198 LACK OF MANUFACTURES; COTTON NOT KING. faster than Southern, for slavery prevented the South from diverting to herself a very large proportion of the streams of immigration which were constantly adding to the human resources of the North and West. The north had not only a varied agriculture but also flourishing manufactures and trade; the South was a great plantation. Its manufactures were in value only about one-eleventh of those of the North. A study of the reports of the census taken just before the conflict shows in the Confederacy a lamentable lack of the industries most necessary to the support of a great war. Iron was a prime necessity in a preparation for military operations, but the South's rich deposits had been hardly touched. The production of machinery, cotton and woolen goods, leather, boots and shoes, and agricultural implements was pitifully small. To meet the needs of the situation by establishing the required industries and bringing about a general industrial reorganization was a difficult and well-nigh impossible task. As it turned out, notable headway was made with military industries, but the overtaxed energies of the South were not equal to the task of supplying other urgent needs of its people. At the beginning of the war the Confederacy counted much on the strategical importance of its masterful position as the producer of the world's supply of cotton, for its nearly complete monopoly seemed to be a powerful economic weapon in its hands. Cotton was the principal export of the United States, and the withholding of the supply was expected seriously to affect the North by the disturbance of international exchanges. Such distress was anticipated in those industries of the North and Europe which were dependent on the cotton supply as to result in irresistible pressure on the governments to bring the war to an end; and the Confederate authorities were so much influenced by this hope that at first they strove to keep cotton from being sent out of the Confederacy. But, as the needs of the South became urgent, there was a change of policy, for it seemed reasonable and wise to attempt to meet deficiencies in arms and munitions of war, in food and supplies, by obtaining them from Europe in exchange for high priced cotton. However, the constantly tightening blockade, which condemned the South to economic isolation, upset all such plans and made their results relatively small, for the industrial needs of the seceding States could not be adequately met by home production; their ports, closely beset by the Federal fleet, received only the uncertain cargoes of venturesome blockade runners. Another almost insurmountable difficulty in the way of making the South self-sustaining was the lack of skilled LACK OF SKILLED WORKMEN AND RAILROADS. mechanics and of directors of industry with scientific and technical training. Though this was a very real and serious misfortune, due recognition must be given to the creditable results achieved under able direction in some of the military industries of the Confederacy. It is also probable that the Southern people were less prepared than the Northern to devise and apply efficient and scientific methods in the management of affairs, for, predominantly occupied with agriculture under the slave labor system, the South had had no opportunity for gaining general familiarity with the procedure of the modern world of industry and trade. In the matter of intercourse and commerce between the different parts of the South, the lack of extensive and well-equipped railroad systems was a serious disadvantage. The railroads were largely local in character, carrying the traffic between the interior and such important cities as Richmond, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. There were no through lines binding the states of the Confederacy together. When the war opened the South had less than thirty per cent. of the railroad mileage of the country, and this was soon greatly reduced by the invading armies. The Southern roads. were not so well built and operated as those at the North, and as the war progressed it proved impossible to 199 maintain them in even moderately good condition. Tracks and bridges fell into a dangerous state of disrepair; rolling stock deteriorated and there was no way of replacing it. Frequently the roads were so overtaxed with military transportation that private business and trade, when carried on at all, were subject to interminable delays and uncertainty. In adequate railroad connection between the different parts of the South was a serious obstacle to the furnishing of subsistence to the Confederate armies, the result being that there might be abundant crops in one section, while lack of the means of transportation left the soldiers without rations in another. The methods of the Confederate commissary department were such as to discourage farmers from willingly furnishing foodstuffs to the army. The government could not, therefore, rely upon ordinary purchases in the market from producers or dealers, but adopted a policy of impressing supplies at prescribed schedules of prices below the market rate and such forced purchases were made with successive issues of paper money. The farmers claimed that they could not profitably produce foodstuffs at the government's arbitrary prices, and in some cases withheld their produce; in other cases they turned from the growing of cereals to that of cotton and tobacco, as the latter crops were less liable to 200 INFLUENCE OF THE FINANCIAL SITUATION. seizure. The result was that toward the end of the war the government experienced the greatest difficulty in securing subsistence for the armies. Even impressment of goods was accompanied by great wastefulness, for enormous quantities of provisions were lost, stolen, or allowed to spoil. Though there was no great dearth of food in the country at large, the army suffered by reason of the poor commissary system, and the military power of the Confederate forces was seriously impaired. The paper money inflation played no inconsiderable part in the economic difficulties of the South. Speculation not only became inevitable but was actually encouraged by the logic of the situation, while legitimate business became uncertain and hazardous. The successive paper money issues led to constantly increasing prices, for the limitation of which laws were enacted, the only effect being to cause producers to withhold their goods. from the markets; the resulting scarcity in turn led to still higher prices and new paper issues with which to purchase supplies. Heavy taxation then became necessary, but the Confederacy was ill-equipped to enforce promptly a