Life In The Confederacy
When the fortunes of the Confederacy in both camp and council began to
ebb, the life of the Southern people had already profoundly changed. The
gallant, delightful, care-free life of the planter class had been
undermined by a war which was eating away its foundations. Economic no
less than political forces were taking from the planter that ideal of
individual liberty as dear to his heart as it had been, ages before, to
his feudal prototype. One of the most important details of the changing
situation had been the relation of the Government to slavery. The
history of the Confederacy had opened with a clash between the extreme
advocates of slavery--the slavery-at-any-price men--and the
Administration. The Confederate Congress had passed a bill ostensibly to
make effective the clause in its constitution prohibiting the African
slave-trade. The quick eye of Davis had detected in it a mode of
evasion, for cargoes of captured slaves were to be confiscated and sold
at public auction. The President had exposed this adroit subterfuge in
his message vetoing the bill, and the slavery-at-any-price men had not
sufficient influence in Congress to override the veto, though they
muttered against it in the public press.
The slavery-at-any-price men did not again conspicuously show their
hands until three years later when the Administration included
emancipation in its policy. The ultimate policy of emancipation was
forced upon the Government by many considerations but more particularly
by the difficulty of securing labor for military purposes. In a country
where the supply of fighting men was limited and the workers were a
class apart, the Government had to employ the only available laborers or
confess its inability to meet the industrial demands of war. But the
available laborers were slaves. How could their services be secured? By
purchase? Or by conscription? Or by temporary impressment?
Though Davis and his advisers were prepared to face all the hazards
involved in the purchase or confiscation of slaves, the traditional
Southern temper instantly recoiled from the suggestion. A Government
possessed of great numbers of slaves, whether bought or appropriated,
would have in its hands a gigantic power, perhaps for industrial
competition with private owners, perhaps even for organized military
control. Besides, the Government might at any moment by emancipating its
slaves upset the labor system of the country. Furthermore, the
opportunities for favoritism in the management of state-owned slaves
were beyond calculation. Considerations such as these therefore explain
the watchful jealousy of the planters toward the Government whenever it
proposed to acquire property in slaves.
It is essential not to attribute this social-political dread of
government ownership of slaves merely to the clutch of a wealthy class
on its property. Too many observers, strangely enough, see the latter
motive to the exclusion of the former. Davis himself was not, it would
seem, free from this confusion. He insisted that neither slaves nor land
were taxed by the Confederacy, and between the lines he seems to
attribute to the planter class the familiar selfishness of massed
capital. He forgot that the tax in kind was combined with an income tax.
In theory, at least, the slave and the land--even non-farming land--were
taxed. However, the dread of a slave-owning Government prevented any
effective plan for supplying the army with labor except through the
temporary impressment of slaves who were eventually to be returned to
their owners. The policy of emancipation had to wait.
Bound up in the labor question was the question of the control of slaves
during the war. In the old days when there were plenty of white men in
the countryside, the roads were carefully patrolled at night, and no
slave ventured to go at large unless fully prepared to prove his
identity. But with the coming of war the comparative smallness of the
fighting population made it likely from the first that the countryside
everywhere would be stripped of its white guardians. In that event, who
would be left to control the slaves? Early in the war a slave police was
provided for by exempting from military duty overseers in the ratio
approximately of one white to twenty slaves. But the marvelous
faithfulness of the slaves, who nowhere attempted to revolt, made these
precautions unnecessary. Later laws exempted one overseer on every
plantation of fifteen slaves, not so much to perform patrol duty as to
increase the productivity of plantation labor.
This "Fifteen Slave" Law was one of many instances that were caught up
by the men of small property as evidence that the Government favored the
rich. A much less defensible law, and one which was bitterly attacked
for the same reason, was the unfortunate measure permitting the hiring
of substitutes by men drafted into the army. Eventually, the clamor
against this law caused its repeal, but before that time it had worked
untold harm as apparent evidence of "a rich man's war and a poor man's
fight." Extravagant stories of the avoidance of military duty by the
ruling class, though in the main they were mere fairy tales, changed the
whole atmosphere of Southern life. The old glad confidence uniting the
planter class with the bulk of the people had been impaired.
