Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Untrained in riot control, New York's police fought the mobs courageously but with only partial success on July 13 and 14. Army officers desperately scraped together a few hundred troops to help. The War Department rushed several regiments from Pennsylvania to New York, where on July 15 and 16 they poured volleys into the ranks of rioters with the same deadly effect they had produced against rebels at Gettysburg two weeks earlier. By July 17 an uneasy peace returned to the shattered city. Determined to carry out the draft in New York lest successful resistance there spawn imitation elsewhere, the government built

  37. Exaggerated contemporary estimates of more than a thousand persons killed found their way into popular histories of the riot. But the careful research of Adrian Cook has established that only 105 people were definitely killed, and another dozen or so deaths may have been linked to the rioting. Eleven of those killed were black victims of the mob, eight were soldiers, and two were policemen; the rest were rioters. Cook, Armies of the Streets, 193–94, 310n.

  38. Ibid., passim, esp. 117, 195–96.

  up troop strength in Manhattan to 20,000 men who enforced calm during the resumption of drafting on August 19. By then the city council had appropriated funds to pay the commutation fees of drafted men—including, no doubt, some of the rioters.

  II

  The specter of class conflict also haunted the South. As in the North, conscription worsened the friction. Manpower needs had forced the Confederate Congress in September 1862 to raise the upper age limit from thirty-five to forty-five. This made the heads of many poor families suddenly subject to the draft at a time when that summer's drought had devastated food crops. And Congress added insult to injury by a provision to exempt one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves.

  This controversial exemption was the result of pressure from planter families. The South had gone to war, among other reasons, to defend slavery. But if all white men on plantations went into the army, discipline would erode, slaves would continue to run off to the swamps or to the Yankees, and slavery itself would crumble away. The South was also fighting to preserve a certain vision of womanhood. To leave white women alone on plantations to cope with large numbers of slaves was hardly compatible with this vision. A letter from an Alabama woman to the governor in September 1862 bespoke a situation that seemed to call for action. "I have no brother no one on whom I can call for aid," she wrote. "I am living alone now, with only my child a little girl of 2 years old. I am now surrounded on all sides by plantations of negroes—many of them have not a white [man] on them. I am now begging you will not you in kindness to a poor unprotected woman and child give me the power of having my overseer recalled." The Confederacy also needed the food and fiber raised on plantations, and southerners believed that without overseers the slaves would raise nothing. Planters insisted that the exemption of overseers was at least as important to the war effort as the exemption of teachers or apothecaries. In October 1862 Congress concurred, though not without objections by some senators against this legislation "in favour of slave labour against white labour."39

  By granting a special privilege to a class constituting only 5 percent

  39. Quotations from Armstead Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage: Slavery's Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865," unpublished ms, chap. 5, pp. 15, 27.

  of the white population, the "Twenty-Negro Law" became as unpopular in the South as commutation in the North. Although only four or five thousand planters or overseers obtained exemptions under the law—representing about 15 percent of the eligible plantations and 3 percent of the men exempted for all causes—the symbolism of the law was powerful. Many of the men who deserted from Confederate armies during the winter of 1862–63 agreed with a Mississippi farmer who went AWOL because he "did not propose to fight for the rich men while they were at home having a good time." Alarmed by what he heard on a trip home from Richmond, Mississippi's Senator James Phelan wrote to his friend Jefferson Davis on December 9: "Never did a law meet with more universal odium. . . . Its influence upon the poor is calamitous. . . . It has aroused a spirit of rebellion in some places, I am informed, and bodies of men have banded together to resist; whilst in the army it is said it only needs some daring men to raise the standard to develop a revolt."40

  Such protests made limited headway against planter influence. Congress modified but never repealed the twenty-Negro exemption, which remained a divisive issue for the rest of the war. One modification in May 1863 required planters to pay $500 for the privilege; another in February 1864 reduced the number of slaves to fifteen but specified that exempted plantations must sell to the government at fixed cost 200 pounds of meat per slave, part of it for the families of needy soldiers. As this requirement suggests, hunger was a serious factor in the disaffection of yeoman and laboring classes. Despite the conversion of much acreage from cotton to food crops in 1862, the drought and the breakdown of southern transportation—not to mention Union conquest of prime agricultural regions—led to severe food shortages the following winter. The quickening pace of inflation also drove the price of food, even when available, beyond the reach of many. Having doubled in the latter half of 1862, the price index doubled again in the first half of 1863. In Richmond, War Department clerk John Jones saw his salary fall farther and farther behind the cost of living until in March 1863 "the shadow of the gaunt form of famine is upon us." Jones had lost twenty pounds

  40. Quotations from Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938), 4911., and O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 790. For statistics on draft exemptions, see Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924), 107–08.

