WRITERS HAVE often asserted that the outcome of the
Civil War was simply inevitable, the North so outweighing
the South that there was really no contest. If such
were truly the case, then one would have to ask why the men of 1861,
who could count as well as authors a century later, were as stupid as
they would seem to be. For if the outcome was a foregone conclusion,
the Confederates were remarkably stubborn in resisting it, and the
Union equally incompetent in attaining it.
Stating the matter thus baldly reveals how silly the assertion actually
is. After Lincoln called for 75,000 men for three months' service, he
consulted with his army commander, Winfield Scott; the latter offered
the opinion that maybe 750,000 men could put down the rebellion in
three years. Lincoln was appalled; but even then Scott had underestimated
what it would take to do the job.
Far from being a clear-cut matter of arithmetic, the war was an
extraordinarily close thing, and at any one of several points, or for any
one of many factors, it could have had a different ending. If, in the
end, God did prove to be on the side of the big battalions, that was a
result of the process of the war itself, and of the decisions, wrong or
right, made by the participants in it. Historians, as a rule, prefer to
argue against the concept of inevitability—to accept it would put them
out of business. But so do most human beings: who among us would
rather trust to the wisdom of statisticians than take arms against our
fate?
It is necessary first of all to assess the resources available to either
side, to see how they balance out. That is a balance that must not,
however, be taken in isolation; it is also necessary to consider the aims
of either side, for if they each had different assets, they each also had
different aims. Finally, it is particularly germane to consider the choices
made and roles played by the border and middle states. Had any or
any number of them chosen a different side from the one they joined,
then not only would the balance of forces have been changed, but the
geostrategic picture would have been so significantly altered that the
entire conflict would have proceeded differently. The choices those
states made, however, were a part of the war itself, so it is useful to
assess the relative strength of the combatants first, and then to discuss
which way the middle states moved and why they did so.
At the time of the attack on Fort Sumter the United States consisted
of all the territory of the present contiguous mainland. Neither Alaska
nor Hawaii had yet been acquired. Much of the West was as yet unsettled
by Americans; California, acquired in the Mexican War and
admitted as a state in 1850, and Oregon, admitted in 1859, remained
isolated. There were thirty-four states, the latest of them being Kansas,
admitted only in January of 1861. The census of I860 gave the country
a population of 31,443,321. That figure suggests a degree of precision,
a precision that soon fades into estimates upon breaking the country
in two.
Of the thirty-four states, eleven seceded to form the Confederate
States of America. They counted a population of about nine million,
which left something more than twenty-two million for the Union.
Four slave states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, remained
in the Union. In all of the middle states, however, not just
these four, men made individual choices. Though Kentucky was a
Union state, there were Kentucky regiments in the Confederate army,
and though Tennessee was a Confederate state, there were Tennessee
regiments in the Union army. East Tennessee was a hotbed of Union
loyalism throughout the war, and Lincoln nearly drove his generals to
distraction wanting to send forces into that area. On the other side,
Jefferson Davis was similarly plagued by refugee Kentucky politicians
assuring him the population would support a Confederate invasion of
its territory. The population of western Virginia was so overwhelmingly
loyal to the Union—and resentful of eastern domination—that
it seceded in turn from Virginia, and was admitted as a state of the
Union in 1863. So it went, and the Confederacy may be said to have
had a population of roughly nine million, and the Union of twentytwo
million.
But of the nine million Confederates, perhaps three million were
slaves, and the figure may have been as high as three and a half million.
How these people should be counted depends almost entirely upon the
sympathies and predilections of the counter. Almost unanimously they
wanted a Union victory, and would not willingly assist the Confederacy;
on the other hand, as slaves, there was little they could do about
it, unless and until they were liberated by Union military action. Even
if they preferred not to support the Confederate war effort, they necessarily
supported the Southern economy, and at times, they made an
actual military contribution, often being used, for example, to dig
fortifications in one place or another.
Setting aside this vexing issue, we have perhaps six million white
people in the Confederacy, some less but most more committed to their
cause. Twenty-three states remained in the Union, or twenty-four if
West Virginia be counted, with a population of twenty-two million.
But of that, California and Oregon contributed very little in manpower
to the war, and again, the population of the four middle slave states
must be split. It is probably roughly correct to say that a Confederacy
of six million faced a Union of twenty-one million, giving the Union
a manpower superiority of three and a half to one.
