American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Moving these immense masses of men and munitions put enormous demands on boats, trains, and—all along the front—horses. After the lower Mississippi was cut off early in the war, river transport expanded to support the Union armies above Vicksburg, and west-east grain and other traffic grew so robustly that the Erie Canal carried a quarter more tonnage than in the feverish fifties. Ship builders at the same time were able to double their production of merchant tonnage for the high seas. At the other end of the long transport lines, quantities of horses were needed to draw wagon trains, ambulances, and artillery. By late 1862 the Army of the Potomac was receiving 1,500 horses a week and demanding more.

  It was the iron horse, though, that most consequentially joined the colors, to a degree never before known in war. Despite all the other demands on iron and machinery, and despite the destruction of vast stretches of track in the South, the four years of war added 4,000 miles to the railroad network, though growth was slower than in the 1850s. Railroad men double-tracked major lines, built hundreds of bridges, standardized railroad gauges, fashioned efficient new terminals for transferring freight and passengers. Whole new railways were built, most notably the Atlantic & Great Western, which cut through Pennsylvania and Ohio to points west. Patriotism was not the only motive. “At no former period,” Horace Greeley’s Tribune noted, “has the whole Northern railroad system been so prosperous.”

  Nothing seemed to daunt the railroad builders. After the Confederates had destroyed a key bridge, Herman Haupt, a forty-five-year-old railroad genius, set to work to span Potomac Creek at top speed. Soldier-workmen labored in a bone-chilling rain. “While one crew hoisted and locked up the notched crib logs, others went into the dripping woods to cut and trim selected saplings and fetch the long poles to the bridge site,” George Edgar Turner wrote. “Men, tools and time were too scarce to strip them of their bark. Above the cribs three stories of trestlework were to be erected…. At the second-story level of the trestle a new difficulty presented itself. Very few of the men had the ability or the courage to clamber about on the wet and slippery ropes so far above the rock-strewn bed of the gorge.” Some men had to climb farther up to the eighty-foot level. But within two weeks the track was laid and the first engine pulled across inch by inch with ropes to see if the wooden crosspieces would hold up. They did.

  Visiting the bridge, Lincoln seemed almost ecstatic. “That man Haupt has built a bridge across the Potomac Creek 400 feet long and nearly 100 feet high,” he told war officials on returning to Washington. “Upon my word, gentlemen,” he added, “there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.”

  Men, matériel—and money. War’s appetite for the last was as voracious as for manpower and munitions. Ultimately the war would cost the Confederacy $2 billion, the Union more than $3 billion—unimaginable figures at the start of the conflict. At war’s outbreak, money seemed short everywhere: the federal government was running a deficit, the seceding states had tiny financial resources, businessmen north and south suffered from disrupted trade, and even private citizens lacked cash. By the end of 1861 Ralph Waldo Emerson was complaining that his plight was as hard as that of his fellow countrymen.

  “The 1 January [1862] has found me in quite as poor plight as the rest of the Americans. Not a penny from my books since last June—which usually yield 5, or $600.00 a year,” he wrote his brother William. “The Atlantic Bank omitting its dividends: My Mad River & Lake Erie Bonds (Sandusky) which ought to pay $140 per ann. now for several years making no sign. Lidian’s Plymouth House now for 3 years has paid nothing and still refuses.… Then lastly, almost all income from lectures has quite ceased….” They were economizing, and he was trying to sell a woodlot. But better this “grinding” than any peace restoring the “old rottenness.”

  Expecting a short war, both Richmond and Washington had improvised desperately during the first years of the struggle. Inexperienced in finance, Chase had resorted to short-term funding, plunging into a huge loan program and then into the issuance of greenbacks, as they would come to be called, through the Legal Tender Act of February 1862. He opposed the one device that would have permitted a pay-as-you-go strategy—heavy income and excise taxation—and only strong congressional leadership had produced by August of 1861 an income tax of 3 percent on incomes over $800 and 5 percent over $10,000. Southern lawmakers, wary of general tax measures, relied first on bond issues and then on the issuance of several hundred millions in treasury notes—an invitation to soaring inflation.