Misapprehension appeared on both sides. Too much has been said lately,
however, in justification of the poorer classes who were thus wakened
suddenly to a distrust of the aristocracy; and too little has been said
of the proud recoil of the aristocracy in the face of a sudden,
credulous perversion of its motives--a perversion inspired by the
pinching of the shoe, and yet a shoe that pinched one class as hard as
it did another. It is as unfair to charge the planter with selfishness
in opposing the appropriation of slaves as it is to make the same charge
against the small farmers for resisting tithes. In face of the record,
the planter comes off somewhat the better of the two; but it must be
remembered that he had the better education, the larger mental horizon.
The Confederacy had long recognized women of all classes as the most
dauntless defenders of the cause. The women of the upper classes passed
without a tremor from a life of smiling ease to a life of extreme
hardship. One day, their horizon was without a cloud; another day, their
husbands and fathers had gone to the front. Their luxuries had
disappeared, and they were reduced to plain hard living, toiling in a
thousand ways to find provision and clothing, not only for their own
children but for the poorer families of soldiers. The women of the poor
throughout the South deserve similar honor. Though the physical shock of
the change may not have been so great, they had to face the same deep
realities--hunger and want, anxiety over the absent soldiers, solicitude
for children, grief for the dead. One of the pathetic aspects of
Confederate life was the household composed of several families, all
women and children, huddled together without a man or even a half-grown
lad to be their link with the mill and the market. In those regions
where there were few slaves and the exemption of overseers did not
operate, such households were numerous.
The great privations which people endured during the Confederacy have
passed into familiar tradition. They are to be traced mainly to three
causes: to the blockade, to the inadequate system of transportation, and
to the heartlessness of speculators. The blockade was the real destroyer
of the South. Besides ruining the whole policy based on King Cotton,
besides impeding to a vast extent the inflow of munitions from Europe,
it also deprived Southern life of numerous articles which were hard to
relinquish--not only such luxuries as tea and coffee, but also such
utter necessities as medicines. And though the native herbs were
diligently studied, though the Government established medical
laboratories with results that were not inconsiderable, the shortage of
medicines remained throughout the war a distressing feature of Southern
life. The Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond and a foundry at Selma,
Alabama, were the only mills in the South capable of casting the heavy
ordnance necessary for military purposes. And the demand for powder
mills and gun factories to provide for the needs of the army was
scarcely greater than the demand for cotton mills and commercial
foundries to supply the wants of the civil population. The Government
worked without ceasing to keep pace with the requirements of the
situation, and, in view of the immense difficulties which it had to
face, it was fairly successful in supplying the needs of the army.
Powder was provided by the Niter and Mining Bureau; lead for Confederate
bullets was collected from many sources--even from the window-weights of
the houses; iron was brought from the mines of Alabama; guns came from
newly built factories; and machines and tools were part of the precious
freight of the blockade-runners. Though the poorly equipped mills turned
a portion of the cotton crop into textiles, and though everything that
was possible was done to meet the needs of the people, the supply of
manufactures was sadly inadequate. The universal shortage was betrayed
by the limitation of the size of most newspapers to a single sheet, and
the desperate situation clearly and completely revealed by the way in
which, as a last resort, the Confederates were compelled to repair their
railroads by pulling up the rails of one road in order to repair another
that the necessities of war rendered indispensable.
The railway system, if such it can be called, was one of the weaknesses
of the Confederacy. Before the war the South had not felt the need of
elaborate interior communication, for its commerce in the main went
seaward, and thence to New England or to Europe. Hitherto the railway
lines had seen no reason for merging their local character in extensive
combinations. Owners of short lines were inclined by tradition to resist
even the imperative necessities of war and their stubborn conservatism
was frequently encouraged by the short-sighted parochialism of the
towns. The same pitiful narrowness that led the peasant farmer to
threaten rebellion against the tax in kind led his counterpart in the
towns to oppose the War Department in its efforts to establish through
railroad lines because they threatened to impair local business
interests. A striking instance of this disinclination towards
coöperation is the action of Petersburg. Two railroads terminated at
this point but did not connect, and it was an ardent desire of the
military authorities to link the two and convert them into one. The
town, however, unable to see beyond its boundaries and resolute in its
determination to save its transfer business, successfully obstructed the
needs of the army. ¹
¹ See an article on The Confederate Government and the Railroads in the
American Historical Review, July, 1917, by Charles W. Ramsdell.
