A short while ago, Roy Moore reignited the controversy over the historical legacy of slavery and the civil war by waxing nostalgic about how great the U.S. was during slavery. To be sure, he wasn’t saying slavery was great, but many read the episode as being a dog whistle and an appeal to an idealized view of the antebellum south. At the very least, anyone making a statement that suggests good old family values overrides the systematic dehumanization and forced impressment of millions of people over hundreds of years can be accused of trivializing the horrible legacy of slavery.

Some of you may remember a post of mine a few months ago that examined the underappreciated strengths of the Union side of the Civil War, with the point being something of a positive affirmation of values. The next step then, logically, would be to look at the underappreciated flaws of the Confederacy, with the goal of refuting the Lost Cause myth and the rather nasty racial and ideological tendencies that it plays into. This has been on the back burner for a while, but after the whole episode with Moore now may be as good a time as any to engage in a round of literally and metaphorically tearing down the edifices of the old Confederacy.

The predominant way people tend to approach that issue is, of course, to point to the horrendous moral abomination of slavery and the fact that the Confederacy was unambiguously formed with the more or less sole purpose of preserving slavery. Truth be told, that probably is the best and most vital way of deflating the Lost Cause myth, but I think I’d have a hard time saying anything new on the subject. Another common approach is to undercut the particular icons of the Lost Cause myth, but to be honest I don’t really think the question of whether or not Lee was a competent general on an individual level is really a very productive discussion in the here and now.

So instead I’m going to point to something I think doesn’t get brought up nearly enough in discussions about the Civil War and its long-term cultural legacy: the Confederacy was not only based on a horrible cause, it was also a dysfunctional mess. Nobody should romanticize it, much less pine for its return in any way, for the simple fact that it was a straightforward failure.

This is, I think, a relevant point because the failures of the Confederacy were ultimately an outgrowth of the worldview that informed its creation. That worldview continues to live on in an updated form, and as Roy Moore most recently demonstrated many people still actively draw from an idealized history of the antebellum South to inform their ideals. Pointing out that none of these ideals are viable and are, in fact, flawed in their inception, is a worthwhile argument to make in addition to pointing out that they’re absolutely heinous.

The Confederate War Effort Alienated Pretty Much Everyone Who Wasn’t A Slaveholding Oligarch

As mentioned in the previous post, the North was incredibly effective at getting people from a diverse set of backgrounds to basically relate to its war aims. In the South, the opposite was the case; the Confederacy was exceptionally good at alienating large swaths of its own population, not just because it was inept, but because of its very nature.

First, of course, the institution of slavery effectively made a large part of the population automatically into enemies. The South was already at a marked disadvantage, demographically speaking. The North outnumbered the South by 22 million to 9 million. But considering that the 3.5 million slaves living in the confederacy had a vested interest in seeing the North win, the balance was more like 25.5 million to 5.5 million, a ratio of nearly 5 to 1. Roughly 200,000 African Americans served in the Union Army in the Civil War, of whom 100,000 were escaped slaves. That was equal to about 1/5th of the Confederate Army.

More than that, slavery presented a severe vulnerability from a logistical standpoint. In the early days of the war, slavery was in many ways an asset to the Confederacy. The fact that there were people who were impressed to carry out agricultural production and manual labor meant that more people could be freed up to do the actual fighting. But having such a massive number of people being forced to work against their will is an expensive affair, which requires running a full-on police state at all times. Even in the best of times, the South and the Confederacy had to devote significant manpower and materials to keep slaves from escaping or even rising up in rebellion. And as the war went on, slavery became more and more of a liability, as the closer the Union lines got, the more slaves would defect, and the more rapidly the Confederate war effort would collapse.

Many in the North realized the inherent liabilities slavery created early on and tried to use them to their strategic advantage. As early as August 1861, John C. Freemont declared emancipation in Missouri directly as a means of undermining the rebel insurgency in the state, and others went even further, arming slaves and attempting to directly foment slave revolts. The U.S. government was resistant to these efforts at first, but soon realized that abolition wasn’t just morally right, but also strategically expedient.

But it wasn’t just the slaves who had reason to resent the Southern social order. Pretty much everyone else did as well.

Among the South’s slaveholding elite, an aristocratic and almost feudal world view prevailed. A certain antipathy towards democracy existed, and many felt that the enfranchisement of poor whites had been a mistake. South Carolina didn’t even allow a direct popular vote in the Electoral College until after the Civil War. Many believed they were not only genetically born to rule over black slaves, but also whites as well. In the years leading up to the Civil War, a popular myth emerged among Southern elites that Southerners, and slaveholders in particular, were the descendants of Normans and Cavaliers, the natural ruling caste in England, while Northerners were descendants of Saxon serfs. Once the war started, Southern diplomats presented themselves as kindred spirits with Europe’s own aristocrats, playing up their own pretensions of gentility and casting themselves as a correction to the reckless experimentation with democracy.

All of this was the source of considerable resentment among the yeoman farmers and poor whites who made up the bulk of the Confederate military. The idea that the Civil War was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” was far more prevalent in the South than it ever was in the North. This notion was apparently confirmed by the actions of the Confederate government. While plantation-raised cotton was seen as a linchpin of the South’s diplomatic strategy, subsistence farmers saw their produce confiscated to feed the armies. Men were drafted at a rate twice as high as in the North, but it was easier for the rich to find exemptions through commutation fees, substitutions, or — most galling — the “20 negro laws” which automatically exempted large slave owners from the draft.

Most of the time this animosity was overridden by patriotism, regional pride, a sense of duty and racial solidarity, but the demoralizing effect of it all was still widespread enough to seriously undermine the war effort. For one thing, desertion was rampant. At one point in 1864 Jefferson Davis gave a rough estimate that something like 1/3rd of Confederate soldiers had deserted, and while this largely reflects the appalling conditions the Confederate military had fallen into by that point, it also suggests that many soldiers decided that fighting a war to preserve the personal fortunes of a narrow slaveholding elite just wasn’t worth it. Many went further into outright insurrection. These weren’t minor affairs. East Tennessee spent much of the opening year of the war in rebellion, and eventually the region sent 31,000 soldiers to fight in the Union Army. Meanwhile, things like the Free State of Jones popped up from time to time across the upcountry.

The Commodities Based Slave Economy Of The Antebellum South Stifled Industry And Blighted The Region Long After The War

Slaveholders often justified the slave system by arguing that the concentration of wealth it enabled fueled human progress, often pointing to slavery in ancient Greece as proof of their argument. But however much slaveholders regarded themselves as enlightened polymaths, by the end of the 1860s it was apparent that the truth was very much the opposite. While the antebellum South was exceptionally good at generating wealth, it lagged badly in the realm of industry and inventions. Foreign observers frequently noted its relative