The Resources of the Confederacy

IN one of Mr. W. E. Henley’s hospital poems, a sailor, “ set at euchre on his elbow,” tells in twenty lines what he saw from the wharf at Charleston when he was there off a blockade runner, near the end of the American Civil War. Professor John C. Schwab, of Yale, after long and patient investigation of many obscure sources, has written a financial and industrial history of the South during the war¹ which exhibits every characteristic of the most painstaking school of economic historians. His paragraphs are so meaty with facts, his references so abundant, his method so consistently scientific, his work, in a word, is so thoroughly well done, that it is hard to see how industry and intelligence could have gone farther.

Yet it is a question whether The Confederate States of America or Mr. Henley’s verses will prove the more serviceable to the ordinary reader, trying to get a notion of what was inside the shell that crackled to pieces before the great armies of Grant and Sherman. Such is the complexity of civilized societies, so many and so artificial are the forms which the ordinary processes of production and distribution, buying and selling, borrowing and lending, come to take, so constantly does the play of human motives disarrange the machinery of industry and government, and so wide a margin of error must the student allow in his observations, that failure in one sense is always predicable of an enterprise like Professor Schwab’s. The work will of necessity be incomplete, for to reconstruct a civilization by setting one stone upon another is beyond the industry of a lifetime ; and it will not be rounded out by the reader himself, for it is not supplemented by his sympathetic understanding, it does not stimulate his imagination. The difference between Professor Schwab’s treatment of the dead Confederacy and what a poet, a novelist, a literary historian, might do with it, is like the difference between an artist’s and an anatomist’s treatment of a human body. We do not judge the artist’s work by the number or even by the truth of its details ; its aim is to make us see and understand the whole by virtue of a quality common to us and it. On the anatomist or the anatomist-historian our demand is different. His work is unfinished until the last tissue of the body or the body politic is dissected into its minutest cells. Neither anatomy nor political science can ever attain its object completely, as painting and poetry do sometimes attain theirs. Mr. Henley’s sailor man might not more enlighten us if his glimpse from the wharf were widened into a vision of the whole harassed South. Professor Schwab’s book will be the more valuable for every correction he may make in his tables of prices and note issues, for every newspaper file he may in a future edition make a footnote to refer us to.

But there is also a sense in which a work like this may be complete, — a sense in which it may very well pass completeness and tend to surfeit: that is to say, if one has regard for the reader’s limitations. There is a point beyond which the writer cannot go without disregarding the “ reader ” altogether, not in the matter of his mere interest and pleasure, but in the matter of his attention and memory, of his ability to carry a mass of facts in his head long enough to connect them with what may follow. Of course, there are readers and readers, but it should be no harder to gauge the average mind in this than in many other of the respects in which one must gauge it in books and in life, and to stop short of the line beyond which, for the average mind, scarcely a single general principle or important relation of cause and effect will stand out through the haze to reward the effort which the reading of such a book requires.

Of course, too, it is not the “ reader ” but the student that books like this are meant for, yet the reader also has some claims. There are questions which every intelligent person would like to ask about the Confederacy, and here are the answers ; but one may miss them altogether if the results of the investigation are set forth too abstrusely, or too cautiously, or too minutely. Professor Schwab and another scientist, Professor E. A. Smith, of Allegheny College, — who limits himself, however, to a study of the Confederate treasury,² — come forward from their dissection of a defunct state, and we wish to know of them, not what discoveries or confirmations they have to report to their brother scientists, but what was the strength that sustained the Southern Confederacy while it lived and what disease or wound or weakness it died of. Perhaps it may be practicable to extract from their reports, restrained as they are, and resolutely void of gossip and conjecture, some satisfaction of our unenlightened curiosity.

Our question is not meant to cover the military struggle. With the main features of that, educated Americans — and many Englishmen as well, now that they have books like Colonel Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson — are reasonably well acquainted. But it seems nowadays to be generally conceded that while the armies on both sides were composed almost entirely of volunteers, and so small that the North’s superiority in wealth and numbers had not begun to tell, the South’s advantages of fighting on interior lines and of possessing more good riders and good shots did tell heavily. It would perhaps be conceded also that the South had men enough, if she could have kept them in the field well armed and well clothed and well fed, to withstand even the vast numbers which the North did put in the field and liberally equip and sustain. We all understand, too, that after the first few months the blockade forced the Confederates to rely on their own resources far more nearly altogether than the Southern leaders in secession had apprehended. Were the available resources inadequate, or were they neglected or wasted ? Why were the Southern armies always ill armed, ill clad, ill fed, ill paid ? How far was the outcome, inevitable though it may have been, immediately attributable to faults and errors ?

