by Bruce Catton
Staid and respectable before the war, Wilmington now was wide open. Speculators were drawn from all over the Confederacy by the weekly auctions of luxury goods, and there was a substantial influx of the kind of rogues who always appear in a boom town. The captain of one of the blockade-runners said that a breakdown in law enforcement made it unsafe to go about the streets at night; murders and robberies were common, and in daytime there were bloody fights between sailors from the merchant ships (whose pockets were full of money) and soldiers stationed in Wilmington. Agents and employees of the importing companies lived high, spending money so freely that food prices in the local markets went beyond the reach of ordinary citizens; most people who were not connected with the import-export business left town if they could, spurred on by the fact that in the summer of 1862 yellow fever broke out, due partly (it was supposed) to the non-enforcement of ordinary quarantine regulations. Convalescent soldiers from the Richmond hospitals who paused in Wilmington en route to their homes enjoyed the stopover very much. With all of the money that as floating around, the ladies’ committee that had been organized to provide meals for soldiers on sick leave was better financed than any other committee in the Confederacy, and it had an infinite range of delicacies to choose from when it did its marketing. The soldiers who got meals at the long tables in the railroad station ate very well. On a marshy flat across the river from the city, steam cotton presses had been put up, and there the outward-bound steamers got their cargoes. The wharves where this was done were heavily guarded, to prevent the escape of men who were trying to dodge conscription, and vessels loaded with cotton were obliged to fumigate their cargoes before they left the river, to smoke out possible stowaways.5
… War is not just armies, and battles, and clever campaigns laid out on the map and then ratified in blood. It is a resort to force, to be sure, which is to say that men have temporarily abandoned the effort to exert a reasoned control over events; but it creates forces of its own as it goes along and then itself becomes subject to them, and goes where they drive it. From the moment of its beginning war contains, cruelly invisible, the shape of its unimaginable end product, much as a block of marble contains a statue before the chisel ever touches it. What was happening in Nassau and Wilmington and other places like them was a partial gauge of the forces that were now at work.
These forces were at work elsewhere—in Virginia and in Tennessee, along the Mississippi and in New Orleans: at almost every place where the fevered bodies of the estranged sections touched. They involved cotton, and gold, and the whole list of goods and services with which the Northern and Southern people had supplied each other before they went to war. They showed themselves first in easy money and the corruption that easy money brings, and good patriots in both sections denounced the base cupidity of profiteers. But what the profiteers were doing reflected not so much human baseness as the peculiar stresses generated by the effort to conduct a civil war according to the rules and standards conventionally applied to war with a foreign enemy.
There is, for instance, the age-old rule that one does not trade with the enemy in wartime.
One does not: but the two nations which had made this war were not foreign enemies, they were simply the estranged halves of an economic whole. They depended on each other, and the fact that they were making war did not end that interdependence in any degree. It simply compelled them to struggle against one of the most profound economic forces in American life—the necessity for an exchange of essential goods between the Northern and the Southern states. This force was too strong for them. The exchange had to go on. Even as they tried to build an impassable wall between themselves they were compelled to cut holes in it.
This became apparent in the summer of 1862—the strange summer when so many of the hidden compulsions of the war began to display themselves. Federal troops by now occupied a good deal of secessionist territory—part of Louisiana, various Carolina seaports, western Tennessee and a fringe of northern Mississippi, not to mention a certain amount of Virginia: this, plus such important commercial centers as New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis. In these cities the intense Northern desire for cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco suddenly encountered the even more intense Southern desire for everything from munitions to shoes, from corn and bacon to medicine and salt. Canny traders began to make deals, because unbelievable profits were involved; and governments began to wink at those deals, even to encourage them, because it seemed that they had to if they were to carry on the war, even though the deals gave direct aid and comfort to the enemy.
The Federal government outlawed trade with the Confederacy, but it believed that commerce followed the flag, which meant that traders followed the army. (Sometimes, being ardent men, they got slightly ahead of it.) The traders were accompanied by Treasury Department agents, who enforced intricate regulations governing the purchase, sale, and transportation of commodities in occupied areas, and who were empowered to seize and offer for public sale all cotton acquired by the army. Most business was done under Treasury permits, and Secretary Chase—who drew up the regulations, appointed the agents, and issued the permits—explained his general policy thus: “It is my wish to have just as much cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco brought out of the insurrectionary states as possible without … increasing the resources of the Rebels and thus prolonging the war.” This ideal was lofty but unattainable, because it was humanly impossible to buy anything in or near an “insurrectionary state” without increasing the resources of secession; the impulses set in motion by circulating money can hardly be checked, and anyway one bale of cotton looks much like another. A busy Treasury agent remarked that he could not possibly “investigate the morals” back of any shipment of cotton, or concern himself very much with where the cotton had been, how it got away from there, or who had originally raised, owned and shipped it.6 It goes without saying that these agents, who had power of life or death over business deals, came under great temptation. Some of them proved incorruptible, and some did not.
