Government. Good afternoon, everyone. How are you all doing . Our topic for today is the second part of our civil war content for this semester. And i want to talk today about Economic Policy and social events that are tied to the economy. I have kind of titled this, feeding the confederacy. We will focus most of our attention on the Confederate States and we will talk about the crucial issue of how you make sure that your soldiers and your civilians have enough to eat over the course of the war. There are two key ironies of this confederate experience for me. And that historians who study the confederacy really point to. One is that the Confederate States of america is a predominantly agricultural nation. We have talked about this before. The vast majority of the population in the union and the confederacy are people who live on farms. But especially in the Confederate States. We are dealing with a population that is overwhelmingly people who live on farms. And yet they will struggle to feed themselves more often than they will run out of bullets and armaments. So this is surprising when you think of an agricultural nation, right . The second big irony here is that the the founding documents and the is a session documents of the states before they joined the confederacy said we wanted a limited government with more power give to the states. And yet the confederate government is going to become stronger and more invasive than any Government People had seen to this point in order to wage war and try to feed everyone. All right . So two key ironies. We are going to talk about how they come about. A flash point for this question of how you feed everyone is a series of riots in the spring of 1863 in the confederacy. Most notely lly notably in capital city of richmond although it happens elsewhere as well. Spring 1863. Timing here is crucial. We talked last time about the an conneda plan and the blockade. We are more than a year into the war almost two years into the war, really. The blockade is now effective enough that it is getting difficult to find specialty commodities and key foods that cannot be grown locally throughout the south because things are having trouble getting in. Thats one key factor. Another key factor is that its simply early spring, and the food people stored in the fall and in the early winter as they were getting in their crops, they are starting to run out of it. But the new things they planted in the spring havent really come into the ground yet. There is not a lot of things available, food available. They are kind of there is always going to be a shortage of food at this particular moment but it is exasperated by some elements of the war as we will see in a moment. The richmond bread riot is primarily enacted by women, women who were working in the factories of richmond who were shop keepers, who were small producers. So small scale farmers who lived on the outskirts of the city. And they have a number of concerns. The small scale farmers have found it harder and harder to bring their produce into the citys markets and sell it. The women who are working in the pack frees and shops cant get the food they need for their families. Their wages arent keeping up with the cost of commodities as it is getting harder and harder to fine things. Most of them their husbands are in the armys or you know, there are a number of widows very prominently involved in this. Reporter initial plan is to talk to the governor. Richmond is the capital of the confederacy, also the capital of virginia. They think we are going to ask for his help. They get to his house early on the morning of april 2nd and find out he already left to go to the capital. So they march further into town. And as people join themmet gets bigger. It gets roudier. They start breaking into stores and grabbing the food, grabbing clothes, grabbing the goods they are struggling to get ahold of. That was the point of the protest in the first place. Becomes destructive. And they gather. They meet, they get to the capital and the president confederacy, Jefferson Davis, comes out and orders them disperse. Tells him he is very dismissive of them, he is contemp use. Tells them, you know, go home to your families, do what women are supposed to do. They say, well we are trying to feed our family. This is what women are supposed to do. He throws some gold coins at them and tells them they are going to be fired on by the soldiers in the area if they dont leave within five minutes. All in all, this is not good press for the confederacy. Richmond gets a lot of attention. This is an illustration that comes from a northern newspaper thats mocking the women where you know, showing them sending their husbands off to war early on, the southern bells in the beautiful dresses and after two years of war this is what they have become, they have become these, you know, sort of one attractive animallike women in the streets stealing food. There are riots elsewhere but richmond gets the most attention because it is the capital. And also because of the way Jefferson Davis responded. And particularly the soldiers in the Confederate Army are not too thrilled when they hear this their president has suggested firing guns on women in the streets, some of whom might be their wives or their sisters who are just demanding food. So the response from the government will be important. It doesnt look to a lot of people like the confederate government does anything in response to this. But thats not the case. We will see that as we move forward. But i want to go back a little bit to what leads up to this. What causes this