If we disregard the already accomplished effects of slavery on Southern industry, it was probably of advantage to the Confederates that the laborers in their fields were of a class less easily demoralized by war than a free white peasantry would have been. There is nothing to indicate that, until the country was overrun by Union troops, the blacks on the farms and plantations were less efficient than in peace. They made no move to rise. It was not found necessary to exempt from military service more than one owner or overseer for every twenty slaves, and the exemption did not keep more than five or six thousand men out of the army. Here was an agricultural labor system, defective, no doubt, but which did not need to be adapted to the emergency, and which, when it was diverted from cotton-growing, — partly by the loss of the market for cotton, and partly by concerted purpose, — was capable of producing a food supply adequate to all wants, save that certain foods in common use, but not absolutely indispensable, could not be produced in the South at all. For some of these, like tea and coffee, passable substitutes were contrived ; the insufficiency of salt and of various medicines was the difficulty most nearly insuperable. There was, besides, a good part of the four and a half million bales of cotton of the crop of 1860, the entire four million of the crop of 1861, the million or more of 1862, the half million each of 1863 and 1864. The South had sufficient food, and it had in abundance a principal raw material of clothing. Tobacco was plentiful,— no mean item in war, as veterans both of the Civil War and of the Spanish War will testify. Tanneries were commoner than any other sort of manufactories, and the supply of leather, though scant, could be eked out with various substitutes. There were vast resources of timber, and all the raw material for making iron ; contrary to the general notion, the great deposits of iron ore in northern Alabama were known before the war, and tentative attempts to exploit them had been made.

But it was simply impossible to build the furnaces and mills and railroads which were necessary to an effective use of these resources. The fact that the manufactories and railroads were not brought up to the requisite development is the best of reasons for believing that they could not have been, with the labor and the capital that were available ; for such manufactories as were set up, such railroads as were already built, — some of them were extended with government aid, — were extremely profitable. The motives of self-interest and patriotism, combined with the pressure of want and of military necessity, were not enough. A beginning was made on many lines, and in consequence there appeared for the first time in the cotton states a strong sentiment for protection, and one heard it said that the blockade, like the old embargo and the second war with Great Britain, was going to prove a blessing. But four years of the most favorable conditions under peace would not have brought these industries near maturity. The machinery and the skilled labor could not be found under the actual conditions of a blockaded coast and an invaded border. The government itself, finding it impracticable to get all the small arms and ammunition it needed from abroad, made a headway which was on the whole remarkable toward supplying its wants at home ; but the factories it established could not turn out small arms fast enough. The greater number came from United States arsenals seized at the outset, from captures in battle, and from abroad. In heavy ordnance, mainly through the work of the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, the domestic output was more considerable. President Davis, who had been in the old army, and Secretary of War in Pierce’s Cabinet, could bring a valuable training and experience to the particular problem of arms and equipment, and his account of what was done with the means at hand shows that it was done intelligently and vigorously. We must admit the impossibility of so transforming the whole industrial system of the South as to meet the sudden demand for commodities which had never been produced there, and limit ourselves to the question whether the best use was made of what the Confederates could produce or could buy or borrow.

There was, first, the hope of aid from foreign countries, and of that cotton was naturally the basis. The situation was tantalizing. The price of cotton in England rose from the moment of separation, and continued to rise until, when the blockade became effective, it reached a figure which would have enriched every planter in the Confederacy if he could have marketed his product. Firms and individuals who took the risks of running cotton through the blockade grew rich, notwithstanding heavy losses. Foreign concerns adventured in it. The government went into it extensively through agencies like John Frazer & Co., of Charleston, by sharing the risks and profits of private enterprise, and by establishing a bureau and putting four steamers of its own in commission. At the end of 1863, Bullock, head of the secret service abroad, reported that thirtyone thousand bales had been shipped by the government from the two ports of Charleston and Wilmington to Liverpool. A separate bureau was established in Texas, and there was a lively trade in cotton and small arms across the Mexican line ; but with the fall of Vicksburg the Federal mastery of the line of the Mississippi greatly diminished the practical value of government assets in that quarter. The suggestion that the government might at the very outset have got possession of all the cotton in the country, shipped it abroad, made it a basis of credit with foreign governments and financiers, and grown rich with its rise in value, has often been made, but is readily dismissed. The government had not the means either to buy the cotton or to transport it.

