The Confederate States of America was a real country for four years and two months. It had a president, a bicameral congress, a supreme court that was authorised but never actually constituted, a treasury, a post office that turned a profit, a navy department that commissioned ironclads in British yards, a diplomatic service that failed, and — by the end — an army of conscripts raised by a national draft and fed by a national tax collected in kind. Understanding why it lost requires taking all of that seriously, because the Confederacy did not collapse from external pressure alone. A great deal of what destroyed it was built into its design.
The design problem was there from the beginning and it was never solved. A nation founded on the sovereignty of its constituent states had to fight a modern war, and modern war requires exactly the concentration of central authority that the founding principle denied. Every measure the Richmond government took to survive — conscription, impressment, taxation, the suspension of habeas corpus, the control of railways — was denounced by somebody as the very tyranny the country had seceded to escape. And the people making that argument most loudly were not northerners. They were Confederate governors, Confederate newspaper editors and the Confederate vice-president.
The government at Richmond
Jefferson Davis was, on paper, the best-qualified man in either country. He was a West Point graduate, a Mexican War regimental commander wounded at Buena Vista, a United States senator and a genuinely reforming secretary of war under Pierce, who had modernised the army's weapons and enlarged it. He wanted a field command rather than the presidency, and said so.
He was also a disastrous chief executive of a coalition. Davis was proud, thin-skinned, incapable of letting an argument go, and chronically unwell — neuralgia and a recurring eye inflammation that blinded him in one eye and put him in a darkened room for days at a time. He quarrelled with Joseph E. Johnston over seniority in 1861 and the quarrel poisoned the western command for the rest of the war. He defended Braxton Bragg, who was loathed by every general under him, long past the point of reason. He went through six secretaries of war in four years. Judah Benjamin, who held three cabinet posts and was the ablest man in the government, survived largely because he had the tact to let Davis be right.
The Confederate Congress met in the Virginia State Capitol, and it was an oddity: it had no political parties. The secession movement had subsumed the old party divisions, so there was no organised opposition and no organised support either — no whip, no bloc, no machinery for assembling a majority. Every measure had to be argued from first principles with a shifting body of individuals. Historians have generally concluded that the absence of parties, which was celebrated at the time as evidence of unity, was a serious structural weakness: it left Davis with no mechanism for managing his legislature and no way of channelling dissent into something short of obstruction.
Conscription, and the twenty-negro law
The twelve-month enlistments of 1861 began expiring in the spring of 1862, in the middle of McClellan's advance up the Peninsula, and the armies faced dissolution. On the 16th of April 1862 the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription act in American history, making all white men between eighteen and thirty-five liable for three years' service and extending the terms of men already enlisted. The upper limit rose to forty-five that September and to fifty in February 1864; the lower fell to seventeen. By the end, Davis was calling up the cradle and the grave, and the Virginia Military Institute’s cadets, the youngest of them fifteen, were put into the line at New Market in May 1864.
Conscription worked, in the sense that it kept armies in the field that would otherwise have gone home. It also did more political damage than any other act of the Confederate government. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia declared it unconstitutional, wrote Davis a series of furious letters, and set about exempting thousands of Georgians by appointing them to state offices — militia officers, justices of the peace, anything with a title. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina did much the same. Between them they withheld men and supplies on a scale that materially affected campaigns.
The exemption that did the deepest harm was passed in October 1862. The twenty-negro law released from service one white man on every plantation with twenty or more enslaved people, on the stated ground that somebody had to supervise them and that the risk of insurrection was real. The logic was not absurd. The political effect was catastrophic: it converted an abstract complaint about a slaveholders' war into a specific, legible grievance with a number attached. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight was not a slogan invented by later historians. It was written in letters home from the ranks, in the upland counties of North Carolina and Alabama and Georgia, by men whose families were starving while a neighbour's son stayed home.
Substitution made it worse. Until the practice was abolished at the end of 1863, a drafted man could pay another to serve in his place, and by 1863 the going rate in Richmond had reached several thousand dollars in depreciated currency. Both the Union and the Confederacy allowed it, both regretted it, and in a society already stratified by the ownership of human beings it read as exactly what it was.
Paper money and the price of bacon
The Confederacy financed the war by printing money. It had almost no gold, a tax base that its own political culture made it difficult to tax, and a cotton crop it had voluntarily embargoed. Of the money the government raised, something under 6 per cent came from taxation and about 30 per cent from bonds; the rest was printed. There was no central bank, no legal-tender law — Confederate notes were never legal tender, merely promises to pay two years after a peace treaty that never came — and the individual states, cities, railways and even shopkeepers issued notes of their own alongside the national currency.