  By mid-1863 Northern finances had considerably improved, after extensive experimenting driven by iron necessity. Greenbacks steadily depreciated in value, but not nearly so much as Richmond’s treasury notes. The Confederate Congress at last passed a general tax bill, embracing an 8 percent sales tax on consumer goods, a 10 percent profits tax, and even a graduated income tax, but these taxes were highly unpopular and poorly enforced. In the North, by contrast, the income tax was producing almost 20 percent of total federal receipts, and manufacturers’ and sales taxes were bringing in even more, by the end of the war. Still, the Northern public debt was heading toward almost $3 billion by mid-1865.

  This colossal expansion virtually transformed the nation’s finances. Before the war, operating in what Bray Hammond has called a “jungle” of laissez-faire, 1,600 state banks circulated several thousand different kinds of banknotes. But the old Jacksonian hostility toward a centralized banking structure could not survive the heavy demands of near-total war. Early in 1863 Congress passed the National Bank Act, a vital first step toward a national banking system. Backed, predictably, by most congressional Republicans and opposed by virtually all the Democrats, the measure provided for the chartering of national banks, with authority to issue bank notes up to 90 percent of their United States bond holdings. Toward the end of the war, Congress drove state banknotes out of circulation through a 10 percent tax on them. Soon national far outnumbered state banks.

  A spate of other national measures reached into people’s lives to an unprecedented degree. The 1862 Homestead Act granting citizens—virtually free—160 acres of surveyed public domain after five years of continuous residence; the Morrill Act giving each loyal state 30,000 acres for every member of its congressional delegation in order to endow agricultural and mechanical colleges; the Pacific Railway Acts authorizing a transcontinental railroad and providing huge grants of land for railroad rights-of-way; a homestead bonus for soldiers—these and other measures, combined with state and city actions, were propelled both by wartime necessity and by private interests vigorously represented in the Capitol and White House lobbies. For the first time—and it would be for only a short time—the federal government became a presence in people’s lives.

  Few escaped the long reach of near-total war. Booming war industries absorbed tens of thousands of immigrants still flooding into American ports. Many thousands of women went to work in textile and other factories, hospitals, government offices, and Sanitary Commission projects in the North. During the war, it is estimated, the proportion of women in the manufacturing labor force—mainly textiles and garment-making—rose from about a quarter to at least a third. As usual, women’s wages lagged behind men’s. Toward the end of the war, a New York City woman using a sewing machine and furnishing her own thread, working fourteen hours a day, made 16 ¾ cents a day, while a male “common laborer” could make $1.25.

  To the newcomers threatening their jobs—especially to immigrants and youths—white male workers reacted with fear and anger, all the more so because of the sharp decline in real wages during the war. In the first heady days, whole local unions of workers had gone off to war. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” the secretary of a Philadelphia local recorded in the minutes, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe or we are whipped.” Later in the war, unionists were marching off to picket lines as well. Some of their strikes helped white males to keep ahead of inflation; a few were broken up by Union tro
ops.

  So feverish was much of the nation’s activity during the war, both north and south, that it spawned a grand myth: the Civil War as the economic “takeoff,” as the creator of a new industrial nation, as the “second American revolution,” as indeed “a social war,” in Charles Beard’s words, “ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers.” More sober analysis has shown that the war brought mixed and uneven development. Some economic activity was spurred, some depressed; some people’s earnings—especially makers of war goods—rose, those of others dropped; some moneylenders prospered, most did not. On the whole, industrial capitalists thrived, finance capitalists suffered, from wartime inflation. The great decade of innovation and expansion had been that of the 1850s; in the sixties the war brought relatively few key technological advances, uneven expansion of production, but in some cases—such as boots and shoes—rapid mechanization, often involving interchangeability of parts.