rigorous tax system and there was little disposition to attempt it; moreover, when taxes were levied, they were paid in depreciating paper and their burden could be lightened by delay in settlement. Confederate finances, therefore, reached such a low ebb that the government finally resorted to a tax in kind of one-tenth of agricultural products, but this measure aroused great opposition among the agricultural classes who regarded it as singling them out for an unfair burden. The result of the financing of the war with loans and paper money issues, instead of by severe taxation, became, therefore, most disastrous; for, by the end of the war, the depreciation of the currency was so extreme that a dollar in specie was worth about one thousand in paper. Such conditions brought industrial demoralization to the South and contributed not a little to the final collapse. Mention should also be made of the tremendous advantage the North had over the South in the possession of National and international money markets and of most of the great centres of trade-a fact which accorded the former infinitely greater facilities for the negotiation of loans and for the transaction of other financial operations necessary to the successful conduct of a war. New Orleans and Charleston were at first the money centres of the South, but their supremacy soon waned and there were no others to take their place. However, though the economic weaknesses and difficulties of the Confederacy were great, they furnished the North no easy victory. There Complete reorganiza The vital issues settled by the Civil War - Fixing the status of the Nation - National unification and worldexpansion - Social, moral, industrial, and political effects of the abolition of slavery tion of life in the South The effect of emancipation on territorial acquisitions. When the eleven Southern states voted to secede from the Union and establish the Southern Confederacy as an independent government, they presented for final adjudication several issues that had been in controversy from the beginning of National existence. The constitutional relations of the several States to one another and to the central government, questions of State rights and of negro slavery were weighed in the balance from 1861 to 1865, and in the four short, momentous years those and other political issues, scarcely less important, had been forever decided. Although slavery appeared in the forefront as conspicuously provocative of secession and of the war, it was really a secondary, not a primary, cause of the trouble. Larger economic and political considerations had for seventy years been operating gradually but grimly to an inevitable suspension of sympathy between the North and the South. The industrial and commercial interests of the two sections had been diametrically divergent from the first, and radically different opinions concerning the interpretation of the Constitution were held on the two sides of the Mason and *Professor J. C. Schwab's The Confederate States of America (New York, 1901) is of great value in the study of this topic. It contains an extensive bibliography of original and secondary sources. Volumes iii. and v. of James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States should also be consulted. Information as to the comparative population, industries, and wealth of the North and South is to be found in the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Other select references are The South in the Building of the Nation, vol. Economic History, 1607-1865 (Richmond, 1909); F. E. Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, in American Nation series. vol. xix. (New York, 1906); J. K. Hosmer, Outcome of the Civil War, in American Nation series, vol. xxi. (New York, 1907); Duncan Rose, Why the Confederacy Failed, in the Century Magazine (November, 1896). Also see numerous references to original and secondary sources under the topic " Economic Activities of the Confederacy," chap. x., ante. V.; 202 FIXING THE STATUS OF THE NATION. Dixon line. These differences of opinion were intrinsic and vital, and slavery was but one outgrowth of the conditions which led to the conflicting views. It was recognized at the outset by both parties that the slavery question was not the pivot upon which the war turned. Although the platform upon which Lincoln was elected declared for the restriction of slavery to the area of the slave States, and the abolition movement for a generation in the North had aimed at that and even more, the President expressly declared in his inaugural address that he had no lawful right and no inclination "directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." Politically the non-extension of slavery had been the issue of the Presidential campaign of 1860, as it had been that of 1856; but with the breaking out of the war the great issue became the preservation of the Union in its integrity and the determination of questions relating thereto. Upon that line the issue was clearly drawn. As the Crittenden resolution (passed by Congress in July of 1861) expressed it, the war was not to be waged" for the purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states; but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired. At the end of four years that paramount issue was settled and with it other questions, some cognate and others that had developed during the period. When Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the question whether the United States constituted a confederacy, a federation or a Nation and whether or not the States were independent sovereignties, was relegated to the realms of academic discussion. There were other results of the war, to be sure, but none so important as this. That the United States had made a Nation of themselves in 1789 had up to that time never been wholly conceded; from 1865 there was no shadow of a doubt on that point. The Nation was then and there fixed in its political status beyond all possible peradventure, and the trend of opinion and events of the ensuing years have only served to render that status impregnable. Indeed, so far has the country advanced toward a broader and stronger centralization of government that the socalled "New Nationalism" of the opening years of the new century, which, three generations ago, would undoubtedly have precipitated a revolution, is now calmly, unquestionably and dispassionately accepted as our rightful and proud position. As an outcome of the Nationalistic idea, then, the United States has become a world power. With domestic animosities laid, and internal interests no longer divided, with the extension of area, a phenomenal growth of |