The result was the sharpest inflation in North American history. Prices rose roughly ninety-fold over four years. Flour that cost $6 a barrel in Richmond in 1861 reached $40 by early 1863 and several hundred dollars by the last winter of the war. A pair of boots cost more than a private's annual pay several times over. By the last winter the army could not buy food it could see in warehouses, because farmers would not take the paper and the impressment agents who took it anyway paid schedule prices far below the market and so drove supplies into hiding.
On the 2nd of April 1863 several hundred women gathered at a Baptist church in Richmond, marched on the governor's mansion to demand bread, and then broke into the shops of Cary and Main Streets and took flour, bacon, clothing and — in some accounts — jewellery. The crowd grew into the thousands. Davis came out and addressed them personally from a wagon, emptied his pockets, and told them that the militia would fire in five minutes. They dispersed. The government suppressed reporting of the riot and asked the telegraph companies not to carry the story north. There were comparable disturbances in Mobile, Atlanta, Salisbury, Macon and a dozen other towns.
The war against the government
Opposition to Richmond was not marginal. Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, spent much of the war at home in Georgia denouncing the administration's centralising measures, and in March 1864 delivered a speech to the Georgia legislature attacking conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus in terms a Union propagandist would have hesitated to use. Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, became one of Davis's most venomous critics. Brown and Vance ran their states as quasi-independent powers.
Beneath the political opposition there was a real internal war. The upland South — western North Carolina, east Tennessee, northern Alabama, the Ozarks, and the counties of western Virginia that seceded from secession and entered the Union as West Virginia in 1863 — contained large populations who had never wanted this and would not fight for it. Jones County, Mississippi, produced an armed Unionist band under Newton Knight that the Confederacy never suppressed. Deserters formed bands in the mountains and fought local home guards with real casualties. In the Shelton Laurel valley of North Carolina in January 1863, Confederate troops shot thirteen prisoners, including a thirteen-year-old boy, in a reprisal that the state's own governor condemned.
Desertion became the central manpower problem of the last eighteen months. The best estimates put it at something over 100,000 men, concentrated among non-slaveholders and heaviest after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Letters from home were the usual proximate cause, and the letters were about hunger. Lee's army, which held together better than any other Confederate force, was still losing men steadily to the roads south through the winter of 1864.
The four million
The largest internal problem was the one the Confederacy could least discuss. Nearly forty per cent of the population of the seceded states — about 3.5 million people — were enslaved, and the war was fought over whether they would remain so. The government's entire economic and military calculation assumed their continued labour, and from the first summer of the war that assumption began to fail.
It failed by walking. Wherever Union forces came within reach, enslaved people left: three men arriving at Fort Monroe in May 1861, whom Benjamin Butler declined to return on the reasoning that they were contraband of war, became thousands within months and several hundred thousand by 1865. They brought intelligence, they took up work as labourers, teamsters and cooks for the Union army, and from 1863 something like 150,000 of the men who had been enslaved in the Confederate states enlisted in the United States Colored Troops and came back as soldiers. The Confederacy lost their labour and its enemy gained it, twice over.
Behind the lines, the system loosened without breaking. Planters moved people inland away from the Union columns — refugeeing, the word was — breaking up families in the process. Work discipline decayed as the white men left. Impressment took perhaps tens of thousands of enslaved labourers to dig fortifications, often returning them sick or not at all, and slaveholders resisted the government's demands for them as fiercely as they resisted taxation. The historian Stephanie McCurry's formulation is the sharpest: the Confederacy was a nation founded to exclude the majority of the people living in it, and both of the excluded majorities — the enslaved and the white women left to run farms without men — forced their way into its politics before it ended.
In the last winter the contradiction became explicit. Patrick Cleburne had proposed in January 1864 that the Confederacy arm and free its slaves; Davis suppressed the paper and Cleburne was never promoted again. By November 1864 Davis himself was moving towards the same position, and on the 13th of March 1865 the Congress finally authorised black enlistment — narrowly, and without promising freedom, because a majority could not be assembled for that. Howell Cobb had stated the objection plainly the year before: if slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong. Two companies drilled in Capitol Square in Richmond. Three weeks later the city fell.
End of Chapter V