian in
Peace and War_; J. W. Du Bose’s _Life of William L. Yancey_;
William Garrott Brown’s _The Lower South in American History_;
David Dodge’s _Domestic Economy of the Confederacy_ in volume
58 of the _Atlantic Monthly_; John S. Wise’s _End of an Era_;
and various essays scattered through the _Publications_ of the
Southern History Society.
APPENDIX
PARALLEL CONSTITUTIONS
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED CONSTITUTION OF THE CONFEDERATE
STATES OF AMERICA STATES OF AMERICA
We, the people of the United WE, the people of the _Confederate_
States, in order to form a more States, _each State acting in its
perfect union, establish Justice, sovereign and independent
insure domestic Tranquility, character, in order to form a
provide for the common defence, permanent federal government_,
promote the general Welfare, and establish justice, insure domestic
secure the Blessings of Liberty to tranquility, and secure the
ourselves and our Posterity, do blessings of liberty to ourselves
ordain and establish this and our posterity—_invoking the
CONSTITUTION for the United favor and guidance of Almighty
States of America. God_—do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the
_Confederate_ States of America.
ARTICLE I. ARTICLE I.
SECTION 1. All legislative Powers SECTION 1. All legislative powers
herein granted shall be vested in herein _delegated_ shall be vested
a Congress of the United States, in a Congress of the _Confederate_
which shall consist of a Senate States, which shall consist of a
and House of Representatives. Senate and House of Representatives.
SECTION 2. The House of SECTION 2. The House of
Representatives shall be composed Representatives shall be composed
of Members chosen every second of members chosen every second
Year by the People of the several year by the people of the several
States, and the Electors in each States; and the electors in each
State shall have the State shall _be citizens of the
Qualifications requisite for Confederate States, and_ have the
Electors of the most numerous qualifications requisite for
Branch of the State Legislature. electors of the most numerous
branch of the State Legislature;
_but no person of foreign birth,
not a citizen of the Confederate
States, shall be allowed to vote
for any officer, civil or
political, State or Federal_.
No Person shall be a Representative No person shall be a Representative
who shall not have attained to the who shall not have attained the
Age of twenty-five years, and been age of twenty-five years, and _be
seven Years a Citizen of the a citizen of the Confederate_
United States, and who shall not, States, and who shall not, when
when elected, be an Inhabitant of elected, be an inhabitant of that
that State in which he shall be State in which he shall be chosen.
chosen.
Representatives and direct Taxes Representatives and direct taxes
shall be apportioned among the shall be apportioned among the
several States which may be several States, which may
included within this Union, be included within this
according to their respective _Confederacy_, according to their
Numbers, which shall be determined respective numbers, which shall be
by adding to the whole Number of determined, by adding to the whole
free Persons, including those number of free persons, including
bound to Service for a term of those bound to service for a term
years, and excluding Indians not of years, and excluding Indians
taxed, three-fifths of all other not taxed, three-fifths of all
Persons. The actual Enumeration _slaves_. The actual enumeration
shall be made within three Years shall be made within three years
after the first meeting of the after the first meeting of the
Congress of the United States, and Congress of the _Confederate_
within every subsequent Term of States, and within every
Ten years, in such Manner as they subsequent term of ten years, in
shall by Law direct. The Number of such manner as they shall by law
the Representatives shall not direct. The number of
exceed one for every thirty Representatives shall not exceed
Thousand, but each State shall one for every _fifty_ thousand,
have at Least one representative; but each State shall have at least
and until such enumeration shall one Representative; and until such
be made, the State of New enumeration shall be made, the
Hampshire shall be entitled to State of _South Carolina_ shall be
chuse three, Massachusetts eight, entitled to choose _six_; _the
Rhode Island and Providence State of Georgia ten; the State
Plantations one, Connecticut five, of Alabama nine; the State of
New York six, New Jersey four, Florida two; the State of
Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Mississippi seven; the State of
Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Louisiana six; and the State of
Carolina five, South Carolina Texas six_.
five, and Georgia three.
When vacancies happen in the When vacancies happen in the
Representation from any State, the representation from any State, the
Executive Authority thereof shall Executive authority thereof shall
issue Writs of Election to fill issue writs of election to fill
such Vacancies. such vacancies.
The House of Representatives shall The House of Representatives shall
chuse their Speaker and other choose their Speaker and other
officers; and shall have the sole officers; and shall have the sole
Power of impeachment. power of impeachment; _except that
any judicial or other Federal
officer, resident and acting
solely within the limits of any
State, may be impeached by a vote
of two-thirds of both branches of
the Legislature thereof_.
SECTION 3. The Senate of the SECTION 3. The Senate of the
United States shall be composed _Confederate_ States shall be
of two Senators from each State, composed of two Senators from each
chosen by the Legislature thereof, State, chosen for six years by the
for six Years; and each Senator Legislature thereof, _at the
shall have one Vote. regular session next immediately
preceding the commencement of the
term of service_; and each Senator
shall have one vote.
