Could the South Have Won the War?

NY Times Disunion ^ | March 16, 2015 | Terry L. Jones

[iowamark]

By March 1865, it was obvious to all but the most die-hard Confederates that the South was going to lose the war. Whether that loss was inevitable is an unanswerable question, but considering various “what if” scenarios has long been a popular exercise among historians, novelists and Civil War buffs...

Perhaps the most common scenario centers on the actions of Gen. Robert E. Lee...

What many fail to recognize is that Northerners were just as committed to winning as the Southerners. Some saw it as a war to free the slaves, while others fought to ensure that their republican form of government survived. Northerners believed that America was the world’s last great hope for democracy, and if the South destroyed the Union by force, that light of liberty might be extinguished forever. Lincoln once said the North must prove “that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

The South may have been fighting to preserve a way of life and to protect its perceived constitutional rights, but so was the North. If the Southern people kept fighting even after the devastating defeats at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, why should we not believe the North would have kept on fighting even if the Confederates had won Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga? The fact is that both sides were equally brave and equally dedicated to their cause. Commitment and morale being the same, the stronger side prevailed.

[dangus]

Please note that my comment predicted a very slow death of the institution of slavery, although perhaps faster than the death of the abusive conditions in post-war Dixie. But your post is very interesting, and made me research further.

Your passage states that “In the decades before 1860, Deep South cotton production doubled, and doubled again, while cotton prices rose much faster than inflation — even including Federal import tariffs.”

I find this assertion about prices flatly contradicted by the data I can find. While production increased sharply, prices were very stagnant, having collapsed prior to 1830 and remaining quite low until the Civil War created a shortage.

I wonder if perhaps you are falsely figuring that an increase in demand of slaves means that slave plantations must be thriving? If the price of labor is booming, and the price of a product is so stagnant, then perhaps the death of slavery would have been coming faster than I foresaw it. The population of slaves in the decade prior to the Civil War increased 23%, compared to an overall population growth of 36%. This means that supply wasn’t keeping up with demand, resulting in higher labor costs, resulting in LOWER profits.

[dangus]

The fascinating thing is that most blacks today apparently believe in the mudsill theory today, hook, line and sinker: they believe that conservatives and free-marketers urgently try to hold black people down. Of course, it also drives promoters of massive/illegal immigration.

[jmacusa]

Thank you for a well reasoned and thought out reply. Thank you for responding. I wonder, that is to say, I would image that among many of those white farmers there had to be a certain amount of resentment at the more affluent whites who didn't have to work first of all and were wealthy enough to afford large plantations and slaves and have political power. So too they might have resented blacks, not for the work they were forced to do but that despite the ''Long dark night of the African in America'', certainly a slave knew he wouldn't starve. From a purely economic point of view it would not be in the interest of his owner to let him since a sick and hungry slave would do little work and a dead one would do none. Good God, what a horrible reality.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

The bulk of the population growth in the US you cite was in the north, driven by European immigrants, very few of whom were attracted to the south because of the lack of opportunity there. The southern white population growth was much smaller. For example, between 1850 and 1860, Mississippi’s white population grew by 58,000 while it’s slave population grew by 126,000.

[RWB Patriot]

Harry Turtledove showed a few ways it could’ve gone differently.

[RWB Patriot]

Yet they had to draft immigrants as soon as they came off the boat. Somehow, that doesn’t suggest they weren’t starving for manpower.

[BroJoeK]

dangus: "I find this assertion about prices flatly contradicted by the data I can find.
While production increased sharply, prices were very stagnant, having collapsed prior to 1830 and remaining quite low until the Civil War created a shortage."

I plead guilty to quoting numbers from memory, never a good practice, so don't anybody else do it. ;-)

But since you asked, I'll quote you the actual numbers from page 21 of the book referenced above:

speaking of the South's constant struggle to make economic ends meet -- "...at midcentury [circa 1850], struggle largely vanished.
Cotton prices, sugar prices, tobacco prices shot up, despite extravagant increases in crop production..
The big southern cash crop, short-staple cotton, which had sold for some $74,000,000 a year in the 1840s, sold for some $169,000,000 yearly in the 1850s.
In the four years before the Civil War, the crop yearly averaged some $207,000,000 in value, almost three times more than the average figure a decade earlier.

"So too, in the 1850s compared to the 1840s, the Sea Island cotton crop increased 200 percent in value, the sugar crop 150 percent, and the tobacco crop 67 percent.
In comfortable contrast, the southern cost of living during the 1850s eased up less than 33 percent.