After England, it is probable that the United States, of all “ foreign countries,” contributed the most, through trade, of the things which the Confederates were in pressing need of. Always forbidden, at first sincerely opposed, then winked at, and finally shared in, by the Confederate government, trade through the lines was constantly proving the strength of the commercial impulse on both sides. Cotton and tobacco slipped out; salt, bacon, and other commodities came in. President Lincoln had and exercised the authority to license individuals to trade with the enemy. The government at Richmond actually speculated in the notes of the United States.

But one foreign loan was attempted, and of that also cotton was the basis. By a contract signed at Richmond in January, 1863, Erlanger & Cie., of Paris, underwrote at seventy - seven per cent of their face value Confederate bonds to the amount of three million pounds sterling. The interest was payable in specie, but the bonds were exchangeable at their face value for New Orleans middling cotton at sixpence a pound. That was little more than one fourth the price of cotton abroad, and the Erlangers made a pretty penny by their venture; but the government, what with the agents’ profits and commissions, repurchases to affect the market, and interest paid, got little more than half the face value of the loan according to Professor Smith’s calculation, less than half according to the more careful calculation of Professor Schwab. However, its receipts were in specie, and far larger in proportion than it realized on any but the earliest of its domestic loans. The single foreign loan was clumsily managed, and it seems clear that a larger one should have been tried. Possibly the hope of recognition restrained the government in the matter, but it is reasonable to suppose that the enlisting of great financial interests in England and France would have been of more help toward that end than the object lesson of a few securities held up to prices in the European market which compared favorably with the quotations of United States bonds. However, barring some good fortune which might have raised up for the Confederacy a European ally to play a part comparable to France’s in the American Revolution, the shrewdest diplomacy and financiering would not have relieved it of the necessity to demand the heaviest sacrifices of its devoted people. It could not have drawn from without, either by trade or by borrowing, more than a small part of what it needed to keep its armies in the field.

The devotion of the Southerners was in fact immeasurable ; the economic agree with the military historians that their sacrifices were far greater than any the Revolutionary patriots made. The first revenues of the Confederate government were from voluntary loans of states and free gifts of individuals. The first requisition on the treasury was met with the personal credit of the Secretary. In the day of extreme need, women offered the hair of their heads to be sold abroad for arms.

A state of war enabled the government to get revenue by other extraordinary means than gifts and the loans of states. The United States customs receipts at Southern ports and the bullion in the New Orleans mint were taken before war was declared. A circular issued in March, 1861, directed that all dues to the United States government be paid into the Confederate treasury. A law of Congress passed in May provided that all debts due to citizens of the United States should likewise be paid into the treasury, and certificates given in exchange. The Washington government retaliated with a confiscation act, and in August a Confederate act sequestrated the property of all alien enemies, Confederate and state bonds exempted, and set apart the proceeds to reimburse citizens whose property had been taken by the United States. Pettigru, the foremost lawyer of South Carolina, attacked the law as unconstitutional; but Judge Magrath, of the Confederate District Court, held that the power to pass it was a necessary attribute of such sovereignty as the Confederate government possessed, — a position very like that which the United States Supreme Court came to in its last legal-tender decision. Late in 1864, the property of renegades and émigrés was confiscated. But the revenue from confiscations could not have been much above six millions, unless we include what the states got by like measures. It has been suggested that the entire debt of the South to the North at the beginning of the war, which is variously estimated, — Professor Schwab does not pretend to do more than conjecture that it was about forty millions, — should be counted a Confederate asset, and the same sort of reasoning would make the stoppage of interest payments to Northerners on the bonds of Southern states and corporations an addition to the Southern resources. The list of extraordinary revenues should certainly include the specie of the New Orleans banks which was sent inward when the city fell, and taken by the government, nominally as a deposit. Nearly five millions were obtained that way.

