American Experiment (153 page)

Southern leaders had taken their measure of the man. “He fights to win, that chap,” they were saying in Richmond. “He is not distracted by a thousand side issues. He does not see them. He is narrow and sure, sees only in a straight line.”

As Grant came to grips with Lee in Virginia during the spring of 1864, the new general-in-chief found not only that a strategy of attrition was correct but that he had no alternative. For the new strategist-in-chief under Lincoln could not outgeneral the master tactician. Time and again Lee outmaneuvered Grant, and when the two armies came to grips with each
other—in the horrifying Battle of the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor—the Union’s casualties totaled nearly 60,000 men, almost twice the Confederate losses. By mid-June Grant was moving his troops south of the James River to Petersburg, where he planned to cut Lee’s transport to the south and attack Richmond from the rear. When Petersburg fought off the Union attacks, inflicting heavy Federal losses, Grant settled down to a long siege. It would last nine months. Meanwhile, strong Union attacks continued in the west.

Lincoln’s strategy of exerting pressure on all fronts, combined with Grant’s bulldog tactics, required a massive Northern effort in production, manpower, and transport—and called forth a forceful Southern response. Since the early months of the war, when men had first streamed to the colors on a three-month or (in the South) twelve-month basis, both commands had been struggling to keep their ranks filled. Facing threatened Yankee offensives in the spring of 1862, the Confederate Congress moved boldly to make all able-bodied white males between eighteen and thirty-five liable to military service for three years. Only a year later did the United States Congress pass a draft act, which made all men twenty to forty-five liable to military service, unless they paid a $300 commutation fee or found a substitute who would enlist for three years. These and later measures on both sides were heavily inegalitarian, allowing both Northerners who were wealthy enough and many Southerners with upper-class occupations—including the owner or overseer of any large plantation—to avoid the draft.

“A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” some had grumbled, and now they felt they had proof. To fight the war for the rich man—and even worse, for the “niggers” who were already taking jobs from whites— aroused muttering across the North. Nowhere did the first drawings catalyze feeling more than in the simmering working-class districts of Northern cities and the “secessionist” areas of the Midwest. In Manhattan, mobs of working people, mainly Irish, roamed the streets for four days, burning draft headquarters, pillaging homes, attacking Greeley’s New York
Tribune
building, putting the Colored Orphan Asylum to the torch, and hunting down, torturing, and lynching blacks. Troops had to be brought in from the Gettysburg campaign to quell the riots.

“No measure of the war was a more stunning disappointment” than the North’s conscription of 1863, Allan Nevins concluded. Inequitable and inefficient, the draft fostered a hive of bounty jumpers, substitute brokers, emigrant runners, collusive doctors. The draft act did, however, stimulate
“volunteering,” so, paradoxically, a small fraction of the Union army finally was supplied through this measure. In the South the draft met little open resistance, but as Confederate fortunes sagged, men took to the hills or woods instead of reporting, or hid with family or friends. Some Southerners contended that conscription was unconstitutional, a threat to personal liberty and states’ rights, the very things they were fighting for. Several governors defied Richmond’s efforts to enforce conscription within their borders. Still and all, both North and South mobilized an immense number of men—about a million and a half in the Union army, it is estimated, and almost a million in the Confederate.

To supply these men was, in some respects, an even more exacting task. Suddenly in 1861 there were hundreds of regiments to begin to equip—five hundred on the Union side alone. The records of a high quartermaster officer in the Army of the Potomac showed him, according to Nevins, “receipting within a short period for 39 barrels of coal, 7½ tons of oats, 23 boxes of bandages, 31 of soap, 4 of lanterns, 80 beef cattle and 450 sheep, 180 mules, a miscellany of ropes, nails, rags, forges, lumber, and wagons, rolls of canvas, shipments of stoves, parcels of wire, ‘sundries,’ and sacks—how the army needed sacks!”

