V

The actions of the eight upper South states in 1861 had an important but equivocal impact on the outcome of the war. One can begin to measure that impact by noting the possible consequences of what did not happen. If all eight states (or all but Delaware) had seceded, the South might well have won its independence. If all eight had remained in the Union, the Confederacy surely could not have survived as long as it did. As it was, the balance of military manpower from these states favored the South. The estimated 425,000 soldiers they furnished to southern armies comprised half of the total who fought for the Confederacy. These same states furnished some 235,000 white soldiers and eventually 85,000 blacks to the Union armies—together amounting to only 15 percent of the men who fought for the Union.⁴¹ Nevertheless,

41. Data on the number of men who served in the Civil War armies can be no better than estimates. Few reliable records of Confederate enlistments survived the destruction and loss of Confederete archives at the end of the war. Estimates of the number of men who fought for the Confederacy are therefore based on fragmentary evidence. These estimates range from a low of 600,000 men to a high of 1,400,000. The fullest discussion of this matter can be found in Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America 1861–1865 (Boston, 1901), 1–63. After extraordinarily complex calculations, Livermore estimated the number of Confederate soldiers at something over one million. But Livermore was a Union army veteran, with a tendency to overstate the numbers of the enemy he had faced, and some of the assumptions on which he based his calculations are dubious. Perhaps the most balanced discussion of the matter is Edward Channing, A History of the United States, Vol. 6, The War for Southern Independence (New York, 1925), 430–44. Channing estimated that 800,000 men fought for the Confederacy. Another respected Civil War scholar, E. B. Long, has offered an estimate of 750,000 (Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p. 705). Perhaps the firmest evidence on this question is the number of surviving veterans of the Union and Confederate armies counted by the census of 1890. The number of Confederate veterans at that date totaled 42 percent of the number of living Union veterans. Applying this ratio to the generally accepted estimate of 2,100,000 Union soldiers and sailors gives a total of 882,000 Confederate soldiers and sailors. Since a higher proportion of southerners were killed in the war, the actual total may have been higher. In any case, it seems safe to estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 850,000 to 900,000 men fought for the Confederacy. The proportion of these from the upper South was derived from a variety of primary and secondary sources for those states, and on extrapolation from the number of white men of military age in these states counted by the 1860 census.

Data for the number of Union soldiers cited in this paragraph and elsewhere in this book are based on the full records for each state maintained by the War Department. Nevertheless, the figures for white Union soldiers must also be estimates. The War Department kept records of enlistments, which must be adjusted downward to avoid double (sometimes even triple) counting of men who re-enlisted. This adjustment is not necessary for black soldiers, who were not permitted to enlist before late 1862, so their three-year terms did not expire before the end of the war.

the ability of the North to mobilize this much manpower from slave states gave an important impetus to the Union war effort. And the strategic importance of the rivers, railroads, and mountains of the border states (including West Virginia) can hardly be exaggerated. On the other hand, guerrilla warfare and the problems of administering sizable regions with populations of doubtful loyalty tied down large numbers of Union troops in the border states.

The divided allegiance of the upper South complicated the efforts by both sides to define their war aims and to find a strategy for achieving these aims. For while the Union and Confederate governments were contending for the upper South, they were also mobilizing their armed forces and deciding how to use them.