II

The specter of class conflict also haunted the South. As in the North, conscription worsened the friction. Manpower needs had forced the Confederate Congress in September 1862 to raise the upper age limit from thirty-five to forty-five. This made the heads of many poor families suddenly subject to the draft at a time when that summer's drought had devastated food crops. And Congress added insult to injury by a provision to exempt one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves.

This controversial exemption was the result of pressure from planter families. The South had gone to war, among other reasons, to defend slavery. But if all white men on plantations went into the army, discipline would erode, slaves would continue to run off to the swamps or to the Yankees, and slavery itself would crumble away. The South was also fighting to preserve a certain vision of womanhood. To leave white women alone on plantations to cope with large numbers of slaves was hardly compatible with this vision. A letter from an Alabama woman to the governor in September 1862 bespoke a situation that seemed to call for action. "I have no brother no one on whom I can call for aid," she wrote. "I am living alone now, with only my child a little girl of 2 years old. I am now surrounded on all sides by plantations of negroes—many of them have not a white [man] on them. I am now begging you will not you in kindness to a poor unprotected woman and child give me the power of having my overseer recalled." The Confederacy also needed the food and fiber raised on plantations, and southerners believed that without overseers the slaves would raise nothing. Planters insisted that the exemption of overseers was at least as important to the war effort as the exemption of teachers or apothecaries. In October 1862 Congress concurred, though not without objections by some senators against this legislation "in favour of slave labour against white labour."³⁹

By granting a special privilege to a class constituting only 5 percent

39. Quotations from Armstead Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage: Slavery's Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865," unpublished ms, chap. 5, pp. 15, 27.

of the white population, the "Twenty-Negro Law" became as unpopular in the South as commutation in the North. Although only four or five thousand planters or overseers obtained exemptions under the law—representing about 15 percent of the eligible plantations and 3 percent of the men exempted for all causes—the symbolism of the law was powerful. Many of the men who deserted from Confederate armies during the winter of 1862–63 agreed with a Mississippi farmer who went AWOL because he "did not propose to fight for the rich men while they were at home having a good time." Alarmed by what he heard on a trip home from Richmond, Mississippi's Senator James Phelan wrote to his friend Jefferson Davis on December 9: "Never did a law meet with more universal odium. . . . Its influence upon the poor is calamitous. . . . It has aroused a spirit of rebellion in some places, I am informed, and bodies of men have banded together to resist; whilst in the army it is said it only needs some daring men to raise the standard to develop a revolt."⁴⁰

Such protests made limited headway against planter influence. Congress modified but never repealed the twenty-Negro exemption, which remained a divisive issue for the rest of the war. One modification in May 1863 required planters to pay $500 for the privilege; another in February 1864 reduced the number of slaves to fifteen but specified that exempted plantations must sell to the government at fixed cost 200 pounds of meat per slave, part of it for the families of needy soldiers. As this requirement suggests, hunger was a serious factor in the disaffection of yeoman and laboring classes. Despite the conversion of much acreage from cotton to food crops in 1862, the drought and the breakdown of southern transportation—not to mention Union conquest of prime agricultural regions—led to severe food shortages the following winter. The quickening pace of inflation also drove the price of food, even when available, beyond the reach of many. Having doubled in the latter half of 1862, the price index doubled again in the first half of 1863. In Richmond, War Department clerk John Jones saw his salary fall farther and farther behind the cost of living until in March 1863 "the shadow of the gaunt form of famine is upon us." Jones had lost twenty pounds

40. Quotations from Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938), 4911., and O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 790. For statistics on draft exemptions, see Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924), 107–08.