  "and my wife and children are emaciated." Even the rats in his kitchen were so hungry that they ate bread crumbs from his daughter's hand "as tame as kittens. Perhaps we shall have to eat them!"41

  Women and children on farms suffered as much as those in cities. A farm woman in North Carolina wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance in April 1863 describing how "a crowd of we Poor wemen went to Greenesborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful of meet nor bread in my house what did they do but put us in gail in plase of giveing us aney thing to eat. . . . I have 6 little children and my husband in the armey and what am I to do?" What indeed? Some women wrote to Confederate officials pleading for the discharge of their husbands. One letter to the secretary of war insisted that the writer's husband "is not able to do your government much good and he might do his children some good and thare is no use in keeping a man thare to kill him and leave widows and poore little orphen children to suffer while the rich has aplenty to work for them."42

  Such appeals availed little, so thousands of husbands discharged themselves. "There is already a heap of men gone home," wrote a Mississippi private to his wife in November 1862, "and a heap says if their familys get to suffering that they will go [too]." A month later a distressed officer in Bragg's Army of Tennessee declared that "desertions are multiplying so fast in this army that almost one-third of it is gone."43

  Many of these deserters joined with draft-evaders in backcountry regions to form guerrilla bands that resisted Confederate authority and virtually ruled whole counties. Some of these "regulators" formed ties with the antiwar or unionist secret societies that sprang up in 1862 and 1863: the Peace and Constitution Society in Arkansas; the Peace Society in northern Alabama and northern Georgia; and the Heroes of America in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. The rich man's war/poor man's fight theme stimulated the growth of these societies just as it strengthened copperheads in the North. Although the southern peace societies did not achieve the visibility or influence that an established political party gave northern copperheads, they drained vitality from the

  41. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 170, 243, 164.

  42. W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill, 1980), 221; Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of
Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978), 108.

  43. Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage," chap. 5, pp. 38, 40.

  Confederate war effort in certain regions and formed the nucleus for a significant peace movement if the war should take a turn for the worse.44

  Was it especially a poor man's fight in the South? Probably no more than it was in the North, according to the following table based on data from seven Confederate states.45

  Occupational Categories

  Confederate Soldiers

  White Males (From 1860 Census)

  Planters, farmers, and farm laborers

  61.5%

  57.5%

  Skilled laborers

  14.1

  15.7

  Unskilled laborers

  8.5

  12.7

  White-collar and commercial

  7.0

  8.3

  Professional

  5.2

  5.0

  Miscellaneous and unknown

  3.7

  .8

  From this sample it appears that, adjusted for age, both skilled and unskilled laborers were under-represented in the Confederate army while business and professional classes may have been over-represented. The most important categories in this rural society, however, were farmers and planters. Unfortunately, neither the census nor the regimental muster rolls consistently distinguished between these two classes, so it is impossible to tell whether "planters" were under-represented. The only study of this question found that in three piedmont counties of Georgia the average wealth of men who did not serve in the army was about 20 percent greater than those who did.46 The pattern indicated by this limited

  44. Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1944).

  45. The data on Confederate soldiers are drawn from a sample of 9,057 men listed in the company rolls of regiments from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. I am indebted to the late Bell Irvin Wiley for his generosity in supplying me these data from his research files.

  46. J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1986), 152. Harris compiled a sample of men of military age from three Georgia counties, determined their wealth and slaveholding (or that of their families) from the manuscript returns of the 1860 census, and searched the roster of Georgia soldiers in the Confederate army to determine which men in his sample served in the army and which did not. His findings must be used with caution, however, for he found fewer than half of the men in his sample in the roster of Georgia regiments, while we know that 70 to 80 percent of southern white men of military age served in the Confederate armed forces. The wealth and slaveholding of men missing from the incomplete army records might have modified Harris's findings if they could have been identified.

  sample may have been counterbalanced for the Confederacy as a whole by the greater tendency of men from its poorest upcountry regions to skedaddle, desert, or otherwise avoid Confederate service.

  In any case, the symbolic power of the twenty-Negro law and the actual suffering of poor families gave greater credence to the poor man's fight theme in the South than in the North. After all, "men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives & children to starve," wrote a southern leader in November 1862. The government—more particularly state and county governments—recognized this. Most southern states and many counties appropriated funds for assistance to the families of poor soldiers. These expenditures were financed by taxes on slaves and large landholdings, thus representing an attempt to alleviate class discontent by transferring resources from the rich to the poor. The two states that did most in this line were Georgia and North Carolina—the very states whose governors, Joseph Brown and Zebulon Vance, interposed state's-rights roadblocks to the southern war effort. The common people tended to applaud Brown or Vance and to criticize Davis, not necessarily because they favored state's rights at the expense of the Confederacy but because the state helped them while the Richmond government took away their husbands and sons and their livelihood.47