There remained the two ordinary sources of revenue, — taxation and domestic loans. But the first was curtailed by the blockade to such a degree that the Confederate customs receipts may best be grouped with the receipts from gifts and confiscations, so trifling was the amount. One of the first laws of the provisional Congress at Montgomery imposed a duty of one half of one cent a pound on all exports of cotton, payable in specie or in the coupons of the first issue of bonds, the interest on which was guaranteed by the tax. A month later the first tariff law was passed, with a long free list and a rate of fifteen per cent on a few imports : it was thought advisable to put a premium on immediate importations. A small tonnage duty was for the sole purpose of maintaining lighthouses. The permanent tariff passed in May was of necessity a purely revenue measure, for the provisional Constitution, like the permanent one which followed, expressly forbade protection, although both instruments omitted the prohibition of export duties in the United States Constitution, — a matter of surprise to any one who recalls that the nullifiers held the “ tariff of abominations ” to be virtually a tax on exports. The law followed the Walker principle of 1846, aiming to fix the minimum rates which would yield the maximum returns, made the rates ad valorem wherever practicable, — the highest twenty - five per cent, and the lowest five per cent, — and left the free list still long. For the first fiscal year, the receipts from import and export duties, seizures, and confiscations, all together, were less than two and a half millions in specie.

So taxation, to be effective, must take its most direct and inquisitorial form, harassing to the taxpayers and laborious to the collectors. That the government should have been loath to adopt so unpopular a policy is not surprising; but that any government so driven upon it as that was should delay so long, and then resort to it so timidly and tentatively, is explicable only on a low estimate of the Confederate lawmakers and of the Southern public opinion which their practice of secret sessions does not seem to have emboldened them to disregard. But the weakness of the government was more culpable than the outcry of the people. Years of prosperity and peace under the Union had wonted them to light burdens of taxation, and they were imbued with hostility to the whole theory of a strong central authority. They did, in fact, more nearly keep pace with their government in recognizing the necessity of heavy taxation than taxpayers often do. At one time, a considerable body of public opinion actually urged Congress on to its duty, and the clamor against the laws when they were passed was in large part due to the inequalities they contained.

In July, 1861, Secretary Memminger estimated at forty-six hundred million dollars the assessable values in real estate, slaves, and personal property, and Congress, aiming to raise twentyfive millions, passed in August a direct war tax of one half of one per cent on all property but government bonds and money on hand, making the usual exemptions. The assessment, however, fell below the Secretary’s estimate by nearly four hundred millions, and as a matter of fact less than one tenth of the tax was ever collected from the taxpayers. It was not apportioned among the states, for the provisional Constitution made no such requirement; but each state was a tax division, and could obtain a rebate of ten per cent for its citizens by paying the whole of their quota, less the rebate, before the date fixed for collections. The result was that all but one or two states borrowed the money. The total receipts from the “ tax,” some of them not covered in for a year or more, were less than twenty millions in a currency already much depreciated. The rate was too low, and the law ill framed. The taxes which the Confederacy imposed during the first two years of the war were absurdly light in comparison with those ordinarily imposed by civilized states in time of peace.

The serious resort to taxation came at the beginning of the third year, and it was all the more unwelcome because it was belated. In April, 1863, the Congress passed a property tax of eight per cent, license taxes on various occupations, a graded income tax, a tax of ten per cent on the profits from sales of foodstuffs and a few other commodities, and a tax in kind, or tithe, on the products of agriculture. By this time, the area under control of the government was much diminished, and assessable values were shrunken by many millions. The currency was depreciating so fast that it put a great premium on delay in payments. No collections were made until the end of the year, and by April, 1864, but sixty millions in currency, valued roughly at one twentieth of that sum in specie, had been covered into the treasury. The next six months brought forty-two millions in currency, or two millions in specie. The receipts from the tax in kind cannot be given in terms of money. Officially, the proceeds in 1863 were estimated at five millions in currency. The next year, there was gathered the equivalent of thirty million rations. Professor Smith estimates the total returns from the tithe at one hundred and forty-five millions in currency. The trouble and expense of collection were great, and so was the waste. In February, 1864, the tax law of 1863 was reënacted with higher rates on property, credits, and profits ; the Secretary’s estimate of assessable values at that time was three billions. In June, the rates were raised horizontally, and at the very end, in March, 1865, extreme rates were imposed.