"and my wife and children are emaciated." Even the rats in his kitchen were so hungry that they ate bread crumbs from his daughter's hand "as tame as kittens. Perhaps we shall have to eat them!"⁴¹

Women and children on farms suffered as much as those in cities. A farm woman in North Carolina wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance in April 1863 describing how "a crowd of we Poor wemen went to Greenesborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful of meet nor bread in my house what did they do but put us in gail in plase of giveing us aney thing to eat. . . . I have 6 little children and my husband in the armey and what am I to do?" What indeed? Some women wrote to Confederate officials pleading for the discharge of their husbands. One letter to the secretary of war insisted that the writer's husband "is not able to do your government much good and he might do his children some good and thare is no use in keeping a man thare to kill him and leave widows and poore little orphen children to suffer while the rich has aplenty to work for them."⁴²

Such appeals availed little, so thousands of husbands discharged themselves. "There is already a heap of men gone home," wrote a Mississippi private to his wife in November 1862, "and a heap says if their familys get to suffering that they will go [too]." A month later a distressed officer in Bragg's Army of Tennessee declared that "desertions are multiplying so fast in this army that almost one-third of it is gone."⁴³

Many of these deserters joined with draft-evaders in backcountry regions to form guerrilla bands that resisted Confederate authority and virtually ruled whole counties. Some of these "regulators" formed ties with the antiwar or unionist secret societies that sprang up in 1862 and 1863: the Peace and Constitution Society in Arkansas; the Peace Society in northern Alabama and northern Georgia; and the Heroes of America in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. The rich man's war/poor man's fight theme stimulated the growth of these societies just as it strengthened copperheads in the North. Although the southern peace societies did not achieve the visibility or influence that an established political party gave northern copperheads, they drained vitality from the

41. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 170, 243, 164.

42. W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill, 1980), 221; Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978), 108.

43. Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage," chap. 5, pp. 38, 40.

Confederate war effort in certain regions and formed the nucleus for a significant peace movement if the war should take a turn for the worse.⁴⁴

Was it especially a poor man's fight in the South? Probably no more than it was in the North, according to the following table based on data from seven Confederate states.⁴⁵

From this sample it appears that, adjusted for age, both skilled and unskilled laborers were under-represented in the Confederate army while business and professional classes may have been over-represented. The most important categories in this rural society, however, were farmers and planters. Unfortunately, neither the census nor the regimental muster rolls consistently distinguished between these two classes, so it is impossible to tell whether "planters" were under-represented. The only study of this question found that in three piedmont counties of Georgia the average wealth of men who did not serve in the army was about 20 percent greater than those who did.⁴⁶ The pattern indicated by this limited

44. Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1944).

45. The data on Confederate soldiers are drawn from a sample of 9,057 men listed in the company rolls of regiments from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. I am indebted to the late Bell Irvin Wiley for his generosity in supplying me these data from his research files.

46. J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1986), 152. Harris compiled a sample of men of military age from three Georgia counties, determined their wealth and slaveholding (or that of their families) from the manuscript returns of the 1860 census, and searched the roster of Georgia soldiers in the Confederate army to determine which men in his sample served in the army and which did not. His findings must be used with caution, however, for he found fewer than half of the men in his sample in the roster of Georgia regiments, while we know that 70 to 80 percent of southern white men of military age served in the Confederate armed forces. The wealth and slaveholding of men missing from the incomplete army records might have modified Harris's findings if they could have been identified.

sample may have been counterbalanced for the Confederacy as a whole by the greater tendency of men from its poorest upcountry regions to skedaddle, desert, or otherwise avoid Confederate service.

In any case, the symbolic power of the twenty-Negro law and the actual suffering of poor families gave greater credence to the poor man's fight theme in the South than in the North. After all, "men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives & children to starve," wrote a southern leader in November 1862. The government—more particularly state and county governments—recognized this. Most southern states and many counties appropriated funds for assistance to the families of poor soldiers. These expenditures were financed by taxes on slaves and large landholdings, thus representing an attempt to alleviate class discontent by transferring resources from the rich to the poor. The two states that did most in this line were Georgia and North Carolina—the very states whose governors, Joseph Brown and Zebulon Vance, interposed state's-rights roadblocks to the southern war effort. The common people tended to applaud Brown or Vance and to criticize Davis, not necessarily because they favored state's rights at the expense of the Confederacy but because the state helped them while the Richmond government took away their husbands and sons and their livelihood.⁴⁷