  The Confederate government's taxes and impressments to sustain the army also caused it to appear as an oppressor. By the spring of 1863, runaway inflation finally compelled Richmond's lawmakers to seek alternatives to the printing press to finance the war. In April they followed the Union example and enacted a comprehensive tax law that included a progressive income tax, an 8 percent levy on certain goods held for sale, excise and license duties, and a 10 percent profits tax on wholesalers

  47. Quotation from Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage," chap. 6, p. 12. For progressive taxation and public welfare policies in Georgia and North Carolina, see Peter Wallenstein, "Rich Man's War, Rich Man's Fight: Civil War and the Transformation of Public Finance in Georgia," JSH, 50 (1984), 15–42; and Paul D. Escort, "Poverty and Government Aid for the Poor in Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 61 (1984), 462–80.

  intended to take back some of the money that "speculators" had "extorted" from the people. But the notion that these taxes would make the rich pay their share was neutralized by an additional category of items that were taxed and one that was not. Because money had so little value, Congress imposed a 10 percent "tax in kind" on agricultural produce. After reserving a subsistence for his family, each farmer had to turn over 10 percent of the surplus to one of the three thousand agents who fanned out through the South to collect it. Yeoman farmers bitterly resented this levy. Why should the poor husbandman—or rather husband woman, since so many men were at the front—have to pay 10 percent, they asked, when a clerk or teacher with a salary of $1,500 paid only 2 percent of his income? More pointedly, why was the chief property of the rich—slaves—not taxed? The answer: a tax on slaves was considered a direct tax, constitutionally permissible only after an apportionment on the basis of population. No census could be taken in wartime, hence no direct tax was possible. The relevance of this constitutional inhibition escaped most dirt farmers, who saw only that the revenue agents took their produce while the rich man's slaves escaped taxation.

  In practice the tax in kind seemed little different from "impressment" of supplies by the army. Desperate for provisions, commissary and quartermaster officers scoured the countryside for food, fodder, and work animals. They paid whatever price they (not the farmer) considered fair with promissory notes that deteriorated in value still further before the farmer could cash them. By the end of the war an estimated half-billion dollars of these worthless IOUs were outstanding. Some army units, especially the cavalry, took what they wanted without even pretending to pay. "If God Almighty," wrote an angry Governor Vance to the War Department in 1863, "had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry." Despite the notorious reputation of northern invaders in this regard, many southerners believed that "the Yankees cannot do us any more harm than our own soldiers have done."48 Impressment fell with impartial injustice on the rich and the poor who happened to live near active military operations. But because the family farmer could scarcely afford to lose what little he had, impressment became another source of his alienation from the government and the cause it represented.

  48. Quotations from Escott, After Secession, 111.

  Responding to the outcries against impressment, Congress in March 1863 passed a law to regulate it by creating commissions to fix and arbitrate "fair" prices. This law was honored most often in the breach, however, and abuses continued. More successful were revisions of the tax law in February 1864. Suspending the requirement for a census-based apportionment of direct taxes, Congress imposed a 5 percent levy on land and slaves. Families with property worth less than $500 were exempted from the tax in kind. At the same time the revision of the twenty-Negro law that impre
ssed 200 pounds of meat per slave got the Confederate government into the food-welfare business.

  But these measures came too late to avert the most shocking revelation of internal stress—the bread riots in the spring of 1863. In a dozen or more cities and hamlets from Richmond to Mobile, desperate women raided shops or supply depots for food. Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. Groups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by "speculators" and asked the price of bacon or flour. When informed, they denounced such "extortion," took what they wanted, and marched away.49

  By far the largest and most momentous riot occurred in Richmond. Special circumstances made the Confederate capital particularly volatile. Its population had more than doubled since 1861. Military operations had desolated many food-producing areas of Virginia. Lee's army on the Rappahannock, reduced to half-rations by March 1863, competed with the civilian population for dwindling stocks of the previous year's drought-curtailed crops. In late March a freak nine-inch snowfall made roads impassable for several days. Prices for the few goods left on merchants' shelves skyrocketed to famine levels. On April 2 several hundred women—many of them wives of employees at the Tredegar Iron Works—met at a Baptist church and proceeded to the governor's mansion to make known their distress. The governor offered little comfort, and as the delegation moved on it turned into a mob. A middleclass bystander talked to one of the members, an emaciated girl of eighteen. "As she raised her hand to remove her sunbonnet, her loose calico sleeve slipped up, and revealed a mere skeleton of an arm. She perceived my expression as I looked at it, and hastily pulled down her sleeve with a short laugh. 'This is all that's left of me!' she said. 'It seems