Immediately after they shall be Immediately after they shall be
assembled in Consequence of the assembled, in consequence of the
first Election, they shall be first election, they shall be
divided as equally as may be into divided as equally as may be into
three Classes. The Seats of the three classes. The seats of the
Senators of the first Class shall Senators of the first class shall
be vacated at the Expiration of be vacated at the expiration of
the second year, of the second the second year; of the second
Class at the Expiration of the class at the expiration of the
fourth Year, and of the third fourth year; and of the third
class at the Expiration of the class at the expiration of the
sixth Year, so that one-third may sixth year; so that one-third may
be chosen every second year; and be chosen every second year; and
if Vacancies happen by if vacancies happen by
Resignation, or otherwise, during resignation, or otherwise, during
the Recess of the Legislature of the recess of the Legislature of
any State, the Executive thereof any State, the Executive thereof
may make temporary Appointments may make temporary appointments
until the next Meeting of the until the next meeting of the
Legislature, which shall then fill Legislature which shall then fill
such Vacancies. such vacancies.
No person shall be a Senator who No person shall be a Senator who
shall not have attained to the Age shall not have attained the age of
of thirty Years, and been nine thirty years, and _be a citizen of
Years a citizen of the United the Confederate_ States; and who
States, and who shall not, when shall not, when elected, be an
elected, be an Inhabitant of that inhabitant of _the_ State for
State for which he shall be which he shall be chosen.
chosen.
The Vice President of the United The Vice President of the
States shall be President of the _Confederate_ States shall be
Senate, but shall have no Vote, President of the Senate, but shall
unless they be equally divided. have no vote unless they be
equally divided.
The Senate shall chuse their other The Senate shall choose their other
Officers, and also a President pro officers; and also a President
tempore, in the absence of the _pro tempore_ in the absence of
Vice President, or when he shall the Vice President, or when he
exercise the Office of President shall exercise the office of
of the United States. President of the _Confederate_
States.
The Senate shall have the sole The Senate shall have the sole
Power to try all Impeachments. power to try all impeachments.
When sitting for that Purpose, When sitting for that purpose,
they shall be on Oath or they shall be on oath or
Affirmation. When the President of affirmation. When the President of
the United States is tried, the the _Confederate_ States is tried,
Chief Justice shall preside: And the Chief Justice shall preside;
no Person shall be convicted and no person shall be convicted
without the Concurrence of without the concurrence of
two-thirds of the Members present. two-thirds of the members present.
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment Judgment in cases of impeachment
shall not extend further than to shall not extend further than to
removal from Office, and removal from office, and
Disqualification to hold and enjoy disqualification to hold and enjoy
any Office of Honour, Trust or any office of honor, trust or
Profit under the United States: profit, under the _Confederate_
but the party convicted shall States; but the party convicted
nevertheless be liable and subject shall, nevertheless, be liable and
to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and subject to indictment, trial,
Punishment, according to Law. judgment and punishment according
to law.
SECTION 4. The Times, Places and SECTION 4. The times, places and
Manner of holding Elections for manner of holding elections for
Senators and Representatives, Senators and Representatives,
shall be prescribed in each State shall be prescribed in each State
by the Legislature thereof: but by the Legislature thereof,
the Congress may at any time by _subject to the provisions of this
Law make or alter such Constitution_; but the Congress
Regulations, except as to the may, at any time, by law, make or
places of chusing Senators. alter such regulations, except
as to the _times_ and places of
choosing Senators.
The Congress shall assemble at The Congress shall assemble at
least once in every Year, and such least once in every year; and such
Meeting shall be on the first meeting shall be on the first
Monday in December, unless they Monday in December, unless they
shall by Law appoint a different shall, by law, appoint a different
Day. day.
SECTION 5. Each House shall be the SECTION 5. Each House shall be the
Judge of the Elections, Returns judge of the elections, returns,
and Qualifications of its own and qualifications of its own
Members, and a majority of each members, and a majority of each
shall constitute a Quorum to do shall constitute a quorum to do
Business; but a smaller number may business; but a smaller number may
adjourn from day to day, and may adjourn from day to day, and may
be authorized to compel the be authorized to compel the
Attendance of absent Members, in attendance of absent members, in
such Manner, and under such such manner and under such
Penalties as each House may penalties as each House may
provide. provide.
Each House may determine the Rules Each House may determine the rules
of its Proceedings, punish its of its proceedings, punish its
Members for disorderly Behaviour, members for disorderly behavior,
and, with the Concurrence of and with the concurrence of
two-thirds, expel a Member. two-thirds of the whole number
expel a member.
Each House shall keep a Journal of Each House shall keep a journal of
its Proceedings, and from time to its proceedings, and from time to
time publish the same, excepting time publish the same, excepting
such Parts as may in their such parts as may in their
judgment require Secrecy; and the judgment require secrecy; and the
Yeas and Nays of the Members of yeas and nays of the members of
either House on any question either House, on any question,
shall, at the Desire of one-fifth shall, at the desire of one-fifth
of those Present, be entered on of those present, be entered on
the Journal. the journal.
Neither House, during the Session Neither House, during the session
of Congress, shall, without the of Congress, shall, without the
Consent of the other, adjourn for consent of the other, adjourn for
more than three days, nor to any more than three days, nor to any
other Place than that in which the other place than that in which the
two Houses shall be sitting. two Houses shall be sitting.