The law was unconstitutional, for the permanent Constitution required all direct taxes to be apportioned among the states according to their representation in Congress. Certain states held it an infringement of their rights more particularly because it taxed property they had exempted and banks in which they had an interest. The tithe was the feature most bitterly resented, as inquisitorial, as imposing a special burden on agriculture, already depressed by the loss of its markets, and because the farmers could not profit by delay in payments, as everybody else could, but would lose by it instead. There were other inequalities. But the law, onerous as it was, did not bring the tax receipts up to a high place in the schedule of government revenues. The last full statement available, of October 1,1864, for the six months preceding, shows that less than twelve per cent of the total receipts was from that source. The failure to tax promptly, to tax skillfully and equally, and to tax heavily, was a damning fault and weakness of the government. The rival government at Washington fell into the same error, but recovered from it in time.

The error is not to be measured by the inadequate tax receipts alone, but by the extent to which it impaired and vitiated the final device of borrowing. Had the government adhered to the sound policy it began with when it laid the tax on exports, payable in specie, to guarantee the interest on its first loan, it might have avoided — at least so long as by hook or by crook, at whatever cost, specie could be obtained — its unenviable preëminence among all modern governments as an exponent of forced loans and redundant note issues. Southern civilization, with sins enough to answer for already, might have escaped the crowning indictment that after centuries of money exchanges it brought AngloSaxon Americans back to plain barter in their market places.

The first loan, of fifteen millions, was negotiated on a specie basis, and it was successful. The Southern banks, holding perhaps twenty-five millions of specie, agreed to redeem in specie such of their notes as should be paid for the bonds, and for a year or two the interest, guaranteed by the export tax, was paid in specie. The second issue, in May, of fifty millions, was accompanied with no such guarantee of interest payments. Moreover, treasury notes to the amount of twenty millions were authorized by the same act, to be issued in lieu of bonds, and to be interchangeable with them. The loan was increased to one hundred millions in August, and in December to one hundred and fifty millions. The bonds were offered for specie, for military stores, and for the proceeds of the sale of raw produce or manufactured articles, so that the issue became largely a produce loan ; four hundred thousand bales of cotton, and tobacco and other farm products in proportion, were subscribed. The relief of the planters was an avowed object. Through this policy, the government came to number four hundred and fifty thousand bales of cotton, scattered over the country, among its assets. The receipts in money from sales of bonds during the first year were stated to be thirty-one millions, or twentytwo per cent of the total receipts.

The second year saw a great increase in the number of bonds authorized to be issued, but no corresponding increase in the sales. Of one hundred and sixty-five millions authorized in April, three and one half millions were placed. In September, the Secretary was empowered to sell bonds without limit to meet appropriations. But only nine per cent of the total receipts of the year came from that source. The third year, the receipts from bonds rose to twenty-two per cent of the total, and of the twelve hundred and twenty-one millions of debt accumulated by January 1, 1864, omitting the foreign loan, two hundred and ninetyeight millions were bonded. But the figures are misleading, for practically all the bond sales of the year, except those handled by the Erlangers, were in the nature of a half - compulsory funding. Similarly, the bond sales of the last year were nearly all accomplished through a compulsory funding act of February, 1864, which amounted to a repudiation of all treasury notes which should not be funded by certain dates. By the same act, six per cent bonds to the amount of five hundred millions were authorized for current expenses, and the last full statement of October 1,1864, shows that but little over fourteen millions of these had been sold. The debt was then thirteen hundred and seventy-one millions, and three hundred and sixty-two millions of it were funded, but less than half of the funded debt could be called voluntary loans. More than half the bonds had been sold by compulsion.