  Yet, about halfway through the war, the nation seemed to pass from one economic and social watershed to another. By this time—mid-1863—soldiers by the hundreds of thousands were mixing with men of different origins, backgrounds, religions; the public’s attention was riveted on a national effort as never before; newspapers were giving more attention to far-off battle actions than local dogfights. The mystic chords of union were being fashioned along the endless supply lines and battle lines, north and south. Sections of the economy were being accelerated, modernized, consolidated, if not revolutionized. Change was both slow and dynamic, always uneven and chaotic. The Confederacy experimented with various forms of state control, the North encouraged or permitted extremes of laissez-faire, including extensive private-enterprise trading across enemy lines. Perhaps if one word, improvisation, sums up the national effort during the first half of the war, mobilization sums up the second—a social and economic mobilization that had its roots in the 1850s and before, and its chief impact during the stupendous economic expansion that would come in the North after the war.

  Just as old soldiers chinning in veterans’ halls would later argue which campaign or strategy had been decisive, so historians have searched for the decisive causal forces in Southern indomitableness and final Northern success. In the seamless web of history, every effort was critical. Yet some factors are more critical than others, and the supreme paradox of the Civil War is that agriculture was probably most critical. The economy was still founded on agriculture; no sector of the economy was not linked in some way with agriculture. Farm boys provided much of the soldiery on both sides, and countless farm women took their places in the fields. Farm products were still the main source of vitally needed foreign revenue. The great canal and railroad networks had been shaped to meet agricultural needs. And if agriculture was decisive positively in the North, it was negatively so in the South. The shortage of farm labor was more acute there. Unlike his Northern counterpart, the Southern farmer found labor-saving machinery cut off; so were his outlets to Europe as the Northern blockade tightened.

  While the war was becoming increasingly a mobilization of men, money, machinery, and munitions, to an astonishing degree it was finally won and lost on the grain fields of the North and the cotton fields of the South.

  The Society of the Battlefield

  As for his spirits, Private John N. Moulton wrote his sister from his camp near Vicksburg early in 1863, “I cannot Boast of their being very high. There is the most down cast looking set of men here that I ever saw in my life.…” Six weeks later he felt no better. “I am lonesome and down hearted in Spite of my Self. I am tired of Blood Shed and have Saw Enough of it.”

  A soldier in Nashville reflected bitterly, “When we Enthusiastically rushed into the ranks at our Country’s call, we all Expected to witness the last dying struggles of treason and Rebellion Ere this.” But his hopes had been dashed. “Over 200,000 of our noble soldiers sleep in the silent grave. Almost countless millions of treasure has been Expended in the Unsuccessful Effort of the Government to put down this Rebellion. But after all this sacrifice of valuable life and money, we are no nearer the goal…than we were at the first booming of Sumter’s guns.”

  From a camp opposite Fredericksburg, M. N. Collins, a Maine officer, wrote: “The newspapers say that the army is eager for another fight; it is false; there is not a private in the army that would not rejoice to know that no more battles were to be fought. They are heartily sick of battles that produce no results.”

  Soldiers railed against their leaders. The men, said Moulton, were beginning “to talk openly and to curse the officers and leaders and if the[y] go much farther I fear for the result. They are pretty well divided and nothing But fear keeps them under.…” Wrote a Maine soldier stationed in Virginia just before Christmas 1862, “All though I am wel and able to do duty I am in a very unhapy state of mind.” His “delusive fantom of hope” had at last vanished. “The great cause of liberty has been managed by Knaves and fools the whole show has ben corruption, the result disaster, shame and disgrace.” He was always ready to do his duty but “evry thing looks dark, not becaus the south are strong but becaus our leaders are incompitent and unprincipled.” A Massachusetts private wrote of “incompetent leaders & ambitious politicians.”