Much has been made of the superior manufacturing capacity of the
North as opposed to the essentially agricultural economy of the Confederacy.
This has been overstated, in part because it has been romanticized.
The mythology of the "Lost Cause" pitted the natural and
agricultural South against the artificial manufacturing North. The
northern states, and especially the northeastern states, were indeed relatively
highly industrialized, and there is no doubt that the much
stronger and more balanced economy of the Union was better suited
to modern warfare than was the more highly agricultural South. Confederates
hoped to offset this by imports from Europe, paid for with
their cotton, but the Union blockade cut off a good deal of that possibility.
As it went on, however, the Confederacy proved surprisingly
adept at developing its own manufacturing capacity. The fact was that
both societies were agriculturally based—in the nineteenth century all
societies were that—but the North was marginally more industrialized
than was the South, the margin was a large one, and it was an extremely
important one.
The best case in point for this issue would be railroads. The American
Civil War was really the first railroad war, though the new means
of transportation had been used, in a hesitant way, in both the Crimean
War and in the short Franco-Austrian War of 1859. In this war, however,
Americans would make railroads the sinews of their armies and
the object of their operations. Here the Northern advantage is clearly
shown.
In the Union's territories there were some 22,385 miles of track.
Though this was split among competing companies, and here and there
was impeded by different gauges, so that cars from one line could not
operate on another, it nonetheless formed a coherent transportation
system. That system proved less than needed, as well as a source of
immense profit and possible corruption for its owners and operators;
one of the notorious profiteers, for example, was Lincoln's first secretary
of war, Simon Cameron, who was also a vice president of the Pennsylvania
Railroad. Early in 1862 the federal government passed the Railways
and Telegraph Act, giving Lincoln the power in effect to
nationalize the railways if necessary, and under that threat the operators
set uniform rates and got along with the government. The government
also set up the United States Military Railroads, and operated its own
lines in the active theaters of war.
The Confederacy had only 8,783 miles of track at the start of the
war, owned by more than a hundred companies. Some of the roads were
but a few miles long, and were used, for example, to bring cotton to
steamboat landings. Only about a quarter of the lines were major systems,
and again they had different gauges and modes of operation. The
Confederate government, whose whole reason for existence was resentment
of centralized authority, was far more reluctant than its federal
enemy to control and organize the railroad system, and the early weaknesses
of the Confederate transport net are some measure of the relative
positions of the two combatants. Eventually, indeed, the whole Confederate
transportation apparatus collapsed, but that having been said,
it should also be pointed out that by the middle years of the war, the
Confederates were very effectively utilizing what they had, and were
transferring troops from one threat to another almost more efficiently
than was the North.
Much was made at the time of the importance of cotton; Southerners
believed that, as cotton and its manufacture was then the leading industry
of the United States, and as Britain and France were both dependent
upon Southern suppliers for their cotton industries, this would
give them the necessary leverage to gain recognition of their independence.
Even if the North did fight, they told themselves, British
and French recognition would mean foreign loans, possibly foreign
alliances, and thus Confederate victory. Unfortunately for them, the
years immediately before the war had produced bumper crops, so when
the war began, Europe was able to get along for some time without
fresh imports. By the time that surplus was used up, other factors were
taking effect, and European recognition was withheld. Cotton was indeed
important, and it was manipulated as a factor in the economy of
war, but it did not prove to be nearly the all-important lever that
Confederates had hoped it would be.
National finance, the ability of either side to sustain the war effort
fiscally, was another area where comparisons may be drawn. The total
wealth of the Union was infinitely greater than the total wealth of the
Confederacy, as was the ability of the Union to mobilize that wealth
for war purposes. The best evidence of this is the matter of what happened
to either side's money. In this situation, mere legitimacy counted
for a lot, and the Union, like the English Parliament in the seventeenth
century, could claim such legitimacy. So in the North, the national
institutions simply continued to function, and the North had far less
difficulty than the South raising the money with which to wage war.
In fact there are really two issues here: one was the matter of the
total national wealth; the other was how to translate that wealth into
disposable form for war purposes, that is, how to produce money as
distinct from wealth. There had for many years been disagreements in
the United States over the simple matter of money; generally speaking,
agriculturalists and working people favored paper money, while business
interests favored "hard" money, gold and silver, less liable to depreciation.