particular crisis . What are the factors going on in the confederacy . Well, on some level, there are deep roots, and the agricultural choices made in the 20 years prior to the civil war. Nobody expected a civil war, so they werent preparing for that. And we talked about this very effective productive slaveholding economy that created great wealth. People invested their money and their energy in land and slaves and in the cash crops of cotton primarily, but also to a lesser extent things like rice and sugar. And then in virginia, where we looked at some of that data, wheat being the key cash crop. But a lot of the effort that was put into finding ways to get crops to market quickly and shared quickly was really focused on cotton and export rather than spreading food around the south. That was less of a priority because that wasnt where the money was to be made. So it was an economically logical decision in the 20 years prior to the war that just ends up being a problem because this war is going on and on and on. We said last time, nobody thought it was going to last more than a couple of months. And here they are two years in. And all of these problems have begun to emerge. We will see fewer problems getting crops to market getting food to the people who need it in the United States because in the northern states, the union states, because there had been more effort put in the 1840s and 1950s in processing food crops and preparing them for distribution and market. We talked about the stock yards if chicago being this place, and the wheat being brought in there, and processed in huge quaupts, and shipped out. So there is a mechanism that already exists for getting pigs to market, slaughtered, turned into edible and distributable meat. There is a process that already exists for doing that with wheat that is very much in place that can be used by the United States army. The confederacy doesnt have the similar equivalent for Long Distance distribution of food because it hadnt been necessary before. So they are trying to make up for it. They make up for it better than anyone was necessarily anticipating but it is still not a perfect system. When we turn to the events of the war itself, a key thing we talked about the progress of the armys last time. Where were they the majority of the time in 1862 . They are in virginia. And they are in tennessee. And they are in the upper Mississippi River valley. These are the places that grew most of the food. Particularly, the big wheat farms of the slaveHolding States were in these regions that are more heavily invested and have armies trampling through them far more often in the first two years of the war than some of the places that would have been primarily growing things like cotton and sugar. So thats another key factor. I mentioned already the blockade has started to be effective. It is not keeping out everything by 1863 but it is keeping out enough things that that makes a difference in what people can get ahold of and how much it costs. So wealthy people might still be able to get things, but the people who are involved until these bread riots are really going to struggle to get commodities. Not bread so up in. But coffee. Things that had to be imported into the confederacy. Two other key factors really tied to approximately sees s set really tied to policies set in place by the government fryar prior to 1862. First, the draft. The draft for the confederacy already began in 1862. When they are facing that string of defeats in the mississippi theater, right, in whats tennessee, but the Mississippi River kind of process. And all of those things were leading up to a sense in the spring of 1862, like the confederacy was really struggling. The draft was part of that. What this does is take more men out of the field, out of the farms, and put them into the armies. It sets in motion a process that by the end of the civil war will put over 80 of adult and older teenage white men into the armies. Thats a huge number. So under any circumstances, it is going to be difficult to keep the home front economy going when you are pulling that massive a portion of the population and putting them in the army. So that process is not complete by the spring of 1863, but the draft has existed for almost a year and it is having an impact. Another thing thats having an impact on labor available is the impressment of free black enslaved and American Indian men to do work for the army. We heard about this with the guest lecture we had at the end of last month. These laws start at the state level. So the state of virginia in the fall of 1862, the state of North Carolina later in the fall of 1862 put laws in place to make it easier to gather and to enforce slave holders to give up their workers for several months at a time and send them to dig ditches, build fortifications, help build railroads, do all of the labor, the manual labor, that the army needs. And that is going to pull more people out of the fields. It starts in october when the harvest is still going on. Its continued into the spring and into march when the spring planting needs to happen. So those factors as well are reducing the number of people who were available to grow and maintain and than harvest the crops in many of those foodproducing areas of the confederacy, leading up to the bread riots. Another key factor in peoples ability to buy food. If you live in a city and you are not growing your own food, how you are getting it is you are buying it in your local stores or from local producers. The cost of stuff is going up dramatically. What things are there are also