The Confederate government's taxes and impressments to sustain the army also caused it to appear as an oppressor. By the spring of 1863, runaway inflation finally compelled Richmond's lawmakers to seek alternatives to the printing press to finance the war. In April they followed the Union example and enacted a comprehensive tax law that included a progressive income tax, an 8 percent levy on certain goods held for sale, excise and license duties, and a 10 percent profits tax on wholesalers

47. Quotation from Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage," chap. 6, p. 12. For progressive taxation and public welfare policies in Georgia and North Carolina, see Peter Wallenstein, "Rich Man's War, Rich Man's Fight: Civil War and the Transformation of Public Finance in Georgia," JSH, 50 (1984), 15–42; and Paul D. Escort, "Poverty and Government Aid for the Poor in Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 61 (1984), 462–80.

intended to take back some of the money that "speculators" had "extorted" from the people. But the notion that these taxes would make the rich pay their share was neutralized by an additional category of items that were taxed and one that was not. Because money had so little value, Congress imposed a 10 percent "tax in kind" on agricultural produce. After reserving a subsistence for his family, each farmer had to turn over 10 percent of the surplus to one of the three thousand agents who fanned out through the South to collect it. Yeoman farmers bitterly resented this levy. Why should the poor husbandman—or rather husband woman, since so many men were at the front—have to pay 10 percent, they asked, when a clerk or teacher with a salary of $1,500 paid only 2 percent of his income? More pointedly, why was the chief property of the rich—slaves—not taxed? The answer: a tax on slaves was considered a direct tax, constitutionally permissible only after an apportionment on the basis of population. No census could be taken in wartime, hence no direct tax was possible. The relevance of this constitutional inhibition escaped most dirt farmers, who saw only that the revenue agents took their produce while the rich man's slaves escaped taxation.

In practice the tax in kind seemed little different from "impressment" of supplies by the army. Desperate for provisions, commissary and quartermaster officers scoured the countryside for food, fodder, and work animals. They paid whatever price they (not the farmer) considered fair with promissory notes that deteriorated in value still further before the farmer could cash them. By the end of the war an estimated half-billion dollars of these worthless IOUs were outstanding. Some army units, especially the cavalry, took what they wanted without even pretending to pay. "If God Almighty," wrote an angry Governor Vance to the War Department in 1863, "had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry." Despite the notorious reputation of northern invaders in this regard, many southerners believed that "the Yankees cannot do us any more harm than our own soldiers have done."⁴⁸ Impressment fell with impartial injustice on the rich and the poor who happened to live near active military operations. But because the family farmer could scarcely afford to lose what little he had, impressment became another source of his alienation from the government and the cause it represented.

48. Quotations from Escott, After Secession, 111.

Responding to the outcries against impressment, Congress in March 1863 passed a law to regulate it by creating commissions to fix and arbitrate "fair" prices. This law was honored most often in the breach, however, and abuses continued. More successful were revisions of the tax law in February 1864. Suspending the requirement for a census-based apportionment of direct taxes, Congress imposed a 5 percent levy on land and slaves. Families with property worth less than $500 were exempted from the tax in kind. At the same time the revision of the twenty-Negro law that impressed 200 pounds of meat per slave got the Confederate government into the food-welfare business.

But these measures came too late to avert the most shocking revelation of internal stress—the bread riots in the spring of 1863. In a dozen or more cities and hamlets from Richmond to Mobile, desperate women raided shops or supply depots for food. Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. Groups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by "speculators" and asked the price of bacon or flour. When informed, they denounced such "extortion," took what they wanted, and marched away.⁴⁹

By far the largest and most momentous riot occurred in Richmond. Special circumstances made the Confederate capital particularly volatile. Its population had more than doubled since 1861. Military operations had desolated many food-producing areas of Virginia. Lee's army on the Rappahannock, reduced to half-rations by March 1863, competed with the civilian population for dwindling stocks of the previous year's drought-curtailed crops. In late March a freak nine-inch snowfall made roads impassable for several days. Prices for the few goods left on merchants' shelves skyrocketed to famine levels. On April 2 several hundred women—many of them wives of employees at the Tredegar Iron Works—met at a Baptist church and proceeded to the governor's mansion to make known their distress. The governor offered little comfort, and as the delegation moved on it turned into a mob. A middleclass bystander talked to one of the members, an emaciated girl of eighteen. "As she raised her hand to remove her sunbonnet, her loose calico sleeve slipped up, and revealed a mere skeleton of an arm. She perceived my expression as I looked at it, and hastily pulled down her sleeve with a short laugh. 'This is all that's left of me!' she said. 'It seems

49. E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 422–23.

real funny don't it?' " The bystander asked what was going on. "We are starving," said the girl. "We are going to the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men." Grown to more than a thousand persons, including some men and boys, the mob broke into shops and warehouses. "Bread! Bread!" they shouted. "Our children are starving while the rich roll in wealth." Emboldened by success, some women began to seize clothing, shoes, even jewelry as well as food. The governor and mayor confronted the rioters and called on them to disperse. A hastily mobilized company of militia marched up and loaded their muskets. A few timid souls left but the majority remained, confident that the militia—which contained friends and perhaps even a few husbands of the rioters—would not obey orders to fire on the crowd.⁵⁰

At this juncture Jefferson Davis himself arrived and climbed onto a cart to address the mob. He commanded their attention by taking several coins from his pocket and throwing them into the crowd. He then told them to go home so that the muskets leveled against them could be turned against the common enemy—the Yankees. The crowd was unmoved, and a few boys hissed the president. Taking out his watch, Davis gave the rioters five minutes to disperse before he ordered the troops to fire. Four minutes passed in tense silence. Holding up his watch, the president said firmly: "My friends, you have one minute more." This succeeded. The rioters melted away. Davis pocketed his watch and ordered the police to arrest the ringleaders. Several of these were later convicted and briefly imprisoned. Military officials ordered newspapers to make no mention of the riot in order not "to embarrass our cause [or] to encourage our enemies."⁵¹ The lead editorial in the Richmond Dispatch next day was entitled "Sufferings in the North."

But the rioters had made their point. The government distributed some of its stock of rice to needy citizens. Apprehensive merchants brought out reserve stocks of food, and prices dropped by half. The Richmond city council expanded its welfare food aid. Other localities did likewise. More acreage than the previous year went over from cotton to corn. But

50. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1905), 238; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President (New York, 1959), 381. Two good descriptions of the riot can be found in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond (Austin, 1971), 117—22; and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 201–6.

51. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 18, p. 958.

serious problems persisted, and the South was never able to solve them. Priorities for military traffic on deteriorating railroads caused food to rot at sidings while thousands went hungry a hundred miles away. Union advances further constricted the food-producing areas of the Confederacy. In July 1863 the commissary general warned of a subsistence crisis for southern armies. In September a mob at Mobile, crying "bread or blood," looted stores on Dauphine Street. In October the Richmond Examiner declared that civilians were being reduced "to a point of starvation." A government clerk told of the following exchange between a woman and a shopkeeper in Richmond who asked $70 for a barrel of flour. "My God!" she exclaimed. "How can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?" "I don't know, madam," the merchant replied, "unless you eat your children."⁵²

Refugees exacerbated the South's food crisis. Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes as the Yankee juggernaut bore down on them. Thousands of others were exiled by Confederate officers who turned their cities into a battle zone (Corinth and Fredericksburg, for example) or by commanders of Union occupation forces who insisted that they take the oath of allegiance or leave. All wars produce refugees; these homeless people generally suffer more than the rest of the civilian population; in the American Civil War this suffering was confined almost entirely to the South. As these fugitives packed the roads and crowded in with friends and relatives or endured cheerless boardinghouses in towns and cities, they taxed the South's ever-decreasing resources and added to the uncounted deaths of white and black civilians from disease and malnutrition—deaths that must be included in any reckoning of the war's human cost.⁵³

52. Thomas, Confederate Nation, 204–5; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 296.

53. Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1964), chronicles the hardships of the refugees but makes no attempt to estimate their numbers or their mortality. Civilians in a fought-over country often suffer a higher number of war-related deaths than soldiers, because there are so many more civilians than soldiers. Probably twice as many civilians as soldiers in Europe died as a direct or indirect result of the Napoleonic wars. The shorter duration and smaller geographical scope of the fighting in the Civil War surely kept the civilian death rate far below this level. And with the exception of a yellow fever outbreak in Wilmington during 1862, there appear to have been no serious epidemics during the American Civil War. Suffering and death were widespread, nevertheless, and a fair estimate of war-related civilian deaths might total 50,000, which should be added to the 260,000 Confederate soldier deaths to measure the human cost of the war to the South.

Most civilians in conquered areas, of course, stayed home to live under their new rulers. And in the material if not the spiritual realm, they lived better than their compatriots who fled southward. The Yankee occupation, indeed, presented lucrative opportunities to interested parties on both sides of the line. Flourishing trade, both licit and illicit, grew up between former and sometimes continuing enemies.

Clandestine commerce between enemies is as old as war itself. Americans had proved themselves skilled at this enterprise in the Revolution and the War of 1812. The Civil War offered vastly greater scope for such activities. Free and slave states had lived in economic symbiosis before 1861; their mutual dependence became even more urgent in some respects during the war. "Physically speaking, we cannot separate," Lincoln had said in his first inaugural address. "We cannot remove our respective sections from each other . . . and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them."⁵⁴ Intercourse both hostile and amicable continued for the next four years in ways that neither Lincoln nor anyone else had anticipated. The South needed salt, shoes, clothing, bacon, flour, medicine, gunpowder, lead, and other necessities of war from the outside world. Since the blockade restricted the flow of these supplies from abroad, canny Confederates sought to flank the blockade by direct trade with the North. Enterprising Yankees were willing to exchange such goods for cotton. Both governments officially banned trade with the enemy. But when the price of a pound of cotton leapt from ten cents to a dollar in the North while the price of a sack of salt jumped from $1.25 to $60 in parts of the South, venturesome men would find a way to trade cotton for salt. An English resident of the Confederacy observed that "a Chinese wall from the Atlantic to the Pacific" could not stop this commerce.⁵⁵

The war's first year witnessed a considerable amount of smuggling between the lines in Kentucky and through southern counties of Maryland. The real bonanza, however, began with the Union conquests in the Mississippi Valley during 1862. First Nashville, then New Orleans and Memphis became centers of a flourishing trade in this region. Some of this exchange was legitimate. Eager to restore commercial activities in occupied areas and to win their inhabitants back to unionism, the Treasury Department issued trade permits to merchants and planters who took an oath of allegiance. Having taken the oath a merchant in

54. CWL, IV, 269.

55. Coulter, Confederate States, 287.

Memphis, for example, could sell cotton for cash or credit which he could then use to purchase a cargo of salt, flour, and shoes from Cincinnati for sale within Union-occupied territory. The Treasury hoped that trade would follow the flag as northern armies moved south until the whole South was commercially "reconstructed."

The problem was that trade had a tendency to get ahead of the flag. Some southerners within Union lines swore the oath with mental reservations. Others bribed Treasury agents to obtain a trading permit. Having sold cotton and bought salt or shoes, these men in turn smuggled the latter to southern armies or to merchants serving the civilian market behind Confederate lines. Some northern traders paid for cotton with gold, which eventually found its way to Nassau in the Bahamas to pay for rifles shipped through the blockade. Traders sometimes bribed Union soldiers to look the other way when cotton or salt was going through the lines. A good many soldiers could not resist the temptation to get in on the profits directly. The "mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton," wrote Charles A. Dana from Memphis in January 1863, "has to an alarming extent corrupted and demoralized the army. Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay. I had no conception of the extent of this evil until I came and saw for myself."⁵⁶

On the other side of the line a Confederate officer complained that the cotton trade had also "corrupted and demoralized" southerners who were subtly enticed into the Union web instead of burning their cotton to keep it out of Yankee hands. The Richmond Examiner spoke bitterly in July 1863 of "those rampant cotton and sugar planters, who were so early and furiously in the field for secession" but "having taken the oath of allegiance to the Yankees, are now raising cotton in partnership with their Yankee protectors, and shipping it to Yankee markets." This "shameless moral turpitude . . . inflicts a heavy injury upon the general cause of the South, which is forsaken by these apostates."⁵⁷

In theory the Confederate War Department agreed that "all trade with the enemy" was indeed "demoralizing and illegal and should, of course, be discountenanced, but [and this was a big but] situated as the people to a serious extent are . . . some barter or trading for the supply of their necessities is almost inevitable." Even Jefferson Davis, incorruptible

56. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 52, pt. 1, p. 331.