So the occupied cities began to revive. Nashville came first. Trade was dead when Buell’s men arrived, in February; there was no cotton, and although there was a great hunger for Northern goods the Northern traders would not take Confederate money, and Tennessee bank notes were badly depreciated. But the traders went scouting around, baled cotton began to appear, United States currency started to circulate, and in two months some 3600 bales of cotton had gone north, at an average price of $100 a bale. (That price would go ever so much higher in another year; even so, it represented about two and one half times the prevailing price at the beginning of the war.) Confidence in the Tennessee bank notes revived, the market for Northern products became brisk, and it was estimated that before the summer ended Nashville would send out at least 18,000 bales.
It was the same in Memphis, only more so. This city was occupied on June 6, and Yankee merchants lost no time. Within a fortnight steamboats were unloading flour, coffee, pork, and salt along the levees; it was said that more than two hundred traders were in town, and Memphis merchants who wanted to do business either took the oath of allegiance or bribed a Treasury agent. More than 8000 bales of cotton had been sold by the first week in July, and before July ended the planters who had cotton to sell were refusing to take even United States currency, demanding payment in gold or silver. This infuriated U. S. Grant, who commanded in western Tennessee, and who uttered formal denunciation of “speculators whose love of gain is greater than their love of country.” He remarked that U.S. paper money was legal tender all over the North and decreed that anyone who, owning cotton, refused to sell it for anything but specie would be arrested and forcibly dispossessed of his bales. The same thing, he added, would happen to any trader who paid out gold or silver. Grant’s subordinate, bristly red-haired Sherman, who was in command at Memphis, complained that gold paid for cotton went immediately to Nassau to buy guns and ammunition, and cried: “We cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time.”7
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bsp; This was of no help. The Northern government was vigorously promoting the cotton trade, for a variety of reasons—to assuage the New England mill owners, to improve the position of the dollar in foreign exchange, and to persuade Southern planters that it was good to do business with the Old Union—and the protests of the soldiers had little effect. The War Department overruled Grant, and Sherman fumed that Memphis now would be more useful to the Confederacy than it was when the Confederates occupied it. Neither Bragg nor Van Dorn, he declared, could maintain his army without the meat that was preserved by contraband salt that came down from the North and the munitions that were bought with gold that was paid for cotton, and he wrote to the Adjutant General that “this cotton order is worse to us than a defeat.”8
The case was intricate. In the spring of 1862 Confederate Secretary of War George W. Randolph warned Major General Samuel Jones, commanding the Confederate Department of Alabama and Western Florida, that although a military commander was authorized to destroy export cotton if he thought it was going to go to the enemy, it was necessary to use discretion: “He should bear in mind that it is good policy to exchange produce for arms and munitions of war with anyone willing to make such exchange.” A few months later Mr. Randolph notified President Davis that the Confederate commissary general believed that “the Army cannot be subsisted without permitting trade to some extent with Confederate ports in possession of the enemy.” As far as Mr. Randolph could see, the Confederacy could violate its policy of keeping cotton out of Yankee hands, or it could risk the starvation of its armed forces. He presented his own recommendation: “I advise that the commissary general be authorized to contract for bacon and salt, and the quartermaster general for blankets and shoes, payable in cotton, and that the general commanding on the Mississippi be instructed to permit the cotton delivered under these contracts to pass our lines.” In the fall of the year, a French cotton broker in New Orleans wrote to Secretary Randolph offering a deal: he could forward 100,000 sacks of salt for the Confederate government if in return he could get 10,000 bales of cotton, to be sent out through New Orlens to France. He could also provide bacon, shoes, blankets, and flannel on the same terms. President Davis wrote his own comment: “The objection to this is the proposed shipment to a port in the possession of the enemy. If the supplies can be obtained free from this objection it should be done … As a last resort we might be justified in departing from the declared policy in regard to exports, but the necessity should be absolute.”9
The trouble was that the necessity was absolute. By the winter of 1863 Mr. Randolph’s successor as Secretary of War, James A. Seddon, was confessing that the Department had contracted for various things from suppliers inside the Federal lines; “the contracts were of course made reluctantly, but under a strong conviction of the necessity of resorting to such means of obtaining adequate supplies.” Such deals, he agreed, tended to produce much more illicit trade, and sometimes demoralized good Southern civilians, but the armies had to be fed and clothed, and sometimes “irregular modes of supply” were the only recourse. It would probably be necessary to do more of this, and if so the army commanders in the field would have to get used to it.10
It was a two-way street. Cotton was well on its way toward a price of a dollar a pound in the Northern market; salt was rapidly climbing at the same rate in the South. Without salt, meat could not be preserved, armies could not be fed and even the slaves in the cotton fields would go hungry. The Confederacy had extensive saline wells in southwestern Virginia, and these were being exploited to the limit, but the South had never come close to providing all of its own salt; in the three years before the war, New Orleans alone imported about 700,000 sacks annually. Now the salt-cotton combination became too much for any government to control; military necessity was allied with an economic pressure that went beyond the possibility of restraint. One of Secretary Chase’s Treasury agents explained how the pressure was felt in New Orleans:
A sack of salt could be bought in Federally occupied New Orleans for $1.25. On the far side of Lake Pontchartrain, in Confederate territory, each sack could be sold for anything from $60 to $100. A trader who could take a thousand sacks across the lake, therefore, could make $60,000 or more on an investment of $1250; and with the money thus made he could buy cotton at ten cents a pound with the certainty that he would get at least sixty cents for it as soon as he got it back within the Federal lines.11 No government that ever existed could stop a trade which dripped money as copiously as that; and in this case the two governments which ostensibly wanted to stop it had their own reasons for hoping that at least some of it would continue.