"Only those politically crucial gentlemen, South Carolina rice planters, still suffered under dreary economic skies.
These squire's debts had multiplied faster than their assets even in the 1820s, when rice yields and prices had remained more immune than cotton figures from the worldwide economic downturn.
In the 1850s, rice planters' immunity from market caprices and soil exhaustion ended...

"...Southerners developed almost 30,000,000 previously untouched acres during the 1850s, increasing the land under cultivation by over a third.
Southern farmland doubled in value during the decade, southern railroad lines more than tripled in length, and southern industrial receipts swelled 67 percent.
[Yes] Compared to the North, the South remained poorly developed industrially and ill connected by railroads.
But in the late 1850s, the rate of new development in Dixie surpassed Yankee standards.

"In one area, the South set records than Yankees scorned.
The price of slaves took off in the 1850s.
The average price for a Lower South slave, after hovering around $925 from 1830 to 1850, averaged $1,240 in 1851-55 and $1,658 in 1856-60, a 79 percent rise in the South's largest capital investment.

"After the national Panic of 1857, when the North fell into prolonged depression and the South quickly recovered, Southerners gloated about getting rich quicker than money-mad Yankees."

So, quoting those figures from memory, I don't think I did so badly, certainly getting the gist it correct -- in 1860 the Deep South was booming economically like never before, or since.
This is reflected in every important economic number from that period.

[Theophilus]

I don’t think there is any way to quantify who was most committed. The Union had a lot more of everything. God’s wrath is unbearable.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Yet they had to draft immigrants as soon as they came off the boat. Somehow, that doesn’t suggest they weren’t starving for manpower.

You shouldn't be getting your history from "Gangs of New York." While there were recruiters in New York appealing to immigrants, conscripts in general comprised only 6% of the US army, including substitutes paid by draftees. Confederate conscription rates are hard to judge because the records are spotty, but the best estimates are that they were about double that. But the number is misleading because, while the US army released enlistees whose contracted term was up, the confederate government passed laws extending enlistments for the duration, essentially drafting their own soldiers.

[dangus]

>> The bulk of the population growth in the US you cite was in the north, driven by European immigrants, very few of whom were attracted to the south because of the lack of opportunity there. The southern white population growth was much smaller. For example, between 1850 and 1860, Mississippi’s white population grew by 58,000 while it’s slave population grew by 126,000. <<

As you say, they didn’t move to the South because of the lack of opportunity. They’re still demand drivers.

Your data on Mississippi is accurate, but not typical. Mississippi exploded because slave owners — and their slaves — were departing the border states; nationally, the growth in the slave population was declining, while total population was accelerating. This is where the stuff about border states’ slave trade shrinking and the deep south’s growing is misleading: there was simply a movement from one area to another, not new growth in the Deep South.

[central_va]

This is known as the Mudsill Theory, and there's some thought that the slaveowning classes encouraged this thinking to keep poor whites under their control, willing to fight and die to protect an economic system that did not benefit them.

You understand jack squat about how a southerner thinks. This Yankee naval gazing is amazing.

[central_va]

It is simply factual, though, that the Southern economy was based entirely on slave labor and that the South was not going to voluntarily throw their entire economy into collapse.

BullSh1t. Tradesmen doctors clerks merchants farmers were white and drove the economy of the South, some of the crapo that is thrown around here is both stupid and hilarious to read. If you are buying this revisionist bull you need to find another web site.

[RWB Patriot]

Actually, many of my history classes talked about the regiments that were made up of Irish immigrants.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Sure, there were large numbers of Irish in the US army. But very few were draftees. The Irish Brigade, for example, was formed in September 1861, long before conscription began.

[dangus]

The Panic of 1857 is called a panic precisely because it was driven by finances, not macroeconomic trends; it's not that the South snapped back faster; it's that it wasn't directly affected.

Yeah, there's a modest increase in the 1850s, but nothing near enough to bring it up to previous historical norms. Calling that a 50% increase is misleading through cherry-picking data; it's true if you cherry-pick 1851 (7.4), but why not pick 1850 (11.7) or 1856(12.4)? So what's your source's agenda is cherry-picking data?

[dangus]

Image didn't come out. Here it is again:

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

The Mudsill Theory was first advanced by James Henry Hammond, senator from South Carolina.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Tradesmen doctors clerks merchants farmers were white and drove the economy of the South

Sorry, but you're simply delusional if you believe this. The southern economy was driven by plantation agriculture, it's labor provided by slaves, and it's tradesmen, doctors, clerk and merchants made up a much smaller part of the economy of the south than they did in the north. I know it upsets your little southern apple cart, but it's true.

[central_va]

South hating bigots are so smart.

[wgmalabama]

Had the confederate army grouped and marched on DC right after the first battle of Manassas and burned and killed the political class there it would have ended as soon as it started. That’s how I see it anyway.