57. Ibid., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 646–48; Richmond Examiner, July 21, 1863.

to a fault, conceded that "as a last resort we might be justified in departing from the declared policy" against trade with the enemy, "but the necessity should be absolute."⁵⁸ For the Confederacy the necessity was usually absolute. Trade with the Yankees prevented famine in some areas and kept Van Dorn's Army of Mississippi in the field during the fall of 1862. "The alternative," stated the secretary of war starkly, "is thus presented of violating our established policy of withholding cotton from the enemy or of risking the starvation of our armies."⁵⁹

Believing that "we cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time," Sherman and Grant did their best to stop the illicit cotton trade through Memphis and western Tennessee in 1862.⁶⁰ The two generals issued a stream of regulations to tighten the granting of permits for legal trade, banished southerners who refused to take the oath and imprisoned some who violated it, required that all payments for cotton be made in U.S. greenbacks (instead of gold that could be converted into guns at Nassau), and tried to prevent the access of unscrupulous northern traders to Memphis. But much of this was like Canute trying to hold back the waves. The order banning gold payments was overruled in Washington. And one of Grant's restrictive regulations was also rescinded after achieving an unhappy notoriety.

Several highly visible traders who defied Grant's orders were Jews. Grant and other Union generals had frequently complained about Jewish "speculators whose love of gain is greater than their love of country."⁶¹ When Grant's own father brought three Jewish merchants to Memphis seeking special permits, his son the general lost his temper and on December 17, 1862, issued this order: "The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department." Jewish spokesmen denounced this "enormous outrage" that punished a whole group for the alleged sins of a few. Sensing an issue, House Democrats introduced a resolution, but Republicans tabled it. Lincoln rescinded Grant's order, explaining through Halleck that while

58. O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 2, pp. 334–35, 175.

59. Ludwell H. Johnson, "Trading with the Union: The Evolution of Confederate Policy," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 78 (1970), 314.

60. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 141.

61. Ibid., 123. Although most traders were not in fact Jewish, harassed Union officers had come to use the word "Jew" in the same way many southerners used "Yan kee"—as a shorthand way of describing anyone they considered shrewd, acquisitive, aggressive, and possibly dishonest.

he had no objection to expelling dishonest traders, the order "proscribed a whole class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks."⁶² Grant said no more about Jews, but six months later he summed up the frustrations of his efforts to regulate a trade that "is weakening us of at least 33 percent of our force. . . . I will venture that no honest man has made money in West Tennessee in the last year, whilst many fortunes have been made there during that time."⁶³

Fortunes were made in New Orleans, too, where Benjamin Butler ruled a restive city with a sharp two-edged sword. Cynical, clever, and apparently unscrupulous, Butler in New Orleans presented a paradox. On the one hand his Woman Order, his hanging of a southern gambler who had torn down the U. S. flag at the beginning of the occupation, and his imprisonment of several citizens who defied or displeased him earned everlasting southern hatred of "Beast" Butler. In December 1862, Jefferson Davis even issued a proclamation declaring Butler an outlaw and ordering any Confederate officer so lucky as to capture him to hang him straightway. On the other hand, Butler's martial law gave New Orleans the most efficient and healthy administration it had ever had. Rigorous enforcement of sanitary and quarantine measures cleaned the normally filthy streets and helped ward off the annual scourge of yellow fever. Butler was "the best scavenger we ever had," wryly commented a native. Before the war, conceded a local newspaper, New Orleans had been ruled by plug-ugly street gangs—"the most godless, brutal, ignorant, and ruthless ruffianism the world has ever heard of." After three months of martial law even the pro-Confederate Picayune had to confess that the city had never been "so free from burglars and cutthroats."⁶⁴

The paradox extended to Butler's economic policies. The Union blockade by sea and the Confederate blockade of river commerce with the North had strangled the city's economy. Most workers were unemployed when Farragut captured the city. Butler distributed Union rations to the poor and inaugurated an extensive public works program financed in part by high taxes on the rich and confiscation of the property

62. Documentation and details of this matter can be found in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 14 vols. (Carbondale, Ill., 1967–85), VII, 50–56. See also Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 352–56.

