JULY 20, 1865:
A fiscal report from
Alabama noted that only $1,766.00 (less than $20,000.00 in 2015 dollars) was in
the State Treasury as of this date. The total value of State property such as
buildings and land was worth not much more, since most “official” structures
and lands had been badly damaged in the war.
In the emerging postwar South, the utter lack of assets, liquid and
capital, was typical, and boded very ill for the economic recovery of the
former Confederate States.
As
of April 1861, the Confederate States of America had 297 urban centers in which
lived a combined population of 835,000 of the 9.1 million Confederates. Of 297
towns and cities in the South, 162 (with a total population of 681,000) were at
one point or another occupied by the Union. Eleven Southern cities were either
utterly destroyed or severely damaged by war action. These eleven destroyed
cities had a combined prewar population of 115,900. The number of people who
lived in the destroyed towns represented just over 1% of the Confederacy's
population.
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courthouses were burned (out of 830), destroying the public records of some of
the most populous cities and counties.
Farms
were in ruin. Two-fifths of the South's
horses, mules, chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, and other animals had been killed
in the war. The total value of farm tools and machines dropped from $80 million
in 1860 to only $48 million in 1870, a
full five years after the war had ended.
Two-thirds
of the South's rails, bridges, rail yards, repair shops and rolling stock were
in areas reached by Union armies, which systematically destroyed whatever they
could. In 1865 and for years afterward, even farmers with intact homesteads
suffered since there were almost no railroads or riverboats left to take crops to
market. What infrastructure remained deteriorated rapidly from extreme overuse
and lack of repair.
Labor
costs were high. With more than 25% of the young male white workforce either
killed or disabled, white workers demanded high wages. Few Southerners could
afford to pay them; they could ill-afford to pay the miserable wages demanded
by the newly freed men. Economic stress fed racial resentments.
The
war cost the South an estimated $3.3 billion in 1865 dollars (almost $300
billion today). By war’s end, the South was reduced to a barter economy.
General
Braxton Bragg, when returned home, wailed, “Gone!
It is all gone! Except for my debts!” and most white Southerners were in
the same position. Already heavily mortgaged before the war (the reactivating
banks quickly tried to assess the antebellum debts), and no longer with slaves
to sell for quick capital infusions, all but the wealthiest planters (many of
whom had been quietly moving specie offshore for years) found themselves in
impossible economic straits.
In 1880, twenty years after the Civil War began, the average white worker
earned only $80.00 per annum, down from $125.00 in 1860. Blacks earned even
less. Although there had been a relatively large number of African-American
slaves who were artisans such as carpenters, most blacks were forbidden by law
to pursue these crafts for pay; skilled men were forced to pursue the
subsistence agriculture of sharecropping. Over generations, such skills were
lost, sinking the South even deeper into a morass of poverty and ignorance,
regardless of race.
The
miserable condition of the South would not truly begin to change until the
United States geared up for war in 1942.
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