Perhaps so, though I'll check the references sent by LS to confirm the numbers. You definitely put forth a very worthy argument, NS. Thank you for that consideration!
It depends. If you consider the confederate currency as debt then one could say the confederacy issued about a billion and a half dollars in debt against maybe 18 million in revenues through the course of the war.
Is that a fair comparison? Was the United States currency considered a debt? I was merely alluding to the national debt, in numeric dollars, listed at the end of the war.
That's over 90 dollars in debt for every dollar in other reveunue, as opposed to the union ratio of roughly 5 or 6 dollars of debt for each dollar of other revenue. How can that financial picture be better than the one facing the United States?
A good question, and I'll be sure to consider it when I weigh the evidence. Thank you again!
Conscription in the North was limited to white soldiers and was a dismal failure. Somewhat less than 10% of all Union soldiers in the last year of the war were conscripts. Contrast that with the confederacy where somewhere between one third and one quarter of all troops were conscripts, and most of the rest had had their enlistments involuntarily extended for the duration of the war in April 1862.
1/3 to 1/4 of the Confederate army being conscripts is significant, yes, though I'd be curious to see what percentage of each army was made up of non-Americans (i.e., foreigners). The Federal army was something like double the size of the Confederate by the close of the war, but from the accounts I've seen, this was largely made up of Europeans, not Americans.
Thank you for your addition to this argument, good sir,
Regards,
~dt~
The U.S. notes were redeemable in gold I believe. The confederate notes were not, or if they were in theory there was no gold to redeem them with.
1/3 to 1/4 of the Confederate army being conscripts is significant, yes, though I'd be curious to see what percentage of each army was made up of non-Americans (i.e., foreigners).
The percentage of foreign born in the U.S. army was much higher of course, because the percentage of foreign born people in the North was much higher. The 1870 census, which is available on line, shows that the percentage of the foreign born population in the southern states was miniscule, less than 5 percent I believe. The percentage in 1860 was most likely very low as well. Immigrants were not attracted to the south since they already had their own form of cheap labor - slaves. All in all the percentage of the Union army not born in the U.S. was about 25% with the largest numbers coming from Germany and the second largest from Ireland. By far the largest number of Union soldiers were U.S. born of English extraction (1 million or around 45%} and the second was African American (about 20%).