Instead, pressed by necessity, government authorities consolidated power with remarkable speed and steadily transformed the Confederacy into a nation very different from the one that soldiers expected. In 1862, the Confederate Congress and the Davis administration worked together to impose conscription and martial law, and permitted the Army to commandeer private citizens’ crops through practices that would be officially adopted and systematized as impressment and tax-in-kind policies in 1862 and 1863. The strong arm of the Confederacy, in other words, fell much harder on white Southerners than the light hand of the federal government ever had. Voicing a common complaint, an Alabama private grumbled, “we were promised a government of justice and economy but I see neither.” 8
Conscription accounted for part of the problem. In late 1861, the Virginia legislature responded to the most pressing need, the need for soldiers, by introducing a statewide law that automatically extended the enlistments of soldiers whose terms were set to expire. The new measure was designed to prevent the catastrophic reduction in forces that would occur if all soldiers whose enlistments were up went home, but not surprisingly, many men in the Virginia ranks objected to the bill regardless of its purpose. Pvt. George Peebles commented on the “excitement in Camp to night on account of a bill before the Senate of Virginia…requiring all the volunteers now in service to remain during the war,” and even warned, “if the above act is passed, mutiny will ensue.” 9 The threatened mutiny did not come to pass, but that did not mean that dissatisfaction went away. Instead, it spread throughout the Confederacy when, on April 16, 1862, the Confederate Congress enacted the first national conscription law in American history.
The Confederate Conscription Act drafted white able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and extended the enlistments of soldiers already in the Army. The bill exempted men in a number of categories, including Confederate and state civil officials, laborers in certain war-related industries, state militia officers, teachers, and eventually (because of outspoken opposition to the draft in the press) newspaper editors. It also allowed for substitution, which permitted a man to buy his way out of the Army by paying somebody not subject to the draft to enlist in his stead. The exemptions and substitutions were so badly abused that the law had to be changed repeatedly, eventually resulting in the elimination of substitution in December 1863 (by which time growing manpower needs also argued against allowing anyone to purchase his way out), but anger about loopholes and unfair privileges for the wealthy would come later. In the spring of 1862, the law enraged troops because it violated their rights, as soldiers saw them, by extending enlistments without their consent. 10 Texas private Benjamin Tamplin reported that his regiment was “upon the verge of disbanding” when soldiers learned they must serve two years longer, not necessarily because they no longer believed in the war, but out of anger at a Confederate government that “made a great many fair promises before we volunteers left home,” and then turned into a bully that ignored men’s rights. 11
Manpower posed only one of the logistical problems Confederate authorities faced in 1862. In addition to the draft, Davis’s administration established taxation and finance systems, instituted socially controlling measures like a travel pass system and prohibition of alcohol in selected locations, and began nationalizing transportation and industry. By 1862, Davis ran a substantially more centralized government than Lincoln did. 12 While all these measures were new, soldiers and civilians objected only to some of them. Despite sporadic complaints about its irritating inconvenience, the pass system, which curtailed white Southerners’ freedom of movement, did not lead to a major outcry. Even prohibition passed with little sustained comment from Confederate troops, while civilians often welcomed the liquor ban as a way of controlling rowdy soldiers. 13
Policies affecting white Southerners’ livelihoods and crop-growing practices, in contrast, stirred up acute discontent. Since supply shortfalls could prove nearly as dangerous as personnel shortages, the Richmond government as well as various state governments enacted policies to convert production of nonessentials (such as cotton for export) into production of necessary items like foodstuffs. In addition, while impressment and tax-in-kind policies would not be formally adopted and uniformly implemented by the Confederate government until 1863, ad hoc appropriation of families’ private property by Confederate authorities began in 1862. Impressment took place when army commissary and quartermaster officers obtained food and supplies for soldiers and horses by taking what they needed from farm families unlucky enough to live nearby. In return, families were supposed to receive IOUs in the amount that the army officers (not the farm families) determined to be fair, but the IOUs were always well below market value. In addition, they depreciated so dramatically before families could redeem them that many officers stopped bothering to issue the IOUs altogether. In response to civilians’ complaints about impressment, the Confederate Congress tried to curb abuses by passing a regulatory law in March 1863, but by that time, impressment had been taking place for more than a year. On the surface, tax-in-kind looked more orderly, but to ordinary families its results were very similar. Tax-in-kind required farm families to pay taxes in the form of 10 percent of their total crop minus a small amount for subsistence. Thousands of government agents prowled throughout the countryside to collect the tax, literally showing up at families’ front doors and driving away with part of the harvest. 14 In adopting measures that told farmers what they could and could not grow, and in allowing for the seizure of individual citizens’ crops, the Confederate government and southern state governments touched white Southerners’ daily lives far more directly than the Union government ever had, and not in ways that advanced individual white Southerners’ interests.
