Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (60 page)

Gorgas also established new arsenals and workshops across the South. He built a chemical laboratory, a major gunpowder factory in Augusta, Georgia, and a new cannon foundry in northern Georgia, and organized a string of eight new arsenals from Richmond to Selma, along with several other smaller gunworks in the Carolinas. Together, the new plants were manufacturing 170,000 rifle cartridges a day, and his gunpowder factory produced 2.7 million pounds of gunpowder over the course of the war. He had what one subordinate called “a gift of prescience, which enabled him to provide for the wants of every battlefield,” and by 1864 Gorgas was the only member of the Confederate War Department who could really describe himself as an unqualified success—which he did not hesitate to do. “I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations,” he happily confided to his diary in 1864, “Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a saber… we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies. In looking over all this I feel that my three years of labor have not been passed in vain.”
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The dark side of Gorgas’s endeavors was the fact that, as chief of ordnance, he found himself directly intervening in the production as well as the administration of war matériel. Edwin Stanton, for all his driving determination to get the war moving, was respectful and cautious in dealing with the North’s industrial potential. As a former railroad lawyer (like Lincoln), Stanton wanted “the aid of the highest business talent… this country can afford,” and his arrangements with the northern
railroads were carefully constructed to harness the military power of railroad technology, while leaving the actual direction of the railroads to the private sector.
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Similarly, Stanton’s quartermaster and commissary heads contracted out their needs for weapons, horses, and clothes by bid on the open market, rather than by appropriating existing industries for government use.

By contrast, the Confederate War Department struggled to nationalize Confederate industries, set official prices for goods, and even compete against its own citizens with government-owned blockade-runners. And those businesses that the government did not nationalize outright it tried to regulate into submission: in April 1863 the Confederate Senate actually passed a bill limiting businesses to a 20 percent profit margin (it failed to pass the Confederate House, however). None of these problems is entirely surprising in a society whose plantation elites felt little desire to see any emergence of a powerful industrial middle class in their new nation. Although the Confederate government’s reach into the economy fell considerably short of being state socialism or state corporatism, and a great deal of its resort to nationalization was really more in the nature of an improvisation in the face of desperation, the Confederate government still came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over Southern industrial production and prices in just the way it had always assumed it could control Southern slave labor. The ruling Southerners’ plans may not have been consciously illiberal, but their instinct was.
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What the Confederate elite did not count upon was that, like their slaves, the vast pool of nonslaveholding whites might find ways to elude submission—hoarding, black-marketeering (which was routinely denounced as “extortion”), and simple withdrawal from the market. Quartermaster General Myers increasingly resorted to outright confiscation of wool, which in turn led to manufacturers cutting back on production. Manufacturers who did sign Confederate contracts soon found their production monopolized by government orders, leaving the states, suppliers, and merchants empty-handed. “If Congress and the State Governments desired to limit production,” raged the
Charleston Mercury
in June 1863, “they could not pursue a more certain policy to effect that end, than that of restricting prices, and every such step taken by our rulers will tend to embarrass and ruin our country.” Myers, unlike Northrop, was eventually superseded in August 1863, by Alexander Lawton, but the overall policies did not change. When Samuel Bassett was commissioned by the
Virginia General Assembly to acquire a half million dollars’ worth of cotton cloth, he had to report back that “the universal response has been that the working capacity of every mill is entirely absorbed by the Confederate Government.”
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Nothing illustrates this conflict between the attitude of the plantation and the fluidity of the market than Confederate railroad policy. In April and again in October 1861 Secretary of War Leroy Walker attempted to bargain with Southern railroad presidents for a quid pro quo arrangement not unlike the one Stanton hammered out with the Northern railroads a year later. In February 1862 the Confederate quartermaster department urged Jefferson Davis to disregard Walker’s initiative and militarize the railroads “under the direction of an efficient superintendent, free from local interests, investments, or connection with special railroads,” and in March the Confederate Congress authorized Davis to take “absolute control and management of all railways and their rolling stock.” Davis hesitated to seize control of the railroads outright, and railroad company presidents begged and parried for exemptions, advantages, and special orders prohibiting military interference with their railroads. However, Davis did appoint a “superintendent,” William R. Wadley, to coordinate “supervision and control of the transportation for the Government on all the railroads of the Confederate States” in December 1862.
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This muddle of directives served no real purpose except to signal to departmental Confederate military commanders that there was no coherent railroad policy and that they were free to offer abysmally low rates for transportation, disrupt freight schedules with claims for military priority, and generally run the South’s limited supply of locomotives and boxcars until they fell apart. As early as 1862 the president of the Virginia Central railroad had to confess to his stockholders that “much anxiety is felt to know whether our railroads can be kept in safe running order if the war shall continue a few years longer, and it is hardly to be doubted that the rapid decline in the efficiency of our roads is soon to diminish our means of successfully maintaining our struggle for independence.” By the end of the war, the feeble Southern railway system had been run into the ground by the unsure policies of the Confederate government and military.
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The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.