getting to be more expensive because of inflation. The confederacy prints massive amounts of Paper Currency. This gets under way in 1862 as well. By the spring of 1863, things are not looking great, and this graph you have here is going to show you the increase in the cost of gold. So what it takes to buy a dollar worth of gold in confederate dollar bills. The real jump is a little bit later, right, is in the summer of 1863 and then in 1864. So we are not quite there yet in the spring of 1863 when these bread riots are happening, but it is starting. Prices are going up. I know it is hard so see this, these very tiny dates, but this sort of midway point here, thats the start of 1863. So we are seeing things really starting to shoot up in cost. And the value of that confederate Paper Currency are going down. The states are even printing their own Paper Currency. There is money everywhere. The more of it it is, the less it is worth. It is hard to buy things, pickcally the factory workers who are being paid in currency and their wages are not going up every time the inflation rate goes up. They are really struggling. Thats another key factor in all of this. To put that inflation rate in more real terms, because not that many people are going around buying gold, there is a clerk in the Confederate War Department named john jones who ever so often would write in his diary the cost of a barrel of flour. So i went through and kind of picked some of the dates, and the cost of the barrel of flour. This is barrel of flour going up in cost from about 18 18 to 20 at the start in january of 1861, right before the war begins to the spring of 1863. It is doubled. Which is big. Thats a huge difference. Compared to where it is going, 500 a barrel by if end of the war, 40 doesnt seem so bad in comparison. But in two years, the cost of that barrel of flour has doubled and your wages have nowhere close to doubled. So this is a huge factor in peoples experience of the war. I said before that we have often interpreted the confederate governments response, the national response, to all of these economic crisis and to this unrest as being insufficient, that they didnt really do anything. Part of why we have seen it that way, why historians have seen it that way and why people at the time living through it thought it happened that way is because of the way they responded. They did things, but very often their response was through National Policies and approaches that got implemented by local governments. So they gave local governments tools or expressly told local governments to do things that would help mitigate some of this crisis. So they dont get any credit for having done anything. The county court system, the county commissioners, the home guard put in place by the state. Other sort of locally available elected officials are the ones doing these things. So it doesnt seem like it is the confederacy. But often there is a National Policy behind all of that. So what are some examples of confederate Economic Policy . One that everyone knew was the confederacy, one they didnt like so much, is the tax in kind. Big surprise, people dont want to pay taxes. No one ever wants to pay taxes. We have had that before. They are not paying these the confederacy has no national tax in currency or in gold. The tax in kind is a tax in what it is you produce. So if you are a wheat farmer, it is a portion of your wheat crop. If you raise hogs or cows, it is a portion of your livestock. If you grow cotton whatever it is you are producing is a portion of your crop. And there is a regularly sort of scheduled announced, 10 is due on this day, the tax collectors are going to be coming through. And they they take your taxes in whatever it is you grow. So if you are already struggling, if you were someone who was on the margins and your farm is just barely enough for you to make it, having to hand over 10 or 15 to the government is a big deal, particularly if you were struggling before the war and now your husband is away at the war or you have been injured and you come home and you are trying to keep things going. This tax can be a significant burden for some people. So this is a policy everyone knows is the confederate government, and no one is happy about. Another policy everyone knows is the confederate government and most people are not happy about is impressment of stuff. Not just impressment of labor. We talked about slaves and free people of color, both africanamerican and American Indian being impressed. But the confederate government is also impressing food, supplies, wagons, harnesses, horses, mutuals, cows whatever it is they need when they come through your community. So there is two versions there is two types of impressment. One is the army is here. It is marching through your town. They are going to take what they need. There is not a lot of knots that they are coming necessarily. And you pretty much have to give them what they are asking for. They will give you a receipt. The receipt is for confederate currency which we have already discussed is declining in value. So people are often very unhappy about this. Sometimes they fight back. Sometimes they get arrested. Sometimes people are shot for refusing to hand over goods to the confederate authorities. So that sort of its a legal form of impressment. But it is not predictable. It is kind of hard to know what is going to happen. The other form of impressment is these quotas that each community is expected on top of your tax in kind, you are expected to hand over another portion of your stuff for impressment. In this case, you get a