JUNE 20, 1864:
In Virginia, the
Union settles down to the business of besieging Petersburg. Meanwhile, in
Georgia, the Spring rains have turned the roads to goo. Sherman’s amazing
advance is stuck in red mud up to its shins and its axles. Very little shooting
is going on. Wet powder is making all but the most determined men (and men with
Spencer repeating rifles) sit out the war until the bad weather clears and the
roads dry. In Kentucky, the Union captures one of John Hunt Morgan’s men, a
young private by the name of James P. Gold. Gold remains a POW until the end of
the war and entirely reconstructed to the end of his days, never agreeing to
take the Union’s Loyalty Oath. Gold lives until 1934, one of the oldest Civil
War veterans.
This last summer of
the war is looking to cost the Confederacy dear. Southerners are scrounging
battlefields to find spent bullets that can be melted down and recast.
Housewives are saving the contents of chamber pots for nitre.
The blockade is tightening. Prices are skyrocketing for everything but
cotton and tobacco, which are plummeting in the South. The North is growing
stronger on the high international price of these commodities. The few
Southerners who can manage to sell their cotton and tobacco crops on the world
market are becoming obscenely wealthy even as the rest of their nation
declines.
In the public mind,
“Speculators” are to blame, and these vague and shady “Speculators” are most
often described as either Yankees or Jews (and sometimes both). Anti-Semitic
diatribes begin to appear with distressing regularity in the “Letters To The
Editor” columns of Southern newspapers. Judah P. Benjamin, serving as President
Davis’ Secretary of War and (later) Secretary of State is accused of spiriting
away millions of dollars in Confederate specie to the West Indies.
(Anti-Semitism is also not uncommon in the North --- General Benjamin “Beast”
Butler and Vice-President-Elect Johnson are both proud Judeophobes. Butler once
writes, “[I] could suck the blood of every Jew, and [I would] detain every Jew
as long as [I] can . . . [They are all] traders, merchants, and bankers . . . supporting the Confederacy with whole heart
--- two of them certainly are in the Confederate Cabinet.” There was actually only one Jew in the
Confederate Cabinet, but Butler saw Jews skulking around every corner as other
letters of his indicate.)
Dolly Sumner Lunt
Burge, a Yankee-born resident of Atlanta writes in her diary:
"January 1, 1864. … The prices of
everything are very high. Corn seven [Confederate] dollars a bushel, calico ten dollars a yard, salt sixty dollars a
hundred [pounds], cotton from sixty
to eighty cents a pound, everything in like ratio."
"November 16, 1864. Paid seven dollars a
pound for coffee, six dollars an ounce for indigo, twenty dollars for a quire
of paper, five dollars for ten cents' worth of flax thread, six dollars for
pins, and forty dollars for a bunch of factory thread."
Much of the runaway
inflation is due to poor economic planning on the part of the Confederacy. Manufacturing
(of everything but weapons) remains at prewar levels or more often, less. With
men at the front, planting is carried on by women, children and slaves (those
who have not run off). Crop yields are small. Food stocks are short, and what
can be saved is often expropriated for the army. The South is starving.
Although worsening shortages have been the rule since 1861, this is no longer a
question of shortage, it is a
question of lack. And it will only
get worse.
Railroad trackage has
decreased (due to wartime destruction). It is nearly impossible to get goods to
market in places due to deteriorating roads, wartime displacement, and battle
lines. Waylaying road agents and nefarious highwaymen are a scourge on the
South. The Confederacy, with no international recognition and crushing debt, is
merely printing more and more money to cover its expenses. And with every note
that gets printed, the value of Confederate money declines. Economics and
foreign affairs are the Confederacy’s obscured Achilles tendons, hamstringing
the Rebel cause.