Despite enormous confusion, incompetence, and corruption, the rich agricultural North could easily supply such needs; by the end of 1864 Lincoln could report that the national resources “are, then, unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” The economic expansion of the 1850s had laid the foundation for a factory as well as a farm spurt. A prime need was shoes, the things that armies literally travel on. By 1860 over 100,000 persons worked in the boot and shoe industry, in their homes or in factories where machines sewed the seams of the uppers, which were then sewn by hand, or pegged, to the sole. A Massachusetts inventor, Lyman Reed Blake, developed a machine to sew the soles to the uppers, then he traveled through New England teaching workers how to use it. Within two years of Sumter the new machines had stitched 2.5 million shoes. The Confederacy lagged behind, resulting in its troops often going bootless into battle—though Union men too, on occasion, had to march and fight without shoes.

Beset by the loss of Southern goods and markets and with swiftly changing needs, some Northern industries faltered early in the war, then experimented, improvised, and recovered. While cotton textiles declined, woolen mills hummed away, soon doubling production. Both iron and coal production dropped at first and then rose to the highest levels ever. Here again, the South fell behind badly. “The South lacked factories, raw materials, machines, managers who knew how to organize production, and skilled laborers,” in T. Harry Williams’s summation. “The largest
ironwork in the section, and the only big installation of any kind, the Tredegar plant in Richmond, Virginia, had to operate at half or less of its capacity throughout the war because it could not procure sufficient supplies of pig iron,” and because it was also short of trained workers.

The Northern munitions industries experimented and innovated as they expanded lustily. Armies and armories throughout the North and South had about half-a-million smoothbore muskets when Sumter fell, and 30,000 or so rifles or rifled muskets. Immensely outproduced, Richmond was in many respects more innovative and daring than Washington in both spurring and undertaking war production. Needing desperately to make up for their industrial disadvantages, the Confederates centralized war production to a degree that would not be seen again until 1917. Their war and navy departments in Richmond directed rail traffic, spurred iron production, constructed ships—including twenty-two ironclads and an experimental submarine—and built up vast stocks of munitions. Even the home spinning of cloth by Southern women was coordinated by local quartermaster depots. Ironically, the Confederacy would run out of funds before it ran out of bullets.

With the Harpers Ferry armory lost when fighting began, the North had only its small federal establishment in Springfield, Massachusetts. A wild scramble for rifles on the part of competing states and armies produced a spate of orders for foreign arms and a burst of production at home. Slowly production was shifted from smoothbores to rifles, from the old muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, from single-shot carbines to repeaters, amid much confusion, skepticism in the Ordnance Bureau, and wasted time. Artillery too was improved, but infantrymen on both sides often preferred their supporting gunners to use old-fashioned canister or grape that could mow down advancing enemy troops like a “huge sawed-off shotgun.”

Moving these immense masses of men and munitions put enormous demands on boats, trains, and—all along the front—horses. After the lower Mississippi was cut off early in the war, river transport expanded to support the Union armies above Vicksburg, and west-east grain and other traffic grew so robustly that the Erie Canal carried a quarter more tonnage than in the feverish fifties. Ship builders at the same time were able to double their production of merchant tonnage for the high seas. At the other end of the long transport lines, quantities of horses were needed to draw wagon trains, ambulances, and artillery. By late 1862 the Army of the Potomac was receiving 1,500 horses a week and demanding more.

It was the iron horse, though, that most consequentially joined the colors, to a degree never before known in war. Despite all the other
demands on iron and machinery, and despite the destruction of vast stretches of track in the South, the four years of war added 4,000 miles to the railroad network, though growth was slower than in the 1850s. Railroad men double-tracked major lines, built hundreds of bridges, standardized railroad gauges, fashioned efficient new terminals for transferring freight and passengers. Whole new railways were built, most notably the Atlantic & Great Western, which cut through Pennsylvania and Ohio to points west. Patriotism was not the only motive. “At no former period,” Horace Greeley’s
Tribune
noted, “has the whole Northern railroad system been so prosperous.”

Nothing seemed to daunt the railroad builders. After the Confederates had destroyed a key bridge, Herman Haupt, a forty-five-year-old railroad genius, set to work to span Potomac Creek at top speed. Soldier-workmen labored in a bone-chilling rain. “While one crew hoisted and locked up the notched crib logs, others went into the dripping woods to cut and trim selected saplings and fetch the long poles to the bridge site,” George Edgar Turner wrote. “Men, tools and time were too scarce to strip them of their bark. Above the cribs three stories of trestlework were to be erected…. At the second-story level of the trestle a new difficulty presented itself. Very few of the men had the ability or the courage to clamber about on the wet and slippery ropes so far above the rock-strewn bed of the gorge.” Some men had to climb farther up to the eighty-foot level. But within two weeks the track was laid and the first engine pulled across inch by inch with ropes to see if the wooden crosspieces would hold up. They did.