Of the enormous forced loan remaining, one hundred and seventy-eight millions were in interest-bearing notes and certificates, and eight hundred and thirtyone millions in notes bearing no interest. Beginning in March, 1861, with an issue of one million of treasury notes bearing interest, following that up in May with twenty millions of notes bearing no interest, the government had from the start paid the great bulk of its expenses with notes of the one class or the other. By the end of the first year, one hundred and five and one half millions had been issued ; at the end of the second, the debt was five hundred and sixty-seven and one half millions, and eighty-two per cent of it was in notes. In 1863, new issues more than made up the reduction accomplished by funding, and even the repudiation act of February, 1864, only temporarily diminished the rate of increase. That law required the holders of old notes, some of them fundable in eight per cent bonds, either to fund them in four per cent bonds or exchange them for new notes at the rate of three for two ; otherwise, they were to be taxed out of existence. Perhaps three hundred millions were either funded or exchanged, but the remainder, though repudiated, continued to circulate. After October, 1864, current expenses were met mainly with treasury warrants and certificates of indebtedness, so that an immense floating debt was piled up, but the expiring utterance of the Confederate Congress was another issue of notes ; the bill passed over the veto of President Davis.

We may admit that the government could not have avoided forced loans and an inflated currency, even if it had made the wisest use of all other means of getting revenue. Ordinary standards of public finance cannot justly be applied to it. But it is hard to see how it could have chosen a worse policy than it did. To issue notes in quantities vastly beyond the demands of business, to repudiate them, and then go on issuing more, must be near the height of bad finance. To show the effects of the policy completely, it would be necessary to examine every department of industry and trade, — a study of great interest to economists. Here, it is sufficient to point out that the redundant paper currency was the main cause of the government’s failure to get the most possible out of the material resources and productive industries of the South.

It was intended that the notes should take the place of the old United States currency. The banks, the state governments, and the people readily coöperated with the government, and the New Orleans banks, which had been so well managed that they continued specie payments until September, 1861, suspended in order to accept the notes. But long before the end of the second year the circulation of these exceeded by far the circulation of United States money in the South in 1860, and they rapidly depreciated. Acts to make them a legal tender were several times proposed, but none was passed. Funding acts were passed, but failed to attain their object. No scheme like Chase’s system of national banks would have been practicable with the Confederate bonds as a basis, even if the particularistic public sentiment could have been overcome to the extent of getting the necessary law through the Congress. There was no way to regulate the currency so long as the notes were issued to pay current expenses. There was no check on the states, which began to issue notes before the government. Cities, banks, corporations, business firms, individuals, swelled the circulation with their promises to pay; counterfeiters flourished. The currency was redundant, unregulated, various, fluctuating; and all the time, as always when there is too much money, the mass of the people were clamoring for more and more, because prices were rising higher and higher.

By the end of 1861, a gold dollar was worth a dollar and twenty cents in currency ; by the end of 1862, it was worth three ; a year later, twenty ; and before the final collapse sixty-one dollars in paper was paid for one dollar in gold. Prices in general, with a few notable exceptions, as of cotton and tobacco, rose faster and higher than the price of gold. “ Before the war,” says a wag in Eggleston’s Recollections, “ I went to market with the money in my pocket, and brought back my purchases in a basket; now I take the money in the basket, and bring the things home in my pocket.” Of course, the waning of the hope of victory would have depreciated any sort of Confederate obligations, but victory itself would not have made that unsoundness sound.

The incitement to speculation was irresistible. The general and correct opinion was that it was better to hold any other sort of property than money. It was because notes, whether they bore interest or not, could be used in ordinary transactions, and for speculation, that they were preferred to bonds. Longtime contracts on a money basis were sure to prove inequitable. Salaries and wages were constantly shrinking. The disposition to economize and be frugal in which the people entered upon their time of trial was followed by a reckless extravagance of the lessening little they had. Business was deranged, industry strangled. Simple-minded patriots laid the blame on the speculators, and there arose once more the growl against the Jews, old as history, heard whenever Gentiles get into trouble over money.

The government saw production curtailed, and found the producers less and less minded to sell. It was driven to impressment and arbitrary fixation of prices. In March, 1863, it set ups boards of assessment, and from that time continued to force men to sell, at prices below those of the open market, for money sure to depreciate, commodities which they did not wish to sell at all. One result was to discourage industry still further. Another was waste ; for produce seized wherever found and in whatever condition often rotted or was stolen or lost before it reached the armies. A third was discontent among the people and dangerous conflicts with states. A Virginia state court granted an injunction to restrain a Confederate official from impressing flour. Governor Brown, of Georgia, protested violently against the law, and the Georgia Supreme Court pronounced it unconstitutional. The feeling against it was particularly strong in North Carolina. Everywhere, there was friction in enforcing it.

