Originally aired on January 12, 1996 - In part 72 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson contrasts the wide disparity of resources between the Union and Confederate forces.
#72 – A Lopsided Contest
In a civil war, the rebels (or breakaway group) must have outside help to win. The seceding element is understandably the weaker of the two sides. Alone, it cannot match the established government blow for blow, especially over a long period.
When the Confederacy formed a battle line to face the Union in the Civil War, a sad picture emerged of the flagrant disparity between resources on the two sides. The North’s industrial superiority almost beggars comparison.
Every strip of railroad track was manufactured in the North. The Northern states had 110,000 manufacturing plants, while the Southern states had only 18,000. Put another way, there were as many factories (110,000) in the North as there were factory workers in the South. Small wonder that the states of the Union produced 500 times the hardware as the Southern states.
At war’s outset, the total value of manufactured goods in Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi combined was less than $85 million. In the single state of New York, the total value of such goods exceeded $380 million. The eleven member-states of the Confederacy produced together in 1860 just under 37,000 tons of pig iron. Production of pig iron in Pennsylvania that year was over 580,000 tons.
The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond is automatically cited in all accounts of Confederate industrial effort because it was the only foundry in the South with a capacity for manufacturing something as large as a railroad locomotive. One never hears mention of Tredegar’s counterpart in the North for a simple reason: the Union had dozens of ironworks – and they were all larger than Tredegar.
The South could boast superiority only in cotton, mules, and jackasses. No Yankee would have challenged the last-named item.
Nor did the Confederacy have the financial structure to wage a long war. Banking institutions were few; no specie existed to give stability to its paper currency. The wealth of the South lay in land and slaves, neither of which could easily be converted into liquid capital. Such financial weaknesses undermined the South’s ability to pay for the war by fiscally responsible means. By necessity rather than choice, the Confederate Treasury Department turned to the printing press. It churned out more than $1.5 billion dollars in totally unsupported paper money. Galloping inflation followed.
In food and foodstuffs, there was little disparity in production between North and South. Yet with the Confederacy strapped from the outset by few railroads, a limited number of wagons, and bad highways, distribution was a constant problem. Food perished on railroad platforms while soldiers in the field fought ever-present shortages.
As other examples of the lopsided difference in resources between the two American contestants: the North produced a new invention – the sewing machine – and easily met the enormous orders for army uniforms, while Southern soldiers wore rags and went barefooted.
In 1863 alone, fifty-seven new factories opened in the single city of Philadelphia. Fifty-seven new factories did not come into existence in the Confederacy in the entire four years of the Civil War. Twenty-seven Northern cities built street-car systems in the war years, while Southern cities could not even make basic repairs to their streets. The North could boast during the war of the founding of fifteen new colleges, including Vassar, Swarthmore, and Cornell. Fewer than fifteen existing colleges in the wartime South were able to stay open.
One Northerner who saw all of these one-sided advantages from the start was a man who lived for years in the prewar South and loved the country. His name was William Tecumseh Sherman. To a Southern friend late in 1860, Sherman wrote: “In all history no nation of mere agriculturists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics…You (in the South) are bound to fail.”
Sherman was a good student of history.
