Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

over the course of the war. He had what one subordinate called “a gift of prescience, which enabled him to provide for the wants of every battlefield,” and by 1864 Gorgas was the only member of the Confederate War Department who could really describe himself as an unqualified success—which he did not hesitate to do. “I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations,” he happily confided to his diary in 1864, “Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a saber… we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies. In looking over all this I feel that my three years of labor have not been passed in vain.”85

The dark side of Gorgas’s endeavors was the fact that, as chief of ordnance, he found himself directly intervening in the production as well as the administration of war matériel. Edwin Stanton, for all his driving determination to get the war moving, was respectful and cautious in dealing with the North’s industrial potential. As a former railroad lawyer (like Lincoln), Stanton wanted “the aid of the highest business talent… this country can afford,” and his arrangements with the northern railroads were carefully constructed to harness the military power of railroad technology, while leaving the actual direction of the railroads to the private sector.86 Similarly, Stanton’s quartermaster and commissary heads contracted out their needs for weapons, horses, and clothes by bid on the open market, rather than by appropriating existing industries for government use.

By contrast, the Confederate War Department struggled to nationalize Confederate industries, set official prices for goods, and even compete against its own citizens with government-owned blockade-runners. And those businesses that the government did not nationalize outright it tried to regulate into submission: in April 1863 the Confederate Senate actually passed a bill limiting businesses to a 20 percent profit margin (it failed to pass the Confederate House, however). None of these problems is entirely surprising in a society whose plantation elites felt little desire to see any emergence of a powerful industrial middle class in their new nation. Although the Confederate government’s reach into the economy fell considerably short of being state socialism or state corporatism, and a great deal of its resort to nationalization was really more in the nature of an improvisation in the face of desperation, the Confederate government still came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over Southern industrial production and prices in just the way it had always assumed it could control Southern slave labor. The ruling Southerners’ plans may not have been consciously illiberal, but their instinct was.87

What the Confederate elite did not count upon was that, like their slaves, the vast pool of nonslaveholding whites might find ways to elude submission—hoarding, black-marketeering (which was routinely denounced as “extortion”), and simple withdrawal from the market. Quartermaster General Myers increasingly resorted to outright confiscation of wool, which in turn led to manufacturers cutting back on production. Manufacturers who did sign Confederate contracts soon found their production monopolized by government orders, leaving the states, suppliers, and merchants empty-handed. “If Congress and the State Governments desired to limit production,” raged the Charleston Mercury in June 1863, “they could not pursue a more certain policy to effect that end, than that of restricting prices, and every such step taken by our rulers will tend to embarrass and ruin our country.” Myers, unlike Northrop, was eventually superseded in August 1863, by Alexander Lawton, but the overall policies did not change. When Samuel Bassett was commissioned by the Virginia General Assembly to acquire a half million dollars’ worth of cotton cloth, he had to report back that “the universal response has been that the working capacity of every mill is entirely absorbed by the Confederate Government.”88

Nothing illustrates this conflict between the attitude of the plantation and the fluidity of the market than Confederate railroad policy. In April and again in October 1861 Secretary of War Leroy Walker attempted to bargain with Southern railroad presidents for a quid pro quo arrangement not unlike the one Stanton hammered out with the Northern railroads a year later. In February 1862 the Confederate quartermaster department urged Jefferson Davis to disregard Walker’s initiative and militarize the railroads “under the direction of an efficient superintendent, free from local interests, investments, or connection with special railroads,” and in March the Confederate Congress authorized Davis to take “absolute control and management of all railways and their rolling stock.” Davis hesitated to seize control of the railroads outright, and railroad company presidents begged and parried for exemptions, advantages, and special orders prohibiting military interference with their railroads. However, Davis did appoint a “superintendent,” William R. Wadley, to coordinate “supervision and control of the transportation for the Government on all the railroads of the Confederate States” in December 1862.89

This muddle of directives served no real purpose except to signal to departmental Confederate military commanders that there was no coherent railroad policy and that they were free to offer abysmally low rates for transportation, disrupt freight schedules with claims for military priority, and generally run the South’s limited supply of locomotives and boxcars until they fell apart. As early as 1862 the president of the Virginia Central railroad had to confess to his stockholders that “much anxiety is felt to know whether our railroads can be kept in safe running order if the war shall continue a few years longer, and it is hardly to be doubted that the rapid decline in the efficiency of our roads is soon to diminish our means of successfully maintaining our struggle for independence.” By the end of the war, the feeble Southern railway system had been run into the ground by the unsure policies of the Confederate government and military.90

The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed