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 The Struggle of 
 the Confederacy 
 
 J. L. M. CVRRY 
 
 Reprint from Publications of Southern History 
 Association, November, 190! 
 
Th e Struggle of the 
 Confederacy. 1 
 
 By J. L. M. Curry. 
 
 The writing of Confederate History passes through 
 stages or cycles, and many years will elapse before the last 
 word is said. Naturally, the military history first claimed 
 attention, and among the best and most conclusive books 
 on that aspect of the subject are Henderson's Jackson and 
 Wyeth's Forrest. Besides Davis, Stephens, Bledsoe and 
 "The Southern States in their Relations to the Constitution 
 and the Resulting Union," the civil side has elicited The 
 Civil History of the Confederate States, reviewed in this 
 magazine for Sept., 1901, Smith's History of the Con- 
 federate Treasury, 2 and Callahan's Diplomatic History of 
 the Southern Confederacy. Dr. Schwab, turning aside 
 from tactical and technical problems in warfare and partial- 
 ly from the political aspects, 3 considers financial and in- 
 dustrial phenomena, as a study of economic history under 
 the abnormal conditions of war. Before going further, 
 it gives us pleasure to say that the author has shown a 
 historic spirit, consulting and well using many authorities 
 not generally accessible, presenting by far, with the excep- 
 tion of Prof. Smith, the most complete account of the 
 fiscal history of the Confederacy, and showing himself fre- 
 quently far above the incompleteness and prejudices which 
 
 2 The Confederate States oe America, 1861-1865. A Financial 
 and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War. By 
 John Christopher Schwab. New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 
 1901, pp. XI-j-332, index, cloth, $2.50. 
 
 2 Professor Smith's study of the Confederate Treasury, appear- 
 ing in these Publications for Jan., Mar. and May, 1001, is the 
 fullest investigation of the subject in existence. 
 
 3 When the author ventures upon political statements, he 
 stumbles grievously. — See pp. 189, 212, &c. 
 
 
disfigure so many works on the Confederacy. Contem- 
 porary records are scarce and fragmentary, but Dr. 
 Schwab has been industrious in hunting them up and skil- 
 ful in using them. The harshest criticism which can justly 
 be made is that he uses trustworthy and untrustworthy 
 material with equal freedom and confidence and from lack 
 of personal knowledge of some of the authorities attaches 
 undue importance to writers who never saw any thing 
 pertaining to the Confederacy except through jaundiced 
 eyes. No practical good would result from an exposure 
 of these authorities, which any one familiar with the men 
 and events of the war between the States would reject as 
 utterly unreliable. 
 
 The difficulties and obstacles encountered by the Con- 
 federacy were unavoidable and insurmountable in conse- 
 quence of the length, magnitude and exhausting character 
 of the war. Chiefest among these was the currency, 
 essential to the government in its varied and imperative 
 needs, to the people in their ordinary pursuits, and needed 
 in all industrial enterprises. The war was undesired, unan- 
 ticipated, unprovided for, by the South, and that section, in 
 men, resources, accumulated capital, banking facilities, 
 transportation, manufactures, all industries, was far in- 
 ferior to its adversary. Mr. Memminger, the Secretary of 
 the Treasury, and President Davis, it may now be con- 
 ceded, were not capable financiers, but the circumstances 
 were such that Morris, Turgot, Colbert, Gladstone, would 
 have found themselves amid "a sea of troubles." No ex- 
 perience, skill, ability, could have kept the very limited 
 amount of specie in the country, or made rapidly increas- 
 ing bonds, treasury notes, bank notes, promissory notes, 
 equal in value to, or convertible into, gold and silver. As 
 the war went on and armies were increased and blockade 
 of coasts became more effective and area of unoccupied 
 country contracted and government necessities grew to 
 more enormous proportions, and facilities of internal com- 
 munication were lessened, the circulating medium perform- 
 
ed its functions less satisfactorily and with hastening and 
 unimpedible depreciation. Bonds, treasury notes, call 
 certificates, exports and imports were less and less avail- 
 able to meet the illimitable expenditures. Persons, at 
 home and abroad, willing to advance money in exchange 
 for interest-bearing bonds were not to be found. ''The 
 government's hopes that the redundancy of the currency 
 would be corrected by their absorption in bonds proved as 
 groundless as similar hopes in the North." Army requi- 
 sitions ran up from 59^ millions in 1861 to 670 millions in 
 1864, and the estimates during the year 1864 called for 
 1,500 millions (Schwab, 55,56). The domestic public debt 
 in Oct., 1864, amounted to 1,371 millions (p. 76). During 
 the last year of the war the government was irretrievably 
 bankrupt. Huge floating debts accumulated, unpaid war- 
 rants, &c, were ghosts that would not "down" at any bid- 
 ding of Congress or the Treasury Department. 
 
 It would be "love's labor lost" to try to excuse or vin- 
 dicate the failure of the financial policy of the Confederacy. 
 The stubborn facts are before us and refuse to accept ex- 
 planation. Let us concede frankly that they are to be 
 admitted in their baldness. It is no palliative of our re- 
 gret that Dr. Schwab and Dr. Sumner, with their great 
 learning and ability, and all other writers. English and 
 American, while condemning the Confederate finances, 
 have never been able to suggest what would have been 
 a safer policy, or what would, or could, have prevented a 
 redundant or depreciated currency, or fluctuation and ex- 
 cess in prices, or supplied the government with available 
 credit or money. 
 
 In all revolutionary crises, demanding large and unex- 
 pected uses of money, or its representatives, governments 
 and people have sustained heavy losses and repeated the 
 experiences of the Confederacy. Dr. Schwab with candor 
 mentions not a few parallel instances as occurring in the 
 North, in France, in Austria, in Italy and during our Revo- 
 
lutionary struggle. Under Secretary Chase's financial 
 regime, the Northern banks lost, as did the Southern, a 
 large part of their specie to the government. The North, 
 the South, France, shared in the same illusion that interest- 
 bearing notes would be held for investment and so pre- 
 vent redundancy (89). The Confederate Government 
 elaborated financial transactions with foreign houses on 
 the security of exports of highly-prized products, and 
 Hamilton in 1779 urged a foreign loan as a remedy for the 
 disturbed state of the currency. During the Revolution, 
 financial distress compelled the government to obtain for- 
 eign supplies by placing loans on the security of American 
 products. Both governments suffered from wastefulness 
 in securing the supplies (28, 29). The funding of the Con- 
 federate debt, a kind of repudiation which proved decep- 
 tive in correcting the redundancy of the currency and in 
 helping the national credit and which was the sure precur- 
 sor of the wreck of Confederate finances, was a copy of the 
 devices adopted during the French and American Revolu- 
 tions (46, 59). 
 
 The reviewer has an interesting collection of "shin- 
 plasters," issued during the ''hard times" of 1837-1840, and 
 so in the North as well as in the South, during the war, 
 States, municipalities, merchants, innkeepers, &c, issued 
 their promissory notes making them redeemable in goods 
 or services, or when a larger sum was presented for pay- 
 ment. 
 
 A favorite mode of bolstering different forms of paper 
 currency has been to make them a legal tender, and the 
 United States Congress passed its first Legal Tender Act, 
 25 Feb., 1862. Treasury notes to the amount of $150,- 
 000,000 were authorized, receivable in payment of all debts, 
 except duties and interest due to and from the Federal 
 Government. This compulsory scheme was favored by 
 Secretary Chase although as Chief Justice he declared 
 against its eonstitutionalitv, and it became necessarv after- 
 
wards, as the Court was equally divided, to appoint an ad- 
 ditional judge known to be favorable to the strained con- 
 struction of the Constitution. In the Confederate Con- 
 gress bills to make treasury notes a legal tender were 
 often introduced and as often successfully resisted. The 
 reviewer has the notes of a speech made in the Congress 
 in opposition to this effort, in which he urged that such a 
 compulsory method of imparting an artificial value to 
 money or government credit had universally proved a fail- 
 ure ; that it was an impairment of contracts ; that the injec- 
 tion into the Constitution of a power not specifically 
 granted, but intentionally omitted, was an utter departure 
 from the fundamental principles of a government which 
 was intended to guard against the assumption of powers 
 not granted, &c, and that on the grounds of expediency 
 the remedy for the evil was a foredoomed failure. The 
 story of the Continental currency and of French assignats 
 was cited as conclusive against the measure. 
 
 As auxiliary to remedial legislation and to help debtors 
 in their distress, the States passed stay-laws, relaxed col- 
 lection laws and tried many measures to limit the rights 
 of creditors. These measures grew out of the stringency 
 of the times, the diminution of means wherewith to pay 
 debts, and the worthlessness of the "money." They may 
 be, doubtless are, indefensible, but they are the common 
 resort of all countries controlled by public opinion, when 
 panics and bank suspensions occur. 
 
 The Confederate Government in its sore trials and in- 
 ability to reap benefits from bonds and fiat money and the 
 impossibility of filling coffers by duties on imports or 
 by direct taxation resorted to a tax in kind, largely at the 
 suggestion and on the advocacy of Senator Hunter, who 
 had been Chairman of the Finance Committee in the 
 Senate of the United States, and resorted to impress- 
 ments which produced much discontent and aroused no 
 little of the opposition to the continuance of the war. The 
 
aggravations of burdens, already too heavy to be borne, 
 found no comfort or defence in the fact that, under similar 
 conditions and with like complaints, impressments were re- 
 sorted to during the French Revolution and our Revo- 
 lutionary War. The policies of the Confederate and of the 
 Continental Congress also "ran strikingly parallel in their 
 restricting foreign trade and also in engaging in it" (256, 
 266, 265). 
 