receipt for reimbursement. Tax in kind, you dont get directly reimbursed. You get a government and an army. Impressment, you get promise of direct reimbursement. Sometimes you get paid. If you live close to richmond and you can go and demand your payment, you can get it. Sometimes the local impressment agent will come back and bring your payment. All right. So this is one of these policies that is a National Policy. There are state laws and National Laws about this. But the work of doing it is done by local people. I have pn studying this man named william cable. He lives in southern virginia. He was appointed. He was in the Confederate Army and he was sent home and what they called detailed to do this work. He was part of a prominent family. He was a teacher at some point in his life. He was well respected in this community. This is important. You want someone who is well respected and seen as honest and that they are going to keep good records of what they have taken. And he spends the whole spring, summer, and fall traveling around his county collecting information from people about what they are growing and what they are producing so that he can come back and collect corn, wheat, meat, things that the army needs to function. And either provide payment or provide a receipt. And he will collect it every so often on a boat he has bought and take it down to richmond and hand it over to the War Department. And this is happening in counties throughout the confederacy on a day to day basis. So we had this government that is intruding in our production on your farm on a daily basis. We will see a number of other state policies. I didnt line them all up here. There are so many of them. But virginia in particular because they are in the middle of it all of the time enacts some additional state laws that add to this. For example, in virginia, they put their own spin on the conscripton law. The conscription law says you get covers all white men ages 17 to 55. But if you have 20 or more slaves you get an exemption. You are supposed to use the exemption for the overseer or the owner, the person who maintains the farm, who runs the farm on a day to day basis. The reason for this is you have to keep feeding people. You have to keep the farms going. You cant keep the farms going if there is no one making the slaves work. So the condescription policy is designed to make sure there is someone on the ground making sure the slaves are doing the work and growing the food that the army needs to eat. What we will see is the states putting their own spins on these laws and saying if you dont grow a food crop as your primary crop, wheat, corn, you raise pigs, you raise cattle whatever it is if you are not growing food as your primary crop, you dont get the exemption. Because we need more food. We dont need more cotton in the last year of the war. You cant eat cotton. Virginia actually reduces it and says if you have 15 or more slaves, you get the exemption, but again, you have to be growing food crops. Tobacco is out. We will see communities detail farmers. So someone who is a big producer of crop who doesnt have enough slaves, the community will work with the confederacy and the person will be requested to be detailed and sent home. So he is enlisted in the Confederate Army, he goes through training and sent home and told his job for the army for the time being is to grow food. If needed he will be called up to fight but he is probably more valuable growing the food. So there is all of these kind of tweaks on the policy of getting and thats why we will see the numbers say 90plus percent of the white men in this community were enlisted in the Confederate Army. That doesnt mean we were all in the army all the time. Some of them have been sent home because they are farmers or they are black smits or they are doing jobs at home that are more necessary for the army the majority of the time than their service as soldiers. But they can be called up if absolutely necessary at the last minute. These are some examples of the way they are trying to resolve this economic problem. By getting more people on the farms growing the food. So that people can keep eating. It is also examples of the way the confederate government is sort of inserting itself into the day to day life of every Community Across the south. We will see the War Department very directly take control of the big sort of movers of the stuff, the railroads. Not every line, but over time what we will see is that the majority of the railroads that are still operational, that are not in the United States territory by the end of the war are primarily controlled by the confederate government so that moving soldiers takes priority. Moving war material takes priority. But there is also an interest in making sure that food gets distributed where it needs to go to keep the population going. Because if the soldiers are constantly getting letters from their wives saying we are going to starve to death if you dont come home, eventually you have a desertion problem. So you need to feed the army but you also need to make sure the civilians have enough to eat. Thats going to be a constant priority and concern for the War Department. Salt is a surprisingly important factor in the confederate war experience because it is the only way to preserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration. You kill a chicken, you eat it that afternoon. No big deal. You kill a pig and thats hundreds of pounds of meat. You need to figure out a way to preserve it for the long run. And the primary confederate ration is corn meal and salted pork. So