In any test between the United States and the Confederacy, the former possessed tremendous advantages. There were more than 20 million people in the northern states (excluding Kentucky and Missouri, where opinion was divided) but only 9 million in the South, including 3.5 million slaves whom the whites hesitated to trust with arms. The North’s economic capacity to wage war was even more preponderant. It was manufacturing nine times as much as the Confederacy (including 97 percent of the nation’s firearms) and had a far larger and more efficient railroad system than the South. Northern control of the merchant marine and the navy made possible a blockade of the Confederacy, a particularly potent threat to a region so dependent on foreign markets.
The Confederates discounted these advantages. Many doubted that public opinion in the North would sustain Lincoln if he attempted to meet secession with force. Northern manufacturers needed southern markets, and merchants depended heavily on southern business. Many western farmers still sent their produce down the Mississippi. War would threaten the prosperity of all these groups, Southerners maintained. Should the North try to cut Europe off from southern cotton, the European powers, particularly Great Britain, would descend on the land in their might, force open southern ports, and provide the Confederacy with the means of defending itself forever. Moreover, the South provided nearly three-fourths of the world’s cotton, essential for most textile mills. “You do not dare to make war on cotton,” Senator Hammond of South Carolina had taunted his northern colleagues in 1858. “No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
The Confederacy also counted on certain military advantages. The new nation need only hold what it had; it could fight a defensive war, less costly in men and material and of great importance in maintaining morale and winning outside sympathy. Southerners would be defending not only their social institutions but also their homes and families.
Luck played a part too; the Confederacy quickly found a great commander, while many of the northern generals in the early stages of the war proved either bungling or indecisive. In battle after battle Union
Why did these young volunteers of the First Virginia Militia join the Confederate army in 1861? "It is better to spend our all in defending our country than to be subjugated and have it taken away from us,” one explained, a sentiment that appeared often in the letters of Confederate soldiers. Soldiers on both sides believed that their cause was righteous.
In his inaugural address in February 1861, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, declared that secession was consistent with "the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established.”
Recruitment became more difficult as the war dragged on. This 1864 notice offered volunteers $300 to enlist in the Michigan militia.
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Armies were defeated by forces of equal or smaller size. There was little to distinguish the enlisted men of the two sides. Both, conscious of their forefathers of 1776, fought for liberty, though they interpreted the concept in different ways.
Both sides faced massive difficulties in organizing for a war long feared but never properly anticipated.
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Men Present for Service During the Civil War From 1862 to 1864, the North had twice as many soldiers as the South; by 1865, the North had over three times more than the South.
After southern defections, the regular Union army consisted of only 13,000 officers and enlisted men, far too few to absorb the 186,000 who had joined the colors by early summer, much less the additional
450,000 who had volunteered by the end of the year. Recruiting was left to the states, each being assigned a quota; there was little central organization. Natty companies of “Fire Zouaves” and “Garibaldi Guards” in gorgeous uniforms rubbed shoulders with slovenly units composed of toughs and criminals and with regiments of farm boys from Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan. Unlike later conflicts in which men from all parts of the country were mixed in each regiment, Civil War units were recruited locally. Men in each company tended to have known one another or had friends in common in civilian life. But few knew even the rudiments of soldiering. The hastily composed high command, headed by the elderly Winfield Scott, debated grand strategy endlessly while regimental commanders lacked decent maps of Virginia.
Lincoln’s strength lay in his ability to think problems through. When he did, he acted unflinchingly. Anything but a tyrant by nature, he boldly exceeded the conventional limits of presidential power in the emergency: expanding the army without congressional authorization, suspending the writ of habeas corpus (which entitles those seized by the government to go before a court to see if their arrest were warranted), even emancipating the slaves when he thought military necessity demanded that action. Yet he also displayed remarkable patience and depth of character: He would willingly accept snubs and insults in order to advance the cause. He kept a close check on every aspect of the war effort, but found time for thought too. His young secretary John Nicolay reported seeing him sit sometimes for a whole hour like “a petrified image,” lost in contemplation.
Gradually Lincoln’s stock rose—first with men like Seward, who saw him close up and experienced both his steel and his gentleness, and then with the people at large, who sensed his compassion, his humility, and his wisdom. He was only fifty-two when he became president, and already people were calling him Old Abe. Before long they would call him Father Abraham.
The Confederacy faced far greater problems than the North, for it had to create an entire administration under pressure of war with the additional handicap of the states’ rights philosophy to which it was committed. The Confederate constitution explicitly recognized the sovereignty of the states and contained no broad authorization for laws designed to advance the general welfare. State governments repeatedly defied the central administration, located at Richmond after Virginia seceded, even with regard to military affairs.
Eighteen-year-olds were the largest age group in the first year of the war in both armies. Soldiers were universally called "the boys”; and officers, even in their thirties, were called "old men.” One of the most popular war songs was "Just Before the Battle, Mother.”
Of course, the Confederacy made heavy use of the precedents and administrative machinery taken over from the United States. The government quickly decided that all federal laws would remain in force until specifically repealed, and many former federal officials continued to perform their duties under the new auspices.
The call to arms produced a turnout in the Confederacy perhaps even more impressive than that in the North; by July 1861 about 112,000 men were under arms. As in the North, men of every type enlisted, and morale was high. Some wealthy recruits brought slave servants with them to care for their needs in camp, cavalrymen supplied their own horses, and many men arrived with their own shotguns and hunting rifles. Ordinary militia companies sporting names like Tallapoosa Thrashers, Cherokee Lincoln Killers, and Chickasaw Desperadoes marched in step with troops of “character, blood, and social position” bearing names like Richmond Howitzers and Louisiana Zouaves. (“Zouave” mania swept both North and South, prospective soldiers evidently considering broad sashes and baggy breeches the embodiment of military splendor.)
President Jefferson Davis represented the best type of southern planter, noted for his humane treatment of his slaves. In politics he had pursued a somewhat unusual course. While senator from Mississippi, he opposed the Compromise of 1850 and became a leader of the southern radicals. After Pierce made him secretary of war, however, he took a more nationalistic position, one close to that of Douglas. Davis supported the transcontinental railroad idea and spoke in favor of the annexation of Cuba and other Caribbean areas. He rejected Douglas’s position during the Kansas controversy but tried to close the breach that Kansas had opened in Democratic ranks.
After the 1860 election he supported secession only reluctantly, preferring to give Lincoln a chance to prove that he meant the South no harm.
Davis was courageous, industrious, and intelligent, but he was too reserved and opinionated to make either a good politician or a popular leader. As president he devoted too much time to details, failed to delegate authority, and (unlike Lincoln) was impatient with garrulous and dull-witted people, types political leaders frequently have to deal with. Being a graduate of West Point, he fancied himself a military expert, but he was a mediocre military thinker. Unlike Lincoln, he quarreled frequently with his subordinates, held grudges, and allowed personal feelings to distort his judgment. “If anyone disagrees with Mr. Davis,” his wife Varina Davis admitted, “he resents it and ascribes the difference to the perversity of his opponent.”
•••-[Read the Document Davis, Address to the Provisional Congress at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
