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President Jefferson Davis (above) and his Confederate armies, from Vicksburg to the March to the Sea, could only watch as Southern civilians were forced to endure 'total war.' |
Part 2 of a series
OF ALL THE reasons historians mention
The North had a much larger manufacturing capability, and 92 percent of all factory workers were in the North. The state of Massachusetts alone had a greater industrial base than the entire South. Northern factories produced 91 percent of all the textiles made in the United States, a vital component of uniforms and tents for housing troops in the field.
The North had a greater supply of raw materials: 94 percent of the iron that made the steam engines and rail lines, and 97 percent of the coal which fed the steam engines that provided power to those trains. In rail lines alone, the United States in 1860 had 31,000 miles of rail lines, more than the rest of the world combined. But 22,000 miles of those lines were in the North, woven together into an integrated rail system in which four lines linked cities on the Atlantic Ocean with cities on the upper Mississippi River--and all the towns in between.
Southern rail lines, by contrast, in many cases went from the interior of a state to the nearest seaport; there was little interest in an integrated rail system to connect the major cities. For example, there was no direct connection between New Orleans, the biggest city in the South, and Atlanta, a major rail hub in Georgia. And there was only one rail line across the Mississippi River connecting Texas, a huge source of food and cattle and horses during the war, with the rest of the South.
The one area in which the South was far ahead of the North was in cotton production; the South produced 96 percent of all cotton in the United States. More on that later.
And yet, the South was not fazed by these considerations. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston wrote that the South had "ample means. The people were not guilty of undertaking the war without the means to wage it successfully." Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard said, "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederacy."
A Richmond paper listed the reasons why the South would prevail: "Something more than numbers makes Armies. Against the vast superiority of the North the South has a set-off of advantages." Included was the feeling that the "South was fighting with psychological advantages: [the goal of] independence plus protection of home and hearth."
They also listed these Southern geographic advantages: "Rivers, swamps, mountains that were the equivalent of successive lines of fortifications and defense. Interior lines of communication, a huge advantage. A huge advantage in space [and] the North had a lot of geography to conquer."
Most of the nation's arsenals were in the North, and they produced 90 percent of the nation's firearms and artillery. The North had a much greater acreage devoted to food production and a vastly greater devotion to mechanized farming. With the invention of the McCormick reaper in 1847, the North saw how that one invention could so increase food production that grain could be harvested seven times more efficiently; a few men could do the work of dozens. By 1860, 80,000 reapers had been sold; during the war, 250,000 more were sold to Northern farms. Grain production was now industrialized, and Northern farms were the envy of the world.
Meantime, the South clung to slave labor for its production.
The surprising thing is that nowhere in any discussion prior to the war is the understanding that in the short time between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of our Civil War, war had changed. The Revolution had been a traditional war for its time, using the same battle tactics and arms that had been used for several hundred years. It was little different from the way Napoleon had fought his wars.
But the few years before 1860 saw more inventions than the world had witnessed in the previous thousand years: The Industrial Revolution had revolutionized not only life, it had changed warfare forever. War was now more lethal and could be fought on larger battlefields. The invention of the railroad, the steam engine, the electric telegraph; new developments in food production and preservation; new and better iron allowing more powerful rifles along with artillery of greater range and size and accuracy--all these and more made systemic changes in the way wars were fought.
No longer did a few Colonists leave their homes at night, raid an Indian village, kill a few braves, and go back to farming the next morning. In our Civil War, both sides raised vast armies that had to be armed and fed and clothed both winter and summer, and moved about and given commands via electic telegraph from a headquarters sometimes a thousand miles away.
All this was new and huge--and (this is critical) required that the whole nation be mobilized to support the soldiers doing the actual fighting. This was different--civilians, the "home front" if you will--for the first time were part of the war effort. Civilians were involved not only with their sons doing the fighting--they were required to support those sons with their personal labor and treasure, and the best way they could do it was in a thing called a "factory" where war goods were manufactured in quantities never before imagined.
And quite apart from the people, who were in most cases equally devoted to their "cause," this was where the North had it head and shoulders over the South. The North had in almost a single generation transformed its economy from a home-based, artisan, family-farm economy to a factory-based manufacturing economy, able to produce war materials in quantities which astounded: thousands of rifles, thousands of uniforms, thousands of bullets put into the hands of thousands of soldiers who were then transported thousands of miles over an integrated rail system and ordered by a first-rate telegraph system to be in position, fully equipped to do battle at the exact battle site.
There was at least one important change: With civilians now part of the war effort, they were now legitimate war targets and they and their assets could be treated as prizes, to be confiscated as spoils of war.
Later generations would call it "total war"--and it began in our Civil War.
The amazing thing about our Civil War is that it lasted as long as it did. By sheer devotion to cause--grit, if you will--the South willed itself not to be defeated, to keep fighting against odds that would have daunted a less determined people.
But in the end, it was the economies that ruled--the Union advantages of industry and mass were more than the Confederacy could overcome. The South was not defeated so much as they were overwhelmed by Northern abundance--abundance in men and horses and wagons and guns and food and transport and and and This is one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War.
NED HARRISON is a Greensboro, N.C., writer who specializes in military history. His columns about the Civil War appear regularly in North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia newspapers. He wants to hear your opinions about why the South lost the Civil War. Write Ned Harrison, News & Record/T&C. Box 20848, Greensboro, N.C. 27420. E-mail him at n-b-h@mindspring.com.