However, as in every major war, the supply of hard money
quickly proved far too small for the nation's needs. In the North, banks
were faced with a near panic as early as late 1861, indeed, as soon as
it became apparent the war was not going to be over in a hurry. Investors
and creditors began hoarding their gold and silver, and the war
economy threatened to come to a halt because there was no money
available to lubricate it. Faced with this, early in 1862 the federal
government began issuing paper money, "greenbacks," so called because
they were green on one side. Eventually about $450,000,000 was
in circulation in paper money. The important thing about the greenbacks,
however, was not how many there were, but how valuable they
were; at their lowest, in mid- 1862, the greenback dollars were worth
ninety-one cents of "hard" money, a 9 percent depreciation, virtually
negligible in time of war.
The Confederacy, by contrast, had to start from nothing. Its Congress
began by passing the Bankers Loan and issuing bonds to the value
of $150,000,000. Later they raised a Produce Loan, against the cotton
crop of Southern planters. Eventually they went to an income tax and
even an agricultural tax in kind, that is, one paid in items rather than
in money. But they never really had enough specie to back their finances,
and of course they too issued paper money. Unlike its Northern
counterpart, however, Confederate money rapidly depreciated. By early
1864 the Confederate secretary of the treasury, Christopher G. Memminger,
was reduced to such desperate measures that the Confederacy
refused to accept its own money as payment for bills. Before their
collapse, the Confederates had run up a national debt of more than
$"00,000,000, and had experienced inflation of 6,000 percent; their
money, the visible expression of their national credit, was worthless.
The wonder is, as authorities have noted, not that their finances were
so chaotic, but that they managed to last as long as they did in the
face of it.
From the foregoing it might indeed appear that the outcome of the
war was inevitable, but two factors in particular militate against this
view. The first is that the war had to last long enough for the weight
to matter. If, for example, the Confederates had somehow managed to
win it by 1862, then the long-term inability of the Confederate government
to finance the war effort would not have been a matter of
concern. History is replete with instances of a weaker state defeating a
greater in some lightning attack. So the relative ability of either side
to sustain a long war became a factor as a result of the war itself; in
other words, it was a matter of the battlefield.
The other factor, which has received a little less notice, is that the
aims of the two combatants were quite different, were indeed as disproportionate
as the means they possessed to wage the war. The Con-
federacy had no real designs on the Union; it simply wanted to be quit
of it. Except for a few feeble attempts to round out its western borders
by forays into New Mexico, the South wanted only to be left alone. It
was thus fighting a war whose ultimate aim was simply the defense of
its own territorial integrity. It did, of course, carry the war occasionally
into the North, but that was a matter only of operational strategy, not
of long-term national policy. So all the Confederacy had to do was
sustain itself, demonstrate its viability by showing that it could not be
conquered, and eventually it would win the war.
The Union set itself a far more difficult task: Lincoln proposed to
restore the national authority. That was a polite way of saying the
Union intended to destroy the Confederacy, absolutely, totally, lock,
stock, and barrel. When the war was ended, the Confederacy should
utterly cease to exist. This went beyond even Clausewitz's renowned
aim of war: to force the enemy to accept one's will. Here was war carried
to a totality of aim seldom seen by the modern world of the nationstate.
Napoleon might have wanted to conquer Europe, and he repeatedly
lopped off chunks of Prussia, and he put his own brothers on the
thrones of Spain and Naples, but he did not expect Prussia, or Spain,
or Naples, to disappear as entities. To destroy a nation of six, or nine,
million people is a major undertaking, and a far greater task than
simply sustaining one against external attack for a period of time. If
the Union intended to do what Lincoln said he intended it to do,
however judicious the language by which he disguised his war aims,
it was going to need all the power it could mobilize, and that, ultimately,
was pretty nearly what it did need.
Through all of this, as was suggested above, the position chosen by the
middle states was crucial to the course of the conflict. In the immediate
aftermath of Fort Sumter, both Confederate and Union volunteers
flocked to the colors. Bands played north and south, and all the pretty
girls told all the brave young boys they could love only a soldier.