E
arly on the morning of April 1, 1863, an angry group of women gathered in the small, squat brick building of the Belvidere Hill Baptist Church in the Confederate capital of Richmond. They met for complaint, not for prayer. Some of the women had husbands in the Confederate army and were fending for themselves on the pittances they could earn and the broken promises of assistance made by the Confederate government. Others had husbands in the Tredegar Iron Works whose pay fell woefully short of subsistence levels. Food supplies in the Confederate capital had dwindled as the fruits of the last year’s harvest were consumed by Robert E. Lee’s army and the civilian population of the city. What was now offered for sale by Richmond’s merchants, bakers, and butchers went for astronomical prices. One woman, Mary Jackson (who was variously described as a farmer’s wife, a sign painter’s wife, and the mother of a soldier), stood up behind the pulpit of the church and demanded action: let the working-class women of Richmond assemble the next day, march to Governor John Letcher’s mansion on Capitol Square, and force the governor to make good on the promises of assistance. If assistance was not forthcoming, then let them turn on the “extortioners” in the shops and levy their own brand of fairness by ransacking the bakeries and market stalls for what they needed.

The next morning, a crowd of 300 women joined Mary Jackson at a city marketplace four blocks from Capitol Square. Armed with a Bowie knife and revolver, Jackson led a seething procession through the streets to the governor’s mansion, where Letcher met them on the front steps. The governor, however, had nothing to offer them but a few expressions of personal concern, and after a short speech the governor retreated behind his door and left the dissatisfied crowd milling around in
his front yard. Another woman named Mary Johnson, “a tall, daring Amazonian-looking woman” with a “white feather, standing erect from her hat,” took the lead of the crowd and pointed them down Richmond’s Main Street. “Clubs and guns and stones” appeared, and the crowd surged down the street toward Richmond’s shops.
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Over the next several hours, all semblance of order disappeared in Richmond’s commercial district as the enraged women broke down doors and windows, seized bread and meat, and then went on to loot jewelry, clothing, hats, “and whatever else they wanted.” The hapless Governor Letcher and Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, appeared on the scene to calm the mob, but the women were beyond listening to the words of the politicians. At last a company of soldiers, normally detailed for service at the Tredegar Ironworks, filed into Main Street. Someone or some people in the crowd pulled a wagon into the street as a hasty barricade, and at that moment, all that was needed for Confederate soldiers to begin shooting down Confederate women in the middle of Richmond was one reckless gesture, one careless word.
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No one had ever thought of Jefferson Davis as possessing a dramatist’s sense of timing, but on this occasion the president of the Confederacy appeared at precisely the right moment. It is not clear whether someone summoned Davis (who lived only a few blocks away) or whether he was simply following his own ear for trouble, but he found the mob and the soldiers at the point where each was ready to begin a melee. Coolness under pressure had been Davis’s long suit ever since his army days, and he quickly mounted the barricade wagon and began to speak. His speech was conciliatory, reproachful, and threatening by turns. He knew the people of Richmond were hungry, but he pointed out that farmers in the countryside would only be more unwilling to bring their produce to market in Richmond if they knew that it would be stolen by rioters there. He shamed them by pointing to the stolen jewelry and clothing in their hands when their protest was supposed to be for bread. He even offered them money from his own pockets. He closed by taking out his pocket watch and announcing that if the crowd had not dispersed in five minutes, he would order the soldiers to open fire. A minute or two crawled past, and then the crowd slowly began to break up and drift away. Eventually forty-one women, including Mary Jackson, and twenty-four men were arrested on theft and riot charges.
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The Richmond bread riot was not an isolated case. During 1863, similar riots broke out in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama; in Mobile, a crowd of women carrying banners with slogans such as “Bread or Blood” and “Bread and Peace”
marched down Dauphine Street, smashing shop windows as they went. A group of “Soldiers’ Wives” wrote to North Carolinian Zebulon Vance to complain that with “our Husbands & Sons… now separated from us by this cruel War not only to defend our humble homes but the homes & property of the rich man,” he should understand that “there are few of us who can make over a dollar a day. … Many of us work day after day without a morsal of meat to strengthen us for our Labours and often times we are without bread. Now, Sir, how We ask you in the name of God are we to live.”
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By 1863, the war that Southerners had entered into so confidently two years before was imposing strains on Southern society that few had imagined in the heady spring of Sumter and the high summer of First Bull Run. The creation of a workable Southern nation required more than enthusiasm—it required time to resolve the numerous contradictions in Southern society between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, between the Romantic image of the South as a society of plantation aristocrats and the grubby rationality of cotton capitalism, between states’ rights and the urgency of centralizing every Southern resource in order to win the war. Unfortunately, time was in short supply in the Confederacy. Southern armies were losing territory, Southern men were quietly avoiding war service, and Southern families were going hungry. If Southerners were ever to have the time they needed to understand why they were fighting this war, then the Confederate armies must strike and strike quickly to secure Confederate independence, or else the stress of performing this experiment in nation building under the sword would push the Southern nation into collapse.

The day after the Richmond bread riot, the lead editorial in the Richmond
Dispatch
was resolutely headlined, “Sufferings in the North.”
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On November 7, 1862, President Lincoln finally dismissed George Brinton McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. The immediate reason for McClellan’s dismissal was his slowness in pursuit of Lee’s battered Army of Northern Virginia after its hammering at Antietam the previous September. Looming behind that was the larger conflict between Lincoln and McClellan over slavery and emancipation. But getting rid of McClellan only solved half the problem; it now became necessary for Lincoln to find a more politically reliable replacement who would be aggressive enough to pursue and defeat the Army of Northern Virginia.