 These illustrations might be multiplied as showing that 
 counterparts of our action are easily found elsewhere and 
 that our conditions made a sound currency and the col- 
 lection of sufficient revenue by taxation and the ordinary 
 peace methods an impossibility. Only the survivors of the 
 war can know the privations and sufferings, physical 
 and mental, of that terrible period, when salt was often 
 procured by digging up and boiling the saturated earth 
 of the smoke houses ; when coffee was unobtainable, 
 sassafras was the substitute for tea, sorghum for sugar 
 and molasses, medicines were not to be had, a pair of 
 shoes cost $100.00. a barrel of flour, $900, hats and cloth- 
 ing were made at home with rudest implements, railways, 
 in bridges and roiling stock, were in a dismantled condi- 
 tion, prices for the commonest necessaries were fabulous, 
 and, as our industries were almost exclusively agricultural, 
 attempts to secure material means to carry on the war or 
 enjoy former home comforts were hindered on every side. 
 
 Dr. Schwab expresses the simple but generally unac- 
 knowledged truth that "it was the blockade rather than the 
 ravages of the army that sapped the industrial strength ot 
 the Confederacy" (236). It destroyed imports and exports 
 as a basis for revenue and as a stimulus to production; 
 it made legislation on trade impotent ; it surrounded the 
 South with a Chinese wall ; it perpetuated original in- 
 equalities in manufactures and various industries ; it made 
 each day darker and more ominous by the helplessness of 
 industrial improvement. 
 
Chapter X on the Military Despotism of the Confeder- 
 ate Government is less just to the South than other chap- 
 ters and more partial to the North, and relies more im- 
 plicitly on authorities that we know to be prejudiced and 
 persistently unfavorable to the Confederacy. We may as 
 well admit the historic truth that war and a limited con- 
 stitution are irreconcilable and that restrictions intended 
 for peace are trammels which like the fetters on Samson 
 will be torn asunder in a conflict of life and death. De- 
 spotism in an army seems to be a necessary outgrowth of 
 a protracted and formidable war. Hence both govern- 
 ments—the Confederate and the Federal — recruited their 
 forces by conscription, which tyrannous exercise of power 
 was less excusable in the North with a largely preponder- 
 ant population and with access to foreign enlistments which 
 supplied 720,000 men to her army. The suspension of the 
 writ of habeas corpus by the Confederate Congress was from 
 February 27, 1862, to August I, 1864, but in many parts 
 of the country it was a dead letter. Dr. Schwab (190) uses 
 this decisive language : "The Confederate Government, 
 in suspending the functions of the civil authorities at 
 various times and places during the war, did not employ 
 this extreme war measure with the stringency character- 
 istic of the similar line of policy adopted by the Federal 
 Government. In the North the relentless declaration of 
 martial law was much more effectively and harshly used 
 as a means of cowing the opposition and restraining the 
 disloyal, &c." Senator Hoar, in the Senate, in June last, 
 said : "The courts-martial during the Civil War were a 
 scandal to the civilized world." 
 
 Dr. Schwab is satirical in contrasting the religious re- 
 vivals in the Southern army with "the revolting picture 
 of moral decadence" which he finds to have existed in the 
 South. A distinguished General in the Union army, who 
 illustrated with terrible reality the aphorism, said: "War 
 is hell." War is not favorable to the gentler virtues, but, 
 
8 
 
 altho my testimony may be discredited, I wish to affirm 
 that morality in the South did not surfer the decadence 
 which is charged. In the cities there was some repre- 
 hensible laxity but in the villages and rural districts the 
 departure from the usual correct standard was not so 
 marked as to distinguish from former days. 
 
 Amid the severities and sufferings consequent on a war 
 of invasion, aggravated and intensified by unusual condi- 
 tions, the patriotism of the Southern States and people 
 stands out in inextinguishable glory. Men and women 
 never exhibited greater patience, endurance, courage. 
 "The Southern cause evoked as much devoted loyalty as 
 has been called forth by an) ? cause in history; and that 
 cause was supported at a cost greater than in any similar 
 conflict. The Southerners' sacrifices far exceeded those 
 of the Revolutionary patriots" (312). The unconquerable 
 devotion to principle and country makes a sublime record 
 that the history of ages will not surpass. While disinte- 
 grating forces within were incessant and irresistible, cour- 
 age and hope remained until the tragedy closed at Appo- 
 matox. 
 
 Notwithstanding, rather because of the mild criticism we 
 have found it necessary to make, we wish to commend 
 this book as a real contribution to history and as a praise- 
 worthy instance of how the asperities of war have been 
 softened. "To the student of our country's history that 
 of the Confederate States is the story of a fierce struggle 
 against overwhelming odds, the culmination of an inevit- 
 able conflict the foundations of which were laid in an 
 earlier period. * * To the economist the war does not 
 centre about the heroic efforts of the South to resist the 
 strategy of the Northern generals, but it centres about 
 the picture it presents of the negation of normal ecenomic 
 forces" (310"). 
 
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