Civil War anniversary: North and South: The sinews of war

“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there’s not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? ... All we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”

Rhett Butler’s retort to the Tarleton twins’ swagger at the Twelve Oaks picnic early in “Gone with the Wind” was wrong about the duration of the oncoming war, but its assessment of the relative material strengths of the two sides at the beginning of the conflict wasn’t wide of the mark. Although arguably less prepared than the South in 1861 to mobilize for combat, by all the usual measures of military potential, the North had huge superiorities.

When the war began, the population of the 23 states remaining in the Union was 22.3 million and that of the 11 Confederate states 9.1 million, of whom 40 percent were slaves. In staple commodity production, only in cotton did the South exceed the North, growing 96 percent of the national supply.

“King Cotton” prompted Southern planters to count on the threat of a “cotton famine” as their decisive economic weapon should their trade with New England and European textile manufacturers be interrupted — a view which cavalierly dismissed a host of spectacularly unfavorable sectional disparities, to say nothing of what it might do to their own finances. With more than 10 times the factory production and three times the farm acreage of the South — producing twice as much corn, over four times as much wheat, and 150 percent of the amount of livestock — Northern states generated three times as much wealth as those in the Confederacy.

Northern railroad density per square mile was more than twice that of the South, with even greater advantages in canals and paved roads. In 1860, Northern states produced 97 percent of the nation’s firearms, 94 percent of its cloth, 93 percent of its pig iron, and more than 90 percent of its footwear. Only 19 of 470 locomotives made in the United States in 1860 were built in the South. In shipping, 90 percent of pre-war merchant tonnage was registered in Northern ports, and virtually all the naval tonnage remained under Union control as the fighting got underway.

Nevertheless, these economic imbalances were significantly offset by other considerations, both tangible and intangible, that directly affected the military capabilities of the two sides.

While the Confederacy, as a brand-new regime, obviously had to organize and mobilize from scratch, the war-making resources of the Union were little better. The U.S. Army consisted of only 16,000 men, most of whom were stationed in 79 posts west of the Mississippi. After the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, but these would have to be organized and trained. Many in the Army’s high command, both civilian and military, had been in service since the War of 1812, including 74-year-old General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, and much of the weaponry was of similar vintage.

The U.S. Navy, with less than a dozen of its 42 commissioned vessels available in the spring of 1861 for service in American waters, appeared in little better shape, although capable administration enabled it to draw rapidly on the large resources of the merchant marines and the North’s near-monopoly of shipbuilding.

In the South, widespread mobilization of state militias accompanied secession, and by the time of Fort Sumter, 60,000 men were under arms for the Confederate cause, even before the secession of four Upper South states. Among their eventual commanders were 313 officers who resigned from the U.S. Army, as well as graduates of Southern military colleges such as The Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute — of eight such institutions in the pre-war U.S., seven were in the slave states. Most Northern officers came directly from civilian life in a culture lacking the militaristic traditions of the South, and their inexperience was often costly on the battlefield.

Like the army, the Confederate navy benefited from the adherence of many former U.S. Navy officers — nearly a quarter of the North’s original naval officer corps joined the South — but with no hope of building a force able to challenge the Union blockade of Southern ports in a major fleet action, Confederate naval leadership looked to offset their numerical inferiority by innovative weapons and the use of privateers and commerce raiders against Northern merchant shipping.

Financially, Northern advantages were almost insuperable. At the beginning of the war, the South owned 30 percent of the national wealth, but most of its capital was in the non-liquid forms of land and slaves, and many of their owners were already deeply in debt. Only 12 percent of the circulating currency and 21 percent of the nation’s banking assets lay in the South. There was little experience with taxation — Southerners had few public services and paid only half the per capita tax burden of the rest of the country. Bond sales languished in an economy with little spare cash. During the first year of the war, only 2 percent of the Confederacy’s revenue came from taxes; 75 percent came from printed treasury notes that depreciated immediately upon issue, and the remainder came from bonds, some carrying interest rates of 12 percent per month. In the North, on the other hand, an initial fiscal crisis prompted enactment of the first federal income tax in American history in August, 1861, and the Treasury overcame its immediate difficulties by using the section’s stronger financial structures to support several successful bond issues.

In the end, the war lasted nearly 50 times longer than Rhett Butler’s prediction (and those as well of many real-life forecasters on both sides), and while the South achieved some remarkable feats of catch-up industrialization, Northern numbers and abundance simply overwhelmed Southern scarcity and Butler’s “cotton, slaves ... and arrogance.”

This article is part of a series of stories about Dalton and life in Dalton during the Civil War. The stories run on Sunday and are provided by the Dalton-Whitfield Civil War 150th Anniversary Committee. To find out more about the committee go to www.dalton 150th.com. If you have material that you would like to contribute for a future article contact Robert Jenkins at 706-259-4626 or robert.jenkins@robertdjenkins.com.

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