Some soldiers were willing to tolerate new agricultural measures, as long as the strict policies did not directly affect them or their families. In Corinth, Mississippi, Tennessean George Blakemore approvingly observed that cotton plantations now grew corn and wheat for “feeding the southern army.” He also praised a policy that called for the widespread burning of cotton crops in the belief that such action would prevent northern soldiers from helping themselves to the fruits of southern harvests. 15 One Mississippi prisoner of war urged Virginia newspaper readers to “burn and destroy everything that would be of service to the enemy,” including lucrative crops like cotton and tobacco. Such destructive measures might sound extreme, but the northern victory they sought to prevent would be even more catastrophic. “If the North is successful, our property is destroyed—all that have Southern proclivities will be confiscated, so the South will be penniless,” he warned. Ruthlessness offered the South’s “only salvation.” 16
The Mississippi soldier did not speak for everyone. In fact, if the road to Richmond was a hard one to travel for Union troops trying to capture the capital, the road to nationhood prescribed by Richmond looked downright impassable to many Confederate soldiers. Georgia and Alabama troops cared for little beyond their own narrow horizons, one Louisiana sergeant complained, and would “get out of this trap as soon as they get a chance, and return to their corn hills and potato patches,” which suddenly seemed more threatened by Confederate policies than by the Union Army. 17 In Nashville, Tennessee, when Confederate forces under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest tried to ship out supplies and burn bridges, civilians resisted so stoutly that the cavalry charged on citizens in the streets. In response, the residents and mayor of Nashville promptly surrendered the city to the Union as soon as the Union General Don Carlos Buell’s troops appeared on the Cumberland River. 18 Meanwhile, a soldier noticed that Memphis residents “are lukewarm in the southern cause and if the Yankees will protect their cowardly carcases and save their property, they would give up the Southern cause without striking a blow.” 19 Throughout the Confederacy, as troops ran headlong into conflicts between individual interests and Confederate needs, the personal attachments to one’s own property, family, aspirations, and identity that led them to su
pport or at least accept the need for an independent Confederacy in the first place could do little to resolve growing tensions.
Virginia sergeant John White summed up the quandary that many Confederate troops faced in 1862. He viewed military service as an extension of his “christian duty” to provide his family with “rescue and protection” against a Union force that would destroy his home and endanger his wife and children by freeing slaves. Now, the will of the Richmond government kept him away from his vulnerable family and enacted policies that added to its problems. While White faced danger in the Army, he was powerless to help his family combat food shortages or the frightening prospect of slave uprisings. “How better can I die than defending my family & fire-side,” he demanded. The Confederate government had presented itself as protector of the best interests of white men and their families. By impinging on those interests, it contradicted one of its reasons for existence, and it presented Confederate soldiers with a dilemma. As White put it, “I love my country but I love my family better.” 20
Clashes between individuals’ best interests and the demands of war also eroded unity among white Southerners, aggravated class tensions, and contributed to soldiers’ growing impatience with the citizenry as well as the government. Far from behaving more admirably than Northerners, white Southerners quickly showed that traits like greed and meanness were not confined to north of the Mason-Dixon line. Soldiers especially complained about extortion and speculation. Extortion referred to lending at usurious interest rates or to overcharging for necessities in times of need or shortage. Closely related, speculation involved hoarding food or other necessary goods for the purpose of inducing or creating the appearance of shortages, and then charging astronomical prices. 21 Soldiers hated both practices. A South Carolina private railed against extortionary prices charged for bare necessities like a coat and blanket. “The over coat is a swindle,” he exclaimed after paying twelve dollars when he was sure any honest man would sell “a better coat for $5.50.” Adding the cost of an eight-dollar blanket brought his bill to twenty dollars, nine dollars more than his monthly pay of eleven dollars, even before he bought anything “to keep starvation off,” let alone sent a penny home to his family. 22 Meanwhile, annoyed because “the rich men are all leaving the army and the poor men will have to fight for their property” while “the speculators get rich,” Alabama soldier Louis Branscomb “sometimes wish[ed] the Confederacy would sink.” 23
To make matters worse, civilians seemed neither to appreciate the troops nor to carry their fair share of war’s burdens. When Edward Brown’s brother-in-law, Nim, was sick and unable to get a bed in a hospital in Mississippi, Brown tried to find lodging for Nim in a private house nearby. To his request for a room, the woman who owned the house retorted, “I couldn’t let you have one if I had a thousand rooms.” The sting of the woman’s snub, and the ingratitude to soldiers that Brown felt it indicated, did little to rejuvenate Brown’s enthusiasm for the war or the Confederacy. 24 A South Carolinian complained that soldiers were “not cared for much more than a Dog…. they are scorned by some of the women[;]they say the soldiers stink.” 25 Whatever else soldiers had expected when they enlisted, they had not anticipated callous disdain from the population for which they fought.
