There are two key ironies of this confederate experience for me. And the historians who study the confederacy really point to one is that the Confederate States of america is a predominantly agricultural nation, and weve talked about this before. The vast majority of the population and the union are people who live on farms but especially in the confederacy states. Were dealing with a population thats 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. The second big irony here is that the foundations of the confederacy, the founding documents and the succession documents of the states before they joined the confederacy said we want a limited government with more power given 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. So theres two key ironies, and were 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 notably in the capital city of richmond, although it happens elsewhere as well. Spring 1863 timing here is crucial. We talked last time about the anaconda plan and the blockade. Were more than a year into the war almost two years into the war really. The blockade is effective enough it is getting difficult to find special specialty commodities and key food because theyre 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, theyre starting to run out of it. But the new things they planted in the spring havent really come into the ground yet. Theres not a lot of food easily available. Theres always going to be a shortage of food by this particular moment but its exasperated by some elements of the war as well 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 keep, 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 factories and shops cant get the food they need for their families. Their wages arent keeping up with the cost of commodities as its getting harder and harder to find things. Most of them, their husbands are in the armies or, you know, theres a number of widows very prominently involved in this. Their initial plan is to go talk to the governor and see if the governor can help them. Because richmond is 24 capital of the confederacy but also the capital of virginia. They get to his house early on the morning of april 2nd and they found out hes already left to go to the capitol. And so they marched further into town, and as people join them it gets bigger, it gets rowdier. They start breaking into stores and grabbing food, grabbing clothes, grabbing the goods they were struggling to get a hold of. That was the point of the protest in the first place. It becomes destructsive. And they gather and get to the capitol and the president of the confederacy Jefferson Davis comes out and orders them to disperse. Hes very dismissive of them, hes contemptuous. He tells them go home to your families, do what women are supposed to do. And they say were trying to feed our families. This is what women are supposed to do. He throws some geld coins at them and tells them theyre going to be fired on by the soldiers in the area if they dont leave within 5 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, you know, showing them sending their husbands off to war early on the southern bells and beautiful dresses and after two years of war this is what theyve become. Theyve become these sort of unattractive animallike women in the streets stealing food. There are riots elsewhere, but richmond gets the most attention because its the capitol where and also because of the way Jefferson Davis responded and particularly the soldiers in the Confederate Army are not too thrilled when they hear the president has suggested firing guns on women in the streets some of whom might be their wives and 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 its not the case. And well 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 earliest part of the civil war. Nobody expected a civil war so they werent preparing for that and we talked about this very effective, projective slave holding economy that created great wealth. People invested money and their energy 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 when we looked at some of that data, wheat being the cash crop. But a lot of that 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 that 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 in the northern states, the union states because there had been more effort put in the 1840s and 1850s in processing food crops and preparing them for distribution and market. We talked about the stock yards in chicago being this place and the wheat being brought in there and processed in huge quantities and shipped out. So theres a mechanism that already exists for getting pigs to market, slaughtered, turned into edible and distributable meat. Theres 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 sort of Long Distance distribution of food because it hadnt been necessary before. So theyre trying to make up for that, and they make up for it better than anyone was necessarily anticipating, but its nstill not a perfect syste. When we turn to the events of the war itself a key thing and we talked about the progress of the armies last time, where were they a majority of the time in 1862, theyre in virginia and theyre in tennessee, and theyre in the upper mississippi valley. And these are the places that grew most of the food and particularly the big wheat farms of the slave Holding States were in these regions that are more heavily invested and have armies trampling through them far more often 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. Its not keeping out everything by 1863, but its 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 involved in these bread riots are really going to struggle to get commodities. Not bread is so much but coffee, things that had to be imported in a confederacy. Two other key factors really tied to policies set in place by states and National Government in 1862 began to help the confederacy raise war, first of which is conscription, the draft. And i said this last time, the draft for the confederacy already began in the spring of 1862, when their facing that string of defeats in the mississippi theater, in 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 is part of that. What this does is take more men out of t out of the field, out of the farms and puts them into the armies. Its sets the motion of the process that by the end of the civil war will put over 80 of dult and older teenage white men into the arm es. Thats a huge number. So under any circumstances its going to be difficult to keep the home front economy going when youre pulling that massive 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 lasted almost a year and its having an impact. Another thing is 24 impressment of free black and slaves and American Indian men to do work for the army. We heard about this at the guest lecture we had at the end of last month. These laws start at the state level. So the sfat of virginia in the fall of 1862, the fall of North Carolina later in the fall of 862 put laws in place to make it easier to gather and to force 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 