As a result of this lack of efficient organization an immense congestion
resulted all along the railroads. Whether this, rather than a failure in
supply, explains the approach of famine in the latter part of the war,
it is today very difficult to determine. In numerous state papers of the
time, the assertion was reiterated that the yield of food was abundant
and that the scarcity of food at many places, including the cities and
the battle fronts, was due to defects in transportation. Certain it is
that the progress of supplies from one point to another was intolerably
slow.
All this want of coördination facilitated speculation. We shall see
hereafter how merciless this speculation became and we shall even hear
of profits on food rising to more than four hundred per cent. However,
the oft-quoted prices of the later years--when, for instance, a pair of
shoes cost a hundred dollars--signify little, for they rested on an
inflated currency. None the less they inspired the witticism that one
should take money to market in a basket and bring provisions home in
one's pocketbook. Endless stories could be told of speculators hoarding
food and watching unmoved the sufferings of a famished people. Said
Bishop Pierce, in a sermon before the General Assembly of Georgia, on
Fast Day, in March, 1863: "Restlessness and discontent prevail....
Extortion, pitiless extortion is making havoc in the land. We are
devouring each other. Avarice with full barns puts the bounties of
Providence under bolts and bars, waiting with eager longings for higher
prices.... The greed of gain ... stalks among us unabashed by the heroic
sacrifice of our women or the gallant deeds of our soldiers. Speculation
in salt and bread and meat runs riot in defiance of the thunders of the
pulpit, and executive interference and the horrors of threatened
famine." In 1864, the Government found that quantities of grain paid in
under the tax as new-grown were mildewed. It was grain of the previous
year which speculators had held too long and now palmed off on the
Government to supply the army.
Amid these desperate conditions the fate of soldiers' families became
everywhere a tragedy. Unless the soldier was a land-owner his family was
all but helpless. With a depreciated currency and exaggerated prices,
his pay, whatever his rank, was too little to count in providing for his
dependents. Local charity, dealt out by state and county boards, by
relief associations, and by the generosity of neighbors, formed the
barrier between his family and starvation. The landless soldier, with a
family at home in desperate straits, is too often overlooked when
unimaginative people heap up the statistics of "desertion" in the latter
half of the war.
It was in this period, too, that amid the terrible shrinkage of the
defensive lines "refugeeing" became a feature of Southern life. From the
districts over which the waves of war rolled back and forth helpless
families--women, children, slaves--found precarious safety together with
great hardship by withdrawing to remote places which invasion was little
likely to reach. An Odyssey of hard travel, often by night and half
secret, is part of the war tradition of thousands of Southern families.
And here, as always, the heroic women, smiling, indomitable, are the
center of the picture. Their flight to preserve the children was no
small test of courage. Almost invariably they had to traverse desolate
country, with few attendants, through forests, and across rivers, where
the arm of the law was now powerless to protect them. Outlaws, defiant
of the authorities both civil and military,--ruthless men of whom we
shall hear again,--roved those great unoccupied spaces so characteristic
of the Southern countryside. Many a family legend preserves still the
sense of breathless caution, of pilgrimage in the night-time intently
silent for fear of these masterless men. When the remote rendezvous had
been reached, there a colony of refugees drew together in a steadfast
despair, unprotected by their own fighting men. What strange sad pages
in the history of American valor were filled by these women outwardly
calm, their children romping after butterflies in a glory of sunshine,
while horrid tales drifted in of deeds done by the masterless men in the
forest just beyond the horizon, and far off on the soul's horizon
fathers, husbands, brothers, held grimly the lines of last defense!