Coming Fury, Volume 1 (70 page)

Mr. Davis’s confidence seemed justified; his new government,
with everything to do and little to do it with, had accomplished a good deal, and when he spoke, it had upward of 110,000 men under arms, not counting home guards and militia. But although volunteers were coming forward in an enthusiastic flood tide, there were not nearly enough weapons for them, and there was no possibility that the shortage could be overcome in the immediate future. Joe Johnston, up in the Valley, was calling for reinforcements, and a week before he addressed Congress, Davis had felt compelled to explain to the general that there were no reinforcements because men could not be armed. “From Missi. I could get 20,000 men who impatiently wait for notice that they can be armed,” he wrote. “In Georgia numerous tenders are made to serve for any time, any place, and to these and other offers I am still constrained to answer I have not arms to supply you.”
⁸

This was a hard message to send to a soldier whose army was in contact with the enemy, but there was no help for it. At Manassas, Beauregard was calling for troops even more insistently than Johnston was, and although he was getting a few, he was not getting nearly as many as he believed he needed, and one of his staff officers was angrily complaining that the President and the War Department would send no help “unless it is
dug out of them
.” With bitter cynicism, he wrote: “I hear that the Prest. will send re-enforcements here. Perhaps tomorrow 4000 will arrive. We want 15,000.”
⁹

This explosion was natural enough, in view of the fact that the Federals were obviously about to start an offensive campaign, but it was unjust because there was nothing whatever that Davis could immediately do as far as equipment was concerned. The North also had a shortage of arms just now, but it would be overcome as soon as the country got itself organized for war; the case in the Confederacy was different because the South had so little to organize. The very machinery of government had been improvised-improvised in a land whose fundamental faith was that the government which governs least is best—and this machinery was attempting to operate in a land where the financial and industrial base for a large-scale war simply did not exist. The lack of guns was the first symptom of a deficiency which could never really
be overcome and which, if the war went on long enough, would be fatal.

The South, to be blunt, had a grave shortage of capital and of manufacturing capacity. Its wealth consisted largely of land and slaves. In 1860 it had produced a little less than 10 per cent of the total of American manufactured articles. The shortage of hard money was already being felt; the different state governments, overextended by money spent in the early days of secession, were being obliged to borrow in a very bad money market. Specie payments to individuals were being suspended, treasury notes based on state credit were being issued, and the Congress at Richmond within a month would be authorizing the issuance of $100,000,000 in Confederate treasury notes so that it could reimburse the states for what they were spending on war preparations. The touch of inflation was beginning to be felt before the war was well begun.

Mr. Davis had spoken with pride of the promising production of export staples. To possess a large surplus of cotton, tobacco, and sugar was good, provided that the export markets could in fact be reached, but there were difficulties. The Southern carrying trade had been conducted largely in Northern vessels, which were no longer at hand. The Northern market itself was of course gone: two months ago Davis had signed a law prohibiting the export of cotton except through the seaports, which Northern ships could not enter. Europe remained, and Commissioners Yancey, Mann, and Rost were overseas reminding the British and the French about all of that cotton. They were getting no hint that actual recognition would be extended, and they probably did not expect to, but the cotton business looked more promising. In Paris the Count de Morny, believed to be in the confidence of the Emperor Napoleon, had assured them (as they recently reported to Richmond) that “as long as we produced cotton for sale, France and England would see that their vessels reached the ports where it was to be had.” In London the British Foreign Minister, Lord John Russell, had indicated that his government would go no farther than its declaration extending the rights of belligerents to the Confederate states, but the commissioners felt that this attitude might change if “the necessity for having cotton becomes pressing.”
¹⁰
The necessity was not yet pressing. There had been a big carryover of cotton stocks
overseas—so heavy that New England textile mills would actually be able to import some from Europe during the year ahead—but time might tell a different story. The great supply of export staples was unquestionably a long-term asset, but right now it did nothing to relieve the shortage of war goods.

There were Southerners, then and later, who argued that President Davis should have had his government buy all of the cotton in the South, rush it to Europe, and use the proceeds to buy munitions, warships, and industrial equipment. Theoretically the idea was sound enough, but as a practical matter it was all but out of the question. A far-reaching action of that kind was almost unthinkable in a new nation which owed its existence, primarily, to the belief that the central government ought to have and to use as few powers as possible. So immense a purchase would have given the inflationary wave much impetus. The ships to carry the cotton did not exist. For the moment it seemed best to leave the cotton where it was. Let Europe get hungry for it.

In addition there was the Yankee blockade. Although this now was not much more than a nuisance, it was imperceptibly but inexorably tightening, week by week. Secretary Welles had told the Federal Congress that the navy had twenty-two blockaders in service along the Atlantic Coast and twenty-one more on duty in the Gulf. It had already bought twelve steamers and chartered nine more, and was giving them guns; as combat ships they would be of no account, but as blockaders they would be quite serviceable. Contracts had been let for the building of twenty-one gunboats, to be delivered in ninety days, and a number of larger warships were under construction. Since anything that would float and carry a gun could halt an unarmed merchantman, even sailing ships were being chartered, armed, and put into service, and most of the warships in the overseas squadrons were being recalled.
¹¹
The blockade was extremely loose right now and it never would become air-tight, but in the long run it would produce strangulation.