then harvest the crops in many of those food producing 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 youre not growing your own food how youre getting it is youre 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, its in the summer of 1863 and then in the 1864. So were not quite there yet in the spring of 1863 when these bread riots are happening, but its starting. Prices are going up. I know its hard to see these very tiny dates, but the sort of midway point here, thats the start of 1863. So were seeing things really start to shootup in cost and the value of that confederate Paper Currency is going down. The states are even printing their own Paper Currency. Theres just money everywhere, and the more of it there is, the less its worth which makes it harder to buy things particularly for wage earners, the factory workers being paid in currency and their wages are not going up every time the inflation rate goes up, so theyre really struggling. So 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, theres a clerk in the Confederate War Department named john jones who every so often would write in his diary the cost of a barrel of flour. And so i went through and kind of picked some of the dates and the cost of the barrel of flour. So this is the barrel of flour going up in cost from about 18 to 20 at the start of january 1861 right before the war begins to the spring of 1863. Its doubled, which is big. Thats a huge difference. Compared to where its going, 500 a barrel by the 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 huge factor in peoples experience of the war. I said before that we often interpreted the National Governments response to all these Economic Crises and to this unrest as being insufficient, that they didnt really do anything. Part of why weve 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 officials or pointed officials are the ones doing these things, but often theres a National Policy behind all of that. So what are some examples of confederate Economic Policy . Well, one 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. Right, weve had that before. Theyre 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. Soful you are a wheat farmer its a portion of your wheat crop. If you raise hogs or cows its a portion of your live stock. Whatever it is you are producing its a portion of your crop. And theres a regularly sort of scheduled announced 10 is due on this day. The tax collectors are going to be coming through. And they take your taxes in whatever it is you grow. If youre someone already struggling 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 youve been injured and you come home and youre trying to keep things going, this tax can be a significant burden for some people. So this is policy everyone knows as the confederate government and nobody is happy about. Another policy everyone knows is the confederate government and most people are not happy about is impressment of stuff, right . 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, horse, mules, cows, whatever it is they need when they come through your community. Theres two types of impressment. One is the army is here. Its marching through your town, theyre going to take what they need. Theres not a lot of notice that theyre coming, necessarily. And you pretty much have to give them what theyre asking for. Theyll give you a receipt. The receipt is for confederate currency which we 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 confrederate authorities. So thats sort of its a legal form of impressment but its not predictable. Its hard to know whats going to happen. The other form of impressment are those quoteoes 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 army. Impressment you get 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. This is one of these policies that is National Policy. There are state laws and National Laws about this, but the work of doing it is done by local people. Ive been studying this man named cowell and he was sent home and detailed to do this work. He was part of a prominent family. He was a teacher at some point in his life. He was wellermented respected community. You want someone whos well respected and honest and are going to keep good records of what theyve taken. His spends spring, summer and fall traveling around his county checking information from people what theyre growing and what theyre producing so 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 then hell collect it every so often on a boat hes bought and take it down to richmond and hand over to the War Department. And this is happening in counties throughout the confederacy on a daytoday basis. So we have this government that is intruding in your production on your farm an odaily basis. Well see another of other state policies. Theres so many of them. But virginia in particular because theyre 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 conscription laws. And so the conscription law, which i mentioned but we really didnt talk about. The conscription law for the confederacy says if you have 20 or more slaves you get one exemption from conscription. By the end of the civil war confederate conscription covers all white men ages 17 to 55. But if you have 20 or more slaves you get an exemption. Youre supposed to use the exemption for the overseer or the owner, the person who maintains the farm or who runs the farm on a daytoday basis. And 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 theres no one making the slaves work. So the conscription 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 well see is the states putting their own spin on these conscription 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 youre 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 see says if you have 15 or more slaves you get the exemption, but again you have to be growing food crops. Tobacco is out. Well 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 hes enlisted in the confederate arm wreay and goes through training and sent home and told his job for the Confederate Army for the time being is to grow food. And if hes needed hell be called up to fight but hes probably more valuable growing the food. So theres all these kind of tweaks on the policy of getting thats why well see the numbers say 9 plus percent of the white men in this community were enlisted into the army. It doesnt mean theyre in the army all the time. Some of them have been sent home because theyre farmers or blacksmiths or doing jobs at home more necessary for the army a majority of the time than serviced as soldiers. But they can be called up if absolutely necessary at the last minute. These are some examples of the way theyre trying to resolve this economic problem. By getting more people on the farms growing the food so that people can keep eating. Its 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. Well see the War Department very directly take control of the big sort of movers of the stuff, the,s. Not every line, but every time what well see is the majority of the