William T. Sherman had already taken a sorrowful leave of friends and
supporters, resigned his position as superintendent of the Louisiana
State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, and headed back
north, his duty clear to him. John C. Pemberton was a Pennsylvanian,
but he had married a Virginian. As Sherman came north, he went
south. For others the path was less clear. George H. Thomas of Virginia
decided to stay with the old flag, in spite of offers from his state and
the disapproval of his sisters, who never spoke to him again. Throughout
the border and middle states, tragic scenes took place as families
were split, in many cases never to be reunited. For what we consider
as entities—this state or that state—were in reality thousands of agonizing
individual choices, as men and women argued and prayed to
discover their rightful path and place.
Two Eastern Seaboard slave states remained in the Union, Delaware
and Maryland. In the former, there were less than two thousand slaves,
and most people disapproved, mildly, both of slavery and of secession.
Nonetheless, the state had gone for John C. Breckinridge, the Southern
Democrat candidate, in the I860 election, and the people of Delaware
were almost as united against coercion of the South as they were against
secession. Given its sentiments and its location, Delaware presented
little threat to the Union.
Maryland was both more complex and more important, surrounding
as it did the district of the national capital. The western upcountry part
of the state was largely Unionist, but the eastern part was pro-Southern,
and in fact saw some of the earliest blood of the war. On April 19, the
6th Massachusetts Regiment, marching through Baltimore on its way
to Washington, was attacked by a pro-secession mob. Hustled and
pelted with stones, the soldiers opened fire, and got through the city
only at a cost of four soldiers and twelve civilians. The state's governor,
Thomas Hicks, refused to call the legislature into session, knowing it
would demand at least a secession convention. Only when Federal
troops clearly dominated Baltimore did the state government finally
meet, and even then Maryland was held for the Union largely by political
chicanery, including a number of illegal arrests of politicians.
Virginia was the first state to secede after Fort Sumter. Two days after
Lincoln's call for volunteers, the state adopted a secession bill; even
more important, ex-governor Henry Wise moved to seize the federal arsenal
at Harpers Ferry and the navy yard at Gosport near Norfolk. The
weak federal garrisons tried unsuccessfully to burn both, which were
soon in Confederate hands. Officially Virginia did not secede until May;
in fact, although originally voting against it, most of the state was by
now "wild for secession," blaming Lincoln for starting the war, and
joining enthusiastically in the new Confederacy, which reciprocated by
moving its capital from Montgomery in Alabama to Richmond.
North Carolina was far less enthusiastic than its neighbors either
north or south. Union sentiment was strong, especially in the western
counties, and the inhabitants of the Old North State tended to regard
Virginians as too full of themselves and South Carolinians as hotheaded
fools. Yet the logic of geography and ultimately of sentiment pulled
them toward the Confederacy. When Lincoln called for volunteers,
Governor John Ellis replied that such a call was unconstitutional and
a usurpation of power by the federal government. He refused to call
the state militia into service, and on May 20 North Carolina seceded
and joined the Confederacy, the last but one of its members to do so.
The last of them was Tennessee, and the state was torn apart by the
decision. It was a peculiar split, for the eastern part of the state, mountainous,
peopled by small freeholders, poor, proud, and fiercely independent,
was solidly for the Union; while the western part, more
prosperous and cultivated, was for secession. In January the state's voters
turned down secession by a four-to-one margin, and refused even
to call a convention to consider the issue.
The voters reckoned without their governor, Isham G. Harris, so
strong for the South that he earned the sobriquet "the War Governor
of Tennessee." After Fort Sumter, he pushed through legislation calling
for military liaison with the Confederacy, and began recruiting troops,
eventually producing about 100,000. The eastern counties refused support,
and made some feeble moves to secede from Tennessee as Tennessee
was seceding from the Union, but Harris sent his troops in and
held the territory for the state, and ultimately for the Confederacy.
These east Tennessee Unionists were the people Lincoln wanted so
much to help, but he was unable to do so for most of the war.
The only other state that actually seceded was Arkansas, but its
adherence to the Confederacy was less a foregone conclusion than might
appear from its position on the map. Governor Henry M. Rector was
himself an ardent secessionist, but his citizens were not as singleminded
as he was. As early as February of 1861, he had state troops
seize the federal arsenal at Little Rock, but next month when he called
a secession convention, the delegates voted against him and adopted a
wait-and-see attitude instead. After Sumter, Rector by himself refused
the federal call for volunteers, and then called a second convention.
This time Arkansans followed him, though many did so reluctantly,
and the state seceded in early May. Like most of the other border states,
it remained divided, and for a good part of the war, it had two rival
governments.
