Terrible Swift Sword (59 page)

This moment was getting much nearer.
With Lee and Bragg swinging north the Confederacy's military prospects had
never looked better; and with textile factories all across Lancashire closing
and thousands of workers living on public charity, the cotton industry had
never looked worse. Before July ended the London
Spectator
wrote despairingly about the rising darkness
in the Midlands, where "first one town and then another is swallowed up in
the gloom of universal pauperism," and the
Saturday
Review
felt that the cotton famine was the
saddest thing that had happened to England in many a year: "In the worst
of our calamities there has seldom been so pitiable a sight as the
manufacturing districts present at this moment."
⁶
There were
in England more than 2600 cotton mills and nearly half a million textile workers,
and by the middle of the summer they were deep in trouble. In September workers
were going on the thin diet of parish relief at the rate of 6000 a week, adding
to a relief roll which held more than 150,000 names when the month began. By
the year's end half of all the textile hands in England would be entirely out
of jobs, and most of the rest would be working half-time. The American Civil
War was becoming a matter of dire concern to hundreds of thousands of men and
women who had barely heard of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis and did not
know Alabama from Michigan.
⁷

These people were not going to take a
dispassionate view of the war. Folk with leisure and means could if they
pleased savor the elements of a romantic military drama, or weigh the opposing
merits of secession and reunion. The average Englishman who worked for wages
was going to interpret this war strictly in terms of its effect on him; and
just now it was affecting him most painfully right where he lived. The Liverpool
cotton broker who referred to the war as a serious labor disturbance in the
Southern states was being perfectly logical.
⁸
To the workers and
businessmen of England that was all the war amounted to—unless the people who
were actually fighting it should manage to make it mean something transcendent,
more important even than the struggle for daily bread and annual profits.

The
people who were doing the fighting could see no farther than anyone else. They
could only make out that the war was bigger than they were, bigger than anyone
had planned or imagined, and that it was enforcing changes whose final
significance was beyond analysis. They could do nothing except get on with the
fighting, and as the war increased in size and scope they were more and more
compelled to follow the one terrible rule: Do whatever needs to be done to
win.
This rule was pointing Mr. Lincoln in the direction
of emancipation, although he had doubts about his legal right to go there; and
it was driving Mr. Davis, who had said that the Confederacy wanted nothing
except to be left alone, to mount a full-dress invasion of the North.

Making this invasion, Mr. Davis wanted
everyone to understand the necessity. Early in September he sent instructions
to the leaders of the principal armies, Lee and Bragg and Smith. If they
reached non-Confederate soil they were to issue proclamations explaining what
the invasion meant. The Confederacy (they were to say) was fighting solely for
peace, which would come when the United States abandoned its attempt to rule a people
who preferred self-government, and the generals were to point out that "we
are driven to protect our country by transferring the seat of war to that of an
enemy who pursues us with a relentless and apparently aimless hostility."
Southern fields had been laid waste, Southern people had been killed and
Southern homes had been desolated, and "the sacred right of self-defense
demands that if such a war is to continue its consequences shall fall on those
who persist in their refusal to make peace."
⁹

The trouble was that
the consequences of the war were falling on everybody, including
uncomprehending English factory hands 3000 miles away. The sheer weight of the
armies was exerting a force of its own; under its pressure the societies which
supported those armies were being profoundly transformed. This was hard to bear
and hard to understand, especially in Richmond, capital city of a nation which
had been created in order to prevent change. Even as he sent his armies north
Mr. Davis was receiving letters and hearing complaints which testified to the
pressure.

There was Governor Brown of Georgia, who was
writing in heat and at length to insist that the conscription act was illegal.
The Confederate constitution, said Governor Brown, was "a league between sovereigns,"
and in such a league the central government could draft nobody. Furthermore,
conscription was wasteful; the governor believed that the Confederacy had
drafted "tens of thousands" of men whom it was unable to arm and who
therefore could do no fighting, but whose labor would be more valuable on the
farm or in the workshop. Mr. Davis was curt in his reply. He was sure that
conscription was legal; and, anyway, "I cannot share the alarm and concern
about State rights which you so evidently feel but which to me seem quite
unfounded."
¹⁰
He passed over the economic argument; and here,
as a matter of fact, the governor was on fairly solid ground.

A little earlier in the year, the
Confederate Quartermaster General A. C. Myers reported to the Secretary of War
that supplies in his department were totally inadequate to meet the demand and
that he was currently unable to fill requisitions to outfit 40,000 men. The
reason for this, he said, was clear; the conscription act was pulling workers
out of the very factories on which the Army was relying for its supplies, and
manufacturers "have been rendered incapable of complying with the
contracts made with this department." Not long after this, Secretary
Mallory pointed out that the Navy was having great trouble getting armored
warships built because of a dire shortage of skilled mechanics. To an extent,
this shortage came because so many mechanics in Southern shops came from the
North, and fled the country as soon as the war began; but of the mechanics who
remained, many had been drafted, some shops were closed altogether, and
contractors were unable to fill their engagements.
¹¹

The Southern railroads were suffering
most of all. Indeed, their whole situation was complicated almost beyond understanding
and ultimately beyond remedy.

When
the war began the railroads foresaw outright ruin, not realizing that the war
would mean more traffic rather than less, and so they did their best to
retrench, encouraging their workers to enlist and reducing their workshop crews
to
a
minimum. By the time they discovered that
this was
a
mistake the conscription act was in force,
holding the enlisted workers in the Army; now the roads were deteriorating
badly, engines and cars and tracks were going unrepaired, carrying capacity was
declining, and both the Army and the national economy were gravely handicapped.
In addition, the government had exerted some control over the railroads but
had not gone far enough with it; it moved engines and cars from one road to
another, as military needs dictated, but made no provision for their return,
so that the roads which originally owned the rolling stock lost it forever and
could not replace it. (This was
a
sore
point with Governor Brown, the Georgia railroads having been especially hard
hit in this way. He objected to
a
strong
central government, but he did want Richmond to reach out and compel people to
send back that missing railroad equipment.) As a final factor, when the government
arranged for the transport of soldiers and armaments it bargained so sharply
that the railroads made little money out of such traffic; now they were widely
suspected of preferring to haul goods for civilian account whenever possible.
The Federal government's railroad director, Brigadier General D. C. McCallum, had
a better understanding of the matter. He wrote that war demanded lavish
expenditure rather than economy, especially where the railroads were concerned,
and he summed it up with a remark which reveals one of the truly disturbing
characteristics of modern war: "The question to be answered was not 'How
much will it cost?' but rather, 'Can it be done at all, at any cost?' "
¹²

It
was impossible, apparently, to wage war conservatively; a point especially hard
to accept in the Confederacy, which had everything to lose and nothing to gain
except what it already had when the war began. The Confederacy was bound to be
conservative, lest the mere act of making war destroy the things it was
fighting for; furthermore, its resources in dollars and in men were strictly
limited, and probable costs had to be reckoned with parsimonious care. Yet
caution was not going to win. General Lee had seen that. He had taken
hair-raising chances to drive McClellan away from Richmond, and he was taking
chances equally startling in his present campaign against Pope, and he had
paid, and would continue to pay, in casualties, a much higher price than he
could really afford . . . but he had saved the capital and the cause and he had
put the Yankees on the defensive, and if he had done otherwise the war would be
over by now, the Southern dream gone forever. Like it or not, the civilian
leadership had to behave in the same way.

A case in point was the plight of Mr.
Memminger, the Secretary of the Treasury.

In every respect he was an ultraconservative
man of finance, a most cautious reckoner of probable costs, a born counter of
pennies, complete with pursed lips and coldly contemplative eyes: and he had
given the Confederacy a fiscal policy which in its essentials was simply a
dependence on paper money. This had come about, not because Mr. Memminger had
suddenly become flighty but because his hand had been forced by events beyond
his control. He later recalled that when he took office the Treasury Department
did not even have money enough to buy him a desk; its first purchases abroad
were made on his own private draft, and there was not in the entire country one
sheet of bank-note paper on which money could be printed. This shortage of
paper was soon remedied, and ever so much money was printed with nothing to
support it except a general faith that the South would win the war: Mr.
Memminger was already being blamed, and Robert Toombs had recently derided him
for "attempting to carry on a great and expensive war solely on
credit—without taxation." The complaint was sound but cruel, for Mr.
Memminger had little choice.
¹³

He
had had an impossible assignment to finance an all-out war in a land which
contained almost no hard money and had ho way to get any more. It was a land
whose states, deeply in debt, were already emitting bonds and treasury notes in
order to keep afloat; a land which not only detested the mere idea of a central
government powerful enough to impose heavy taxes but also believed firmly that
the war was going to be short; a land which neither could nor would follow a
conservative financial policy. In the spring of 1861 Congress did vote a
general property tax to support an issue of $100,000,000 in treasury notes.
Since proper tax-gathering machinery did not exist, Congress stipulated that
the several states could assume the tax for their citizens, at a ten per cent
discount; all but two of the states promptly took advantage of this offer,
issuing more treasury notes to make the payments, and the inflationary spiral
was under way. Congress authorized more bond issues, and more treasury notes,
and Mr. Memminger found himself lord of a realm of paper money, financing a
war on credit with nothing solid for the credit to rest on.

There had not, actually, been anything
else he could do. He had adopted
a
desperate
expedient to meet a desperate situation, and although inflation was beginning
to get out of control—the increasing flood of paper money was running across an
increasing shortage of all of the things money could buy—the country was still
able to carry on the war. The problem was that while the financial structure
would hold together for the immediate future, a really long war would bring it
to collapse and ruin.
¹⁴

Early
in the year Mr. Davis had called Joseph E. Johnston's attention to "the
military paradox that impossibilities must be rendered possible."
Impossibilities were needed in industry, in transportation, in finance, in the
administration of government itself. At the end of July, Mr. Davis was
reminded that the states west of the Mississippi were far away, all but isolated
and in dire need of help; and the kind of help they needed seemed to call for
nothing less than a partial remodeling of the Confederate government.

The reminder came in a letter from
Governor F. R. Lubbock of Texas, who spoke for the governors of Arkansas,
Missouri, and Louisiana as well as for himself. The western states, said
Governor Lubbock, needed three things—a general-in-chief, much more money, and
a new supply of arms and ammunition. The general-in-chief must be a regular proconsul,
all but independent of direct War Department control, able to organize an army,
to lead it in action, to shape strategy and to spend money on equipment; there
should also be
a
special branch of the Treasury Department
west of the river to provide the necessary money—western soldiers mostly were
not paid at all, and some of them were getting mutinous. From twenty to thirty
thousand stand of small arms ought to be forwarded at once. To all of this the
President could do little more than reply that he had already sent west the
best general he could spare, all the money the Treasury could provide, and all
the small arms that were available. He would try to do more. The business of a
Treasury branch was certainly illegal and probably impractical, but he would
see about it
¹⁵
. . .and perhaps, in the end, this impossibility
could be made possible along with all of the others.