the army needs salt to take all of those hogs they have collected and preserve that meat for the soldiers. But the people also need salt in order to preserve their open food. There is a salt mine a massive salt mine, in western virginia near, not surprisingly, the town of saltville. And a huge amount of Army Resources are put into this place in western virginia that for the most part is not near any of the battles. But it is heavily fortified. And they are constantly sending slaves out there to build better fortifications. And they are building raillines that connect saltville to the rest of the confederacy because you cant preserve the food if you dont have salt. And then each state is put in charge of handing out salt rations to the people. And this, again, goes to the county level. The county governments are told, you know, you have a pound of salt per person, or five pounds of salt per person. It varies depending on the season and how much might need to be preserved that you have been allotted. Send someone from our county to pick up your salt and then make sure it gets distributed. This is another sort of industry thats being nationalized and that the process of distribution then is being handed facebook local governments to make sure it happens. And i have read through the correspondence of the governor of virginia, there are months where literally half the letters he gets are about salt. We will also see price controls put in place by the confederate congress. And a big debate over what is an appropriate price for commodities because in richmond, the prices have gone up much faster than in other places in the country that are more remote from the conflict. So what is a fair price is a big subject of debate. But when they put those prices in place, they are prices for government purchasing. This is how much the Confederate Army will pay for these products, whether it is corn meal or wheat or pork or whatever. Here is the confederate governments purchasing price. You might be able to charge ordinary civilians more, but this is what the government will pay. This is a problem for big producers because they are not making as much money as they could without those controls in place. But it ends up being helpful for Small Farmers and their wives who were struggling economically because the confederacy tells county governments that they can also purchase at these official government prices and distribute the food to the wives and widows of soldiers who need it. So, again, it is an example of this National Policy enabling local governments to meet the needs of the people. Doesnt look like the confederate government is doing anything because it is your local government thats giving you food. But they are only able to do that because of a confederate government policy that was put in place. Are there any questions so far . We have about 20 minutes left, and i wanted to switch gears even though i said in the beginning it is about the confederate economy. I wanted to switch gears and talk about the United States and some of its policies because first of all, it is the only day we are going to have to talk about it. But i also wanted to provide some comparison points. What we are going to see happen is that the republicans in congress in the United States are able to take a little bit of control. In the aftermath of the election of 1860, they did not have a majority. But as 11 states left the United States, democrats left, and the republicans became the majority in congress. And what they are going to enact looks an awful lot like what the whig party wanted in terms of that american system economic plan that was put in place or that the whigs wanted to put in place in the 1840s and never managed to. Some whigs have migrated to the republican party. And they are going to end up getting a lot of what they wanted because those things helped the United States wage war. For example, an National Bank. Keep hearing about a bank. It keeps coming back and going away. Andrew jackson killed the second bank. The third bank is created as a way to help the u. S. Government sort of better gather up the supplies of the countryside to have one functional national currency. In addition to a bank, we are not just dealing with bank notes anymore. They legislate the creation of legitimate paper money. Through something called the legal tender act. This is important. Those u. S. Dollars printed during the civil war specifically say this bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private. The confederate money is not legal tender. They printed or at least not officially in this way. They print it, the government prohibits it, and authorized it, but it doesnt have that same statement about being legal tender, which means someone can say i refuse to accept this, i do not consider this to be money. The u. S. Money says, this is money, and everyone has to accept it as such. The other thing they do that helps keep inflation under control is they enact a national tax. We get an income tax in the United States. Supreme court rules it unconstitutional during the war. So it doesnt outlive the war, but it helps balance the money thats going out through that Paper Currency being printed by having some money coming back in. So that inflation in the United States over the course of the civil war ends up being about 75 . Custom is a lot. That means something you buy costs seven times what it was before the war, but we are not going into the 500, 800 times that they are going through in the confederacy. And confederate inflation is hitting 9,000 officially by the end of the war. So