  What were they fighting for? For Union and patriotism, but this did not seem enough. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not help most white soldiers. He was thoroughly tired of the war, a Pennsylvanian wrote in February 1863, and if he had known that the issue would become freeing the slaves, as it seemed to have become, he “would not have mingled with the dirty job.” An Illinois soldier belittled the Administration’s yielding to radicals favoring emancipation and Negro recruiting: “I have slept on the soft side of a board, in the mud & every other place that was lousy & dirty … drunk out of goose ponds, Horse tracks &c for the last 18 months, all for the poor nigger, and I have yet to see the first one that I think has been benefited by it.” Other soldiers’ comments on emancipation were even harsher.

  If most Southern soldiers were fighting against emancipation, and few Northern men fully supported it, black people north and south were enlisted in the struggle, and on both sides. The drain of white manpower to the front made Southern agriculture heavily dependent on slave labor, while nearly 180,000 former slaves enlisted in the Union armies. Organized into separate “Colored” regiments officered mostly by whites, the black soldiers appeared to suffer fewer morale problems than whites—doubtless because they saw their stake in the outcome more clearly. “When God made me, I wasn’t much,” one black recruit said, “but I’s a man now.”

  Many white soldiers desperately sought a way out. Some shot off their toes or trigger fingers, until discharges were no longer given to self-maimers. Others hoped for a compromise peace, any kind of peace that would enable them to go home. Even in his regiment, out only five months, wrote a Massachusetts man, “I don’t believe there are twenty men but are heartily sick of war & want to go home.” Wrote the Nashville soldier: “Many of the boys here are in favor of a Compromise, some are of the opinion that the Southern Confederacy will soon be recognized by the U.S. Alas! for our beloved Republic!”

  Just about the time this Yankee in Nashville was exhibiting his brand of defeatism, a Confederate soldier from Alabama was displaying his. “If the soldiers were allowed to settle the matter,” John Crittenden wrote his wife, “peace would be made in short order.” On the average, Confederate spirits were probably a bit higher than Unionist, but from the early flush days of martial ardor and Southern pride, morale fell as the months and years passed. A Georgian home on sick leave wrote his brother that if he did not receive a third extension of his furlough he would stay home anyway. “There is no use fighting any longer no how,” he wrote, “for we are done gon up the Spout the Confederacy is done whiped it is
useless to deny it any longger.” The men from North Carolina, another Georgian wrote his wife from his post with Lee’s army, were threatening to rejoin the Union and “the men from Ga say that if the enemy invade Ga they are going home….” Perhaps the worst blows to Confederate morale came from wives’ letters telling of hunger and cold at home.

  How to persuade such men to reenlist when their terms expired? President Davis and other leaders visited the camps to boost morale. Grand parades and even sham battles were held, patriotic speeches intoned. While a conscription law was ultimately passed, compelling reenlistment, some officers wanted to carry on the spirit of volunteerism. A favorite stratagem, Bell Wiley found, was to assemble men for dress parade, deliver a patriotic speech, move the Stars and Bars up a few paces ahead, and then urge all the patriots in the ranks to step up to the colors and reenlist for the duration. Few could resist such blandishments—but many regretted their action later.

  On both sides it was the wretched life in camp, rather than the days of combat, that crushed soldierly spirit. For most soldiers the Civil War was both an organized and a disorganized bore. Days of dull routine, during which the men could at least build tiny nests of creature comforts, were punctuated by sudden and often inexplicable departures, followed usually by long marches to a new camp and the old tedium. Rain was the enemy—rain that seeped through tent sides and shed roofs, turned campgrounds into quagmires, penetrated every boot and uniform. A Union colonel, John Beatty, recited the daily routine of his camp—and of all camps: reveille at five, breakfast call at six, surgeon’s call at seven, drill at eight, recall at eleven, dinner at twelve, drill again at four, recall at five, guard mounting at five-thirty, first call for dress parade at six, second call at six-thirty, tattoo at nine, taps at nine-thirty. “So the day goes round.”