When the war began, few soldiers envisioned conflicts between the needs of their home communities and the demands of the Confederacy, but now, as such tensions arose, they revealed limitations in a version of patriotism based heavily on defense of home, family, and material interests. White southern men had begun the war in the belief that the Confederacy would serve themselves and their families better than the Union did. Soldiers’ wartime service would advance white Southerners’ interests and protect the South’s superior people and society from corrosive northern influences. In exchange, the Confederate government would respect individuals’ rights and advance their families’ interests, while all southern whites would rise above class pettiness to support troops’ efforts generously. Instead, the government behaved in distasteful ways, armies lost battles, and Southerners on the home front let soldiers down. Many Confederate troops felt betrayed, or, as one Georgia soldier memorably put it, “honey-fuggled.” 26
Honey-fuggled soldiers could suggest that the Confederacy faltered and eventually collapsed because of its own internal fault lines, especially class resentment. 27 In fact, in 1862, some Confederate soldiers (on whom the infant Confederacy relied for its survival) did look for the quickest way out of the Army. Georgia soldier Roderick Harper, for instance, spent the spring of 1862 searching for a substitute to take his place. 28 Taking their discontent to the logical extreme, some soldiers dispensed with the travails of finding a replacement and simply left the ranks. As a result, desertion became a consideration for the Confederate Army for the first time in 1862, although rates varied widely by soldiers’ regions of origin. 29 Yet while sparks of disaffection and class resentment undeniably flickered in 1862, they did not engulf the Confederacy or reduce it to ashes, and neither the war nor the Confederate States of America came to an end for several years. Most men stayed in the ranks, no matter how aggrieved they felt, or how little obvious devotion they displayed to the larger Confederacy. Serving in the neighboring state of Mississippi, Pvt. Thomas Warrick of Coosa, Alabama, confided to his wife, “I have heard a heap of talk about the Country But I have Seed as much of it as I wount to see if I was Jest free I would com Back to old Coosa in a hery.” Given the choice, Warrick “wountin Give old Coosa for no Country.” 30 When push came to shove, Warrick might not have been as willing to sacrifice for the Confederate cause as the eager volunteers of the spring of 1861 claimed to be, but his decision to stay in the Army showed that he was not prepared to abandon the fight, either. Divisions like localism and class fissures certainly affected the Confederacy and its war for survival in 1862, but they did not undo it.
Neither the primacy of individual and family interests nor internal social divisions ruined the Confederacy in 1862, in part because the strengths of the Confederacy’s particular variety of patriotism had not entirely disappeared. Disheartened as Pvt. Edward Brown was when Mississippi civilians refused to help him take care of his sick brother-in-law, Brown still insisted to his wife that “the Yankees must be whipped, if it takes every dollar & every man in the Confederate States to do it.” 31 Because soldiers’ attachment to the Confederacy had less to do with Richmond or the Davis administration than with their own families, material interests, and aspirations, troops could withstand some disgust with government authorities or even their fellow white Southerners. In addition, the insular tendencies of Confederate patriotism limited soldiers’ ideological responsibilities. Unencumbered by duties like proclaiming inalienable human rights or saving republican government for the whole human race, Confederate troops were free to focus on the more manageable goal of separating white Southerners from people who were different or did not share the same interests. Louisiana soldier Thomas Davidson, for example, told his sister, “we should carve out our own destiny ourselves.” The Confederacy should be an independent land for white Southerners, with “no foreign blood to besmirch our young tree of liberty.” 32
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 8