the United States plan works a lot better than the confederate plan at keeping the economy going. We are also going to see that u. S. Congress has time to do other things besides wage war. So thats also where some of this sort of old whig policy comes up. We get a homestead act that makes plans for settling the west in a more sort of official form than had been happening. And specifically in giving small family farm size plots of land, 60 acres. If you go out west and you can overthe course of five years improve your farm, clear some of the land, plant a crop, build some sort of dwelling structure doesnt have to be much, then you get to keep that 60 acres for free. This doesnt work if you are indigent. You have to have at least enough money to get out west, buy supplies, get a crop in the ground. But you dont have to buy the land. This is a way for the people in the free labor ideology that he would talked about to use their own resources to move up and for the government to help them just a little bit, to become independent land owners in the west. This was very popular in the northern states prior to the war, but the slaveHolding States had blocked it because they didnt want lots of little farms all over the west that was going to prevent the spread of big plantations. We also see the Republican Congress pass the Land Grant College act, which creates well, which gives the states a way to fund the creation of universities, of normal schools for teacher training, but of state colleges and universities that will really focus on agriculture and engineering. So a lot of the public universities of the midwest in particular are funded through the creation of this Land Grant College system. Land grant meaning that each state is given land out in the west, in a territory, that they can sell to land speculators, to developers, to the railroad companies, and then use the money to fund their school systems. So congress isnt given them money outright but they are giving them a way to get the money they need to do these thing. And we also see Congress Pass the Pacific Railroad act that allows for the creation of the transcontinental railroad. Again, we talked about this in the 1850s being something that everyone wanted but there being this big debate over where it was going to go and was its primary route going to end in a slaveholding air or in a nonslaveholding area. Again, once most of the slave Holding States left that debate was easier to settle in congress. So we see the republicans in congress in the United States also creating this much more economically active government than had existed before the war. In many ways, it is the war that gives them the space to do this. No one would have signed on, much as the whigs and some of the republicans wanted it, it would have been very hard to get the National Bank act and the legal tender act and the income tax through congress if the war hadnt made it necessary. And the confederate government had that same experience. They just had it to a much greater level because they had to put all of their energy and resources into waging war. And to becoming that very economically active government that had its hands in everything in order to feed the population, to feed the armies, to keep things going. The fact that it worked for as long as it did says a lot about how effective those systems were. So that while robert e. Lees army is having their successes in virginia we talked about them heading into pennsylvania into the summer of 63 to give the Virginia Farmers some space to grow those crops that were then going to be collected on their behalf a little bit later. All of those battles we talked about being at places of transportation, the railroads, and the rivers, is because there was all of this food to gather and send. And there was a mechanism behind the scenes for doing that that involved you know, people all over the place in the confederacy. So thats what i had for you for today. Any questions . Okay. I do want to take attendance as we are finishing up, so hang out, dont go anywhere. But you can begin to pack up your thing. I just want to make sure i got everyone as you were coming in. But thanks so much. I guess we are going to finish early. Coming up here on American History tvs lectures in history a look at the start of radio and how it impacted Public Opinion before the u. S. Entered world war ii. Thats followed by civil war weaponry and how guns changed during the war to become more deadly. And then, we take you on the road to rochester, minnesota, for a tour through the history of the mayo clinic. We are featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight from our real america series a look at the film the silent invader going back to 1957 and the influenza virus emerging from asia which led to a pandemic that killed more than 1 Million Worldwide and 116,000 in the United States. American history tv, tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan3. Just before world war ii, radio was gaining popularity much like todays rise of social media. Wofford College Professor mark burns teaches about the rise of radio as a National Media and its Public Opinion impact on whether to enter world war ii. The class uses sound clips showing the role radio played shaping american views and foreign policy. All right. So last week we talked about the coming of the war in europe and the coming of the war in asia. What i would like to talk about today is the american reaction to all of that, what is called the great debate over american involvement in
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