63. Grant to Salmon P. Chase, July 31, 1863, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 538.

64. Quotations from Gerald M. Capers, Occupied City: New Orleans under the Federals 1862–1865 (Lexington, Ky., 1965), 89, 73, 71.

of some wealthy rebels who refused to take the oath of allegiance. These procedures earned the general another Confederate cognomen—"Spoons" Butler—for allegedly stealing southerners' silver for the enrichment of himself and his Yankee friends. Some truth stuck to this charge, as Union officers and other northerners who flocked to the city bought confiscated valuables at auction for nominal prices. The northerners included Butler's brother Andrew and other Yankee businessmen who helped the general with his project of obtaining cotton for northern mills. These speculators bribed their way through Treasury officials and army officers to make deals with planters and brokers beyond Union lines, trading salt and gold for cotton and sugar. Both sides sometimes used French agents as go-betweens to preserve the fiction of trading with a neutral instead of the enemy. Nothing illegal was proved against Butler himself—an unfriendly Treasury officer described him as "such a smart man, that it would, in any case, be difficult to discover what he wished to conceal"—but his brother Andrew returned home several hundred thousand dollars richer than he came.⁶⁵

Butler's notoriety compelled Lincoln to recall him in December 1862. His successor was Nathaniel P. Banks, fresh from defeats by Stonewall Jackson in Virginia. Banks tried to ban trade with the enemy and to substitute conciliation for coercion in ruling the natives—with limited success in both efforts. Treasury regulations and congressional legislation in 1863–64 curtailed the permit system for private traders. The North also began obtaining more cotton from the cultivation of plantations in occupied territory by freed slaves. But none of this seemed to diminish the commerce between the lines. The Davis administration looked the other way out of necessity; the Lincoln administration looked the other way out of policy. The North needed the cotton for its own industry and for export to earn foreign exchange. To one angry general who could not understand this policy, Lincoln explained that the war had driven the gold price of cotton to six times its prewar level, enabling the South to earn as much foreign exchange from the export of one bale through the blockade as it would have earned from six bales in peacetime. Every bale that came North, even by means of "private interest and pecuniary greed," was one less bale for the enemy to export. "Better give him guns for it than let him, as now, get both guns and ammunition for it."⁶⁶

65. Ibid., 79–94, 161–67; quotation from p. 84.

66. Lincoln to Edward R. S. Canby, Dec. 12, 1864, in CWL, VIII, 163–64. During the war some 900,000 bales of cotton found their way from the Confederacy to the North—nearly double the amount the South managed to export through the blockade. About one-third of this trade with the North was lawful commerce by permit in occupied territory; the remainder was illicit. Stanley Lebergott, "Why the South Lost: Commercial Purpose in the Confederacy, 1861–1865," JAH, 70 (1983), 72–73.

Lincoln's rationalization did not satisfy the general, nor does it fully satisfy the historian. Cotton was the great corrupter of the Civil War; as a Confederate general noted, it made "more damn rascals on both sides than anything else."⁶⁷ This corrosion in the rear—like the antiwar fire in the rear—grew from a malaise of the flesh in the resource-starved South and a malaise of the spirit in the North. During the winter of 1862–63 this northern malaise, spread by military defeat, appeared more fatal than the South's malaise of the flesh. Military success was a strong antidote for hunger. Buoyed by past victories in Virginia and the apparent frustration of Grant's designs against Vicksburg, the South faced the spring military campaigns with confidence. "If we can baffle them in their various designs this year," wrote Robert E. Lee in April 1863, "next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong as that the next administration will go in on that basis. We have only therefore to resist manfully . . . [and] our success will be certain."⁶⁸

67. Capers, Occupied City, 164.

68. Robert E. Lee to his wife, April 19, 1863, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York, 1961), 438.