railroads that are still operational, that are not then United States territory by the end of the war are primarily controll controlled by the federal government, so that moving soldiers takes priority, moving war material takes priority. But theres 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 were 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. And thats going to be a constant priority and concern for the War Department. Assau salt is a surprising factor. You kill a chicken, you eat the chicken that troon, 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 cornmeal 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. In this place in western virginia for the most part is not near any of the battles but it is heavily fortified and theyre constantly sending slaves out there to build better fortifications. And theyre building rail lines that connect salt fields to the rest of the confederacy. Because you cant preserve 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 5 pounds of salt per person. It varies depending on the season and how much might need to be provided. That youve been allotted. Send someone from your county to pick up your salt and make sure it gets distributed. This is another sort of industry thats being nationalized and the process of distribution then is being handed back to the local governments to make sure it happens. Ive read through the correspondence of the governors of virginia, nearly half the letters he gets are about salt. We will also see prices 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 purchasing. This is how much the Confederate Army will pay for these products, whether its cornmeal or wheat or whatever. Here is the federal 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 has 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, its 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 its your local government thats giving you food. But theyre 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 at the beginning its about the confederate economy, i wanted to switch gears and talk about the United States and some of its policies because first of all its the only day were going to have to talk about it. But i also wanted to provide some comparison points. What were 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, right, democrats left and the republicans became the majority in congress. And what theyre going to enact looks an awful lot like what the wig party wanted. In terms of that american system economic plan that was put in place or that the wigs wanted to put in place in the 1840s and never managed to. Some wigs have migrated to the republican party, and theyre going to end up getting a lot of what they wanted because those thins help the United States wage war. For example, a 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. And in addition to a bank were not just dealing with bank notes anymore. They legislate the creation of legitimate paper money. Through something called the legal tender act, and 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, the government prints 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 come back in. So that inflation in the United States over the course of the civil war ends up being about 75 . Which is a lot. That means something you buy costs 7 times what it was before the war. But were not going into into the 500, 800 times that theyre going in the confederacy. And confederate inflation is hitting 8,000 9,000 officially by the end of the war. So the United States plan works much better than the confederate plan at keeping the economy going. Were also going to see that u. S. Congress has time to do other things besides wage war. And so thats also where some of this sort of old wig 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 sized plots of land, 60 acres. If you go out west and you can over the course of five years improve your farm, clear some of the land, plant a crop, build some sort of dwelling structure. It 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, get supplies, to put a crop in the ground. But you dont have to buy the land. So this is a way for people in that free labor ideology we talked about to use their own resources to move up and for the government to help them just a little bit to become independent landowners in the west. This is very popular in the northern states prior to the war, but the slave Holding States had blocked it because they didnt want lots of little farms all over the west that was going to eprevent the spread of big plantations. We also see the Republican Congress pass the Land Grant College act which creates, which gives the states a way to fund the creation of universities. Normal schools for teacher training but 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 has given land out in the west, in a territory that they can sell to land speculators, to developers. So congress isnt giving them the land outright but giving them a way to get some of these things. And we also see Congress Pass the Pacific Railroad act that allows for the creation of the transcontinental railroad. And again we talked about this in the 1850s being something everyone wanted, but theres been this big debate where they wanted to go and was its primary route going to end in a slave holding area or in a nonslave holding area. Again, when 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 that had existed before the war. And in many ways it is the war thats given them the space to do this. As much as the wigs and some of the republicans wanted it, it would have been very hard to get the National Bank act and legal tender act and income tax act 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 yours 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 it worked for as long as it did says a lot about how effective those systems were. So that while robert e. Lees army are having their successes in pennsylvania, and we talked about them helping into virginia to keep those farmers some space to grow those crops that then were going tobe collected on their behalf a little bit later, all of those battles we talked about being at a place of transportation and the railroads and rivers was because there was all this food to gather and send and there was a meginichanisms behind the scenes for doing that that involved people in the confederacy. Thats what i have for you 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 things. I want to make sure i got everyone as you were coming in. But thanks so much. I guess were 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. Then we take you on the road to rochester, minnesota, for a tour through the history of the mayo clinic. Were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight from our reel america series a look at the film 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 cspan 3. Just before world war ii radio was gaining popularity much like todays rise of social media, mark burns teaches about it rise of radio as National Media and its Public Opinion impact. The class uses sound clips