Of all the states at issue, that left only Kentucky. What was it to
do? Lincoln knew how important it was strategically: "I hope I have
God on my side—but I must have Kentucky." Kentuckians themselves
hardly knew what course to choose. Economically they were Southerners;
by tradition and inclination they were pro-Union, very proud of
Kentucky statesmen, notably Henry Clay, who had done so much to
keep the Union together over the last couple of generations. The governor,
Beriah Magoffin, was an idealist, accused of being a traitor by
either side; he decided that the only hope for the entire country lay in
Kentucky remaining neutral, a buffer between the two factions, until
wiser counsels should prevail. He would have put the issue of the state's
secession to a plebiscite, but his pro-Union legislature refused to authorize
it, fearing the voters might go South. Magoffin called out the
state militia, which promptly divided into two. Then he allowed Confederate
recruiters into the southern part of the state, and the Union
set up recruiting offices across the Ohio River to attract Kentucky
volunteers.
Kentucky neutrality was a chimera; the state could go either way,
and it was largely a question of which side played its cards more carefully.
In the event, President Lincoln won the trick; he was much more
at home in this game than Jefferson Davis with his logical, legalistic
mind. To Davis, since Kentucky neutrality was a sham, he treated it
as such, while Lincoln played along with it. Davis was soon undercut,
anyway, by the unauthorized action of Leonidas K. Polk, his western
commander, who simply sent troops into Columbus, Kentucky, a useful
port on the Mississippi. Federal troops under Ulysses S. Grant occupied
Paducah in retaliation. Magoffin called for an alliance with the
United States, but Lincoln simply dragged his feet, whereupon Magoffin
abandoned his high-minded neutrality and called for help. Kentucky
for the Union.
There was one other slave state, Missouri, sticking up west of the
Mississippi like a large bastion. Its solidity on the map was the only
solid thing about it, though. The state was divided several ways, but
until Fort Sumter the moderates held sway against a newly elected and
strongly pro-secession governor, Claiborne F. Jackson. In early May
Jackson set up a training camp outside St. Louis and garrisoned it with
the state militia, like himself pro-Southern. However, he had not
counted on Nathaniel Lyon.
Lyon was a redheaded, hot-tempered Connecticut Yankee in the U.S.
Army, strongly Republican and violently anti-Southern after serving
in Bleeding Kansas. Though he was only a captain, he was a man of
action. Suspecting that Claiborne planned to use his militia to take
control of the federal arsenal in St. Louis, Lyon dressed up as a woman
and toured the militia camp. He teamed up with Francis P. Blair, Jr.,
one of the Missouri's leading Unionists, son of one of Lincoln's big
backers and brother of the postmaster general. Taking their own troops,
they surrounded the militia's Camp Jackson and by a preemptive dawn
strike disarmed the opposition. Unfortunately Lyon then paraded his
prisoners through St. Louis, causing a riot in which twenty-eight people
were killed. Claiborne denounced all this as foreign invasion, and
declared for the Confederacy, moving the capital to Jefferson City and
leaving Lyon and Blair in possession of the state. Lincoln immediately
promoted Lyon from captain to brigadier general. The state was subsequently
torn apart, with two rival governments, and large numbers
of men serving on both sides, in a ratio of about two and a half to one
in favor of the Union. Little columns fought back and forth across the
state for much of the war, though it generally was treated as a Union
state from now on. Lyon himself was killed at the battle of Wilson's
Creek in August, characteristically taking the offensive against an enemy
that outnumbered him two to one.
The path chosen by any of these border states was thus a mixture,
of politics and often of political sleight of hand, tending off into violence
and ultimately regular military action. As in all of America's
wars, men were willing to go long distances to fight. Arkansas and
Louisiana troops helped the Confederate Missourians at Wilson's Creek,
and an Iowa regiment fought on the side of the Union Missourians.
Farther west, Texans attempted to extend their control into New Mexico,
and state troops under Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor fought
a little engagement with Federal soldiers at Mesilla, northwest of El
Paso, in July. It was well into the summer before the general battle
lines were drawn: Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri were to see the
most battles of the entire war, as armies moved back and forth, asserting
or losing control of vital territory and communication arteries.
So by September the sides were chosen; men had made their choices,
stepped forward, held up their hands or put their names on the line.
The time for speeches and patriotic poses was over. It was time now
for fighting.
World History