In general, every strong measure of the government provoked resistance. North Carolina and Georgia were the principal centres of opposition, and their governors, Vance and Brown, the most persistent champions of the extreme state-rights view. Robert Toombs, who had been in the Cabinet, and Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President, spoke freely on that side. The acts empowering the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and the various conscription acts, as they extended the age limits and narrowed the exemptions, with the impressment law, were the measures most stoutly resisted. Brown flatly refused to let a conscription act be enforced in Georgia. North Carolina courts discharged conscripts who had furnished substitutes, and issued writs of habeas corpus, in a region where martial law had been declared. Other measures resisted were the calling out of the state militia, — a bone of contention under the old government as far back as the War of 1812 ; attempts at regulating interstate commerce ; the appointment of non-residents to federal offices in various states ; the setting up of government distilleries contrary to state laws ; the taxation of state bonds ; and the effort of the government to share itself, and to prevent the states from sharing, in the profits of blockade-running. Before the end, the opponents of the government were uniting in a party, strongest in North Carolina, which avowed its desire for peace, and asserted the right, though it did not advocate the policy, of secession from the Confederacy.

For these troubles of the government the Confederate Constitution must be held in part responsible. No government in such straits could have refrained from arbitrary measures, and the Confederate government could not be arbitrary, it could not always be trenchant and effective, without being unconstitutional. Most of the difficulties, however, would have been encountered if the Constitution had been a word-for-word copy, as it was in most of its paragraphs, of the United States Constitution. The variations from that model were not all of a nature to weaken the central authority. The executive was strengthened. The President’s term was lengthened to six years. He could remove the principal officers of the departments, and all officials of the diplomatic service, at his pleasure. He could veto specific items of an appropriation bill; and to this power the Congress, without warrant from the Constitution, added the power to transfer appropriations from one department to another. The power of the legislature was limited by requiring a two-thirds majority in both houses for appropriations not based on department estimates and recommended by the President, by prohibiting extra compensation to public servants, and by prohibiting protection. The sovereignty of the states was expressly affirmed, and slavery guarded from all interference, but public opinion would have made good these provisions if they had been left out. The Supreme Court, though provided for, was never constituted, and no doubt the government was the weaker for want of it; but that, too, was the fault of public opinion.

The assertion that the Confederacy could not have held together in peace is insufficiently sustained if it rest on the differences between the Confederate and the United States Constitution. Stronger and more centralized governments would have been better for the emergency on both sides, but the form which the Confederate government took was the only form it could have taken, and the only form it could have retained in peace. What was in effect a protest against the tendency of the old Union to become a true nation could not have bodied itself forth in a compact and hardy nationality. Unimportant as students know the merits of a written instrument of government to be when they do not accord with material conditions and the character of the civilization to be expressed, the faults of the written instrument are equally unimportant in so far as they are merely departures from a standard which the people cannot or will not live up to.

To follow the inner workings of the Confederacy as we are now enabled to do will supply political scientists and public men with striking instances of the effects of defying economic laws and disobeying the rules of sound finance. It will reveal more clearly than ever the industrial backwardness of the South, and emphasize that as the most serious of its disadvantages in the struggle. It will credit President Davis and his advisers, and many other civil servants of the Confederacy, with the utmost zeal and much intelligence, but none of them with great practical and constructive statesmanship. It will show the Congress at Richmond to have been a weak and undistinguished legislature. It will confirm completely our feeling that the armies of the South were finer far than anything they defended, — that the wonderful gray shell was of greater worth than all it held. To our main inquiry the answer is that the failure of the Southerners to win their independence, clearly as it should have been foreseen, was, in quite definite ways, immediately attributable to faults and errors.

But to dwell on these faults and errors, to make our study wholly commonsense and scientific, may easily mislead us. It may lead us to neglect the strength, while we search out the weakness, of the South. It may lead us away from the moving spectacle of a resolute and devoted people, hard beset by a stronger adversary, and struggling with the defects of its own civilization, which will survive when the economic and political lessons to be got from the rise and fall of the Confederacy shall have lost their value.

That was what Mr. Henley’s sailor saw from the Charleston wharf : —

William Garrott Brown.