There was not much the army commanders could do about it. Halleck, the new Federal generalissimo, told Grant in mid-August to do everything he could to kill the contraband trade, but he also tried to rationalize the matter of bringing in the cotton: the Army had to have cotton to make tents for those 300,000 new volunteers, and anyway the Confederates could buy munitions at Nassau with baled cotton just as easily as they could buy them with the gold they got by selling cotton to the Yankees. Sherman, who noticed that everytime he halted a southbound shipment of contraband at Memphis he heard anguished wails from the respectable merchants at Cincinnati, declared angrily that “Cincinnati furnishes more contraband goods than Charleston, and has done more to prolong the war than the State of South Carolina.”12
Some soldiers protested and did the best they could; others adjusted themselves, and possibly did better—for themselves, at any rate, if not for the common cause. High priest of those who found adjustment pleasant was Major General Benjamin Butler, Federal commander at New Orleans.
At one time or another Butler was a thorn in practically everybody’s side. He was a politician of subtle skills and excellent connections, a soldier of practically no military capacity, an opportunist alert to every shift in the wind, and a capable administrator who gave New Orleans a dictatorial military government as efficient as it was distasteful. He managed to win the hatred and contempt of Southerners as no other Yankee ever did—their mildest epithet for him was “Beast,” they accused him of everything from stealing teaspoons to insulting Southern womanhood, and Mr. Davis at last proclaimed him “an outlaw and common enemy of mankind” and directed that if he were ever captured he should be put to death without trial.13 This grew out of the fact that when Butler first reached New Orleans he hunted down and hanged one William B. Mumford, a citizen who had torn down and mangled a United States flag hoisted by Farragut’s men. Inasmuch as Mumford did this before the Federals formally took possession of the city he had committed no crime, under military law or any other kind of law, and good Southerners considered the hanging no better than plain murder.
Butler was in command at New Orleans just when people began to realize that there was something to be said for doing business with one’s enemies. New Orleans, of course, was one of the chief places where such business was done, and a special odor hung over the cotton-sugar-salt-contraband traffic that took place under Butler’s regime. Butler himself insisted that he was scrupulously honest throughout, and nobody ever proved anything to the contrary. Yet there always seemed to be a dead rat back behind the wainscoting somewhere. A frustrated Treasury agent reported that Butler “is such a smart man” that it would be very hard to find anything he really wished to hide, and said that “it is the general impression here that money will accomplish anything with the authorities.” Certainly the general’s brother, Colonel Andrew J. Butler, was making all kinds of deals, raking in profits which were estimated to run as high as $2,000,000. Despite his title, Colonel Butler was not in the Army; he was just with the Army, one of a number of enterprising merchants who had followed the Army into the cotton south. He traded in nobody knew quite what, up the Mississippi, shipping goods in boats which the Army had seized. He traded also across Lake Pontchartrain, in salt, and it was said that he had made a fortune sending sugar back to New York; and, all in all, he was typical of his time and place. The multi
plicity of deals that were going on inspired a cynical wisecrack among Union men in New Orleans. They said that they wished Ben Butler was President of the United States: he would make millions for himself during the first three months of his presidency, but he would go on and win the war during the next three months.14
What happened in the west happened also in the east. A clerk in the Confederate War Department at Richmond wrote that “it is sickening to behold the corruption of the commercial men,” and he said that the Confederate capital was infested with Baltimore merchants who were importing huge quantities of goods from the North and selling them in Richmond at fabulous prices; some of them, he was told, were making $50,000 a month clear profit. At the end of the year a Confederate enrolling officer asked permission to raise a force to squelch the contraband trade that was coming down the eastern shore of Maryland and across the Rappahannock; the “northern Neck” of Virginia, he said, was “worse than Yankeedom itself.” But the War Department warned him that the case must be approached with much discretion: “All trade with the enemy is demoralizing and illegal and should, of course, be discountenanced, but at the same time, situated as the people to a serious extent are … some barter or trading for the supplies of their necessities is almost inevitable and excusable.”15
The demoralization was real; it existed on both sides, and it was costly. A few months before the end of the war one of Bragg’s officers who had been touring Mississippi turned in a somber judgment: “The fact is that cotton, instead of contributing to our strength, has been the greatest element of our weakness here. Yankee gold is fast accomplishing what Yankee arms could never achieve—the subjugation of this people.” At that same time a committee of the Federal Congress, finishing a survey of the illicit trade, concluded that it had cost the North much more than it was ever worth, both physically and morally. Trade with the enemy, said this committee, had prolonged the war and had cost thousands of lives “and millions upon millions of treasure,” and had gone far to support the Confederate armies in the west. Occupied New Orleans, the committee believed, had helped the Confederacy more than any of the Confederacy’s own seaports with the single exception of Wilmington.16