Business in the South presented contrasts this summer. Some lines were almost in collapse. In Mississippi, a Vicksburg businessman was complaining that “there is no business doing. The shelves are bare—the merchants lolling on the counters. There is no money, no credit, and provisions scarce and dear.”
¹²
But other lines were
booming. The trade in arms, shoes, clothing, and anything else the army might use was going at a great rate. Along the Kentucky border, business was exceptionally lively. As a neutral state, Kentucky offered a notable field for trade with the Yankees, and the opportunity was not being missed. (As Lincoln had perceived, neutrality here was a positive asset to the South.) Confederate agents were in Europe, or on their way there, to buy arms—finding themselves, more often than not, in direct competition with Federal agents who had gone abroad to do the same thing.

To buy at home or abroad the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind. Most of them had been conceived as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports, and they had been built in many different gauges so that no interchange of cars was possible. On the map Richmond had good rail connections with the rest of the Confederacy, but it was not possible to send a loaded freight car from the deep South to Richmond. At numerous junction points each car had to be unloaded, the freight moved cross-town by dray and then reloaded on different cars, and if there was any sort of delay (which was usually the case), the freight had to be stored in a warehouse until the delay was over. There could be no smooth flow of freight traffic; it was bound to move slowly and jerkily, with more or less spoilage and wastage along the way.

This handicap, to be sure, existed also in the North. But there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it
could
be removed, but that in the South it could not. The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all of its locomotives, rails, spikes, car wheels, car bodies, and other items of equipment had come from the North. The famous Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond could make some of these things, but it could not make nearly enough, and, besides, it was swamped now with war orders. The South would have to get through the war on the railroad
layout it had when the war began: a layout which was inadequate even at the start and which could never be properly repaired or maintained. As the nation’s need for an adequate transportation system increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker and there was no earthly help for it. Much freight would of course move in wagons along country roads, in the age-old way, but the same pinch would apply here; the wagons came from Yankee shops, and replacements would have to be improvised out of inadequate means. The Confederacy’s transportation problem, like its problem of finance and production, was fundamentally insoluble unless the war could be kept short.
¹³

These problems, indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely toward final defeat that one is forced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom, these were
Yankee
problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who were familiar with valor, the classics, and heroic attitudes.
¹⁴
Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it. Howell Cobb had spoken for his class when, in February, he declared that the South’s near-monopoly on cotton production was an asset stronger than armies or navies. “We know,” he said, “that by an embargo we could soon place not only the United States but many of the European powers under the necessity of electing between such a recognition of our independence as we require or domestic convulsions at home.”
¹⁵
Essentially, this was the reliance of a group which knew a little about the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran precisely parallel to Mr. Davis’s magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy—the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.

The trouble was that it did matter. It mattered enormously. Mr. Davis was assuming that courage and dedication, because they burned so brightly, would make up for all other deficiencies. This they might very well do for a time, but their magic would grow a
little bit less compelling, week by week and month after month, and if the war went on indefinitely, the day would certainly come when other matters would become dominant. The head so full of fire could make an inadequate body surpass its limitations only for a time.

Perhaps a sullen desire to avenge the beating at Big Bethel had something to do with it. So did General McClellan’s glittering triumph in the western Virginia mountains, the enticement of victory being added to the sting of defeat. Running just beneath these was the impatient anger of the non-combatants, sensed by General Scott from the beginning, taking fire now that the war was actually under way; the whole creating an atmosphere in which an unready army was driven into battle by an impulse which nobody knew how to resist. Bull Run was the consequence.

Big Bethel came first. This was an unremarkable little fight which took place a few miles below Yorktown, Virginia, on June 10, brought on because the Federal power was clumsily flexing its muscles. It would hardly be remembered even as a skirmish except that it was the first real trial by combat. Militarily, it affected the course of the war not at all, and yet because it brought a feeling of humiliation to people who had supposed the war would be won easily, it helped to create a certain state of mind.

Ben Butler commanded Federal troops in and around Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia peninsula, and early in June he learned that the Confederates had built a battery at a river crossing, near a church known as Big Bethel, eight miles from Butler’s own outposts, thirteen miles from the historic village of Yorktown. He was by no means ready to begin a real campaign, but it seemed to him that these Rebels ought to be driven away, and he mounted an expedition to do this; a complicated affair which involved a night march and the convergence of four separate regiments on the point to be attacked. He considered that proper precautions had been taken; the troops were to shout the watchword “Boston,” and one
group would wear white badges on its sleeves so that the others would recognize it. These devices failed; the advancing soldiers could not even recognize the roads they were supposed to take and they went straggling up to the scene of action after a premature encounter in which two Federal regiments had fired briskly into each other. An officer who reached the place at dawn reported that disorganized men were wandering all about, “looking more like men enjoying a huge picnic than soldiers awaiting battle.”