Visiting the bridge, Lincoln seemed almost ecstatic. “That man Haupt has built a bridge across the Potomac Creek 400 feet long and nearly 100 feet high,” he told war officials on returning to Washington. “Upon my word, gentlemen,” he added, “there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.”

Men, matériel—and money. War’s appetite for the last was as voracious as for manpower and munitions. Ultimately the war would cost the Confederacy $2 billion, the Union more than $3 billion—unimaginable figures at the start of the conflict. At war’s outbreak, money seemed short everywhere: the federal government was running a deficit, the seceding states had tiny financial resources, businessmen north and south suffered from disrupted trade, and even private citizens lacked cash. By the end of 1861 Ralph Waldo Emerson was complaining that his plight was as hard as that of his fellow countrymen.

“The 1 January [1862] has found me in quite as poor plight as the rest of the Americans. Not a penny from my books since last June—which
usually yield 5, or $600.00 a year,” he wrote his brother William. “The Atlantic Bank omitting its dividends: My Mad River & Lake Erie Bonds (Sandusky) which ought to pay $140
per ann.
now for several years making no sign. Lidian’s Plymouth House now for 3 years has paid nothing and still refuses.… Then lastly, almost all income from lectures has quite ceased….” They were economizing, and he was trying to sell a woodlot. But better this “grinding” than any peace restoring the “old rottenness.”

Expecting a short war, both Richmond and Washington had improvised desperately during the first years of the struggle. Inexperienced in finance, Chase had resorted to short-term funding, plunging into a huge loan program and then into the issuance of greenbacks, as they would come to be called, through the Legal Tender Act of February 1862. He opposed the one device that would have permitted a pay-as-you-go strategy—heavy income and excise taxation—and only strong congressional leadership had produced by August of 1861 an income tax of 3 percent on incomes over $800 and 5 percent over $10,000. Southern lawmakers, wary of general tax measures, relied first on bond issues and then on the issuance of several hundred millions in treasury notes—an invitation to soaring inflation.

By mid-1863 Northern finances had considerably improved, after extensive experimenting driven by iron necessity. Greenbacks steadily depreciated in value, but not nearly so much as Richmond’s treasury notes. The Confederate Congress at last passed a general tax bill, embracing an 8 percent sales tax on consumer goods, a 10 percent profits tax, and even a graduated income tax, but these taxes were highly unpopular and poorly enforced. In the North, by contrast, the income tax was producing almost 20 percent of total federal receipts, and manufacturers’ and sales taxes were bringing in even more, by the end of the war. Still, the Northern public debt was heading toward almost $3 billion by mid-1865.

This colossal expansion virtually transformed the nation’s finances. Before the war, operating in what Bray Hammond has called a “jungle” of laissez-faire, 1,600 state banks circulated several thousand different kinds of banknotes. But the old Jacksonian hostility toward a centralized banking structure could not survive the heavy demands of near-total war. Early in 1863 Congress passed the National Bank Act, a vital first step toward a national banking system. Backed, predictably, by most congressional Republicans and opposed by virtually all the Democrats, the measure provided for the chartering of national banks, with authority to issue bank notes up to 90 percent of their United States bond holdings. Toward the end of the war, Congress drove state banknotes out of circulation through a 10 percent tax on them. Soon national far outnumbered state banks.

A spate of other national measures reached into people’s lives to an
unprecedented degree. The 1862 Homestead Act granting citizens—virtually free—160 acres of surveyed public domain after five years of continuous residence; the Morrill Act giving each loyal state 30,000 acres for every member of its congressional delegation in order to endow agricultural and mechanical colleges; the Pacific Railway Acts authorizing a transcontinental railroad and providing huge grants of land for railroad rights-of-way; a homestead bonus for soldiers—these and other measures, combined with state and city actions, were propelled both by wartime necessity and by private interests vigorously represented in the Capitol and White House lobbies. For the first time—and it would be for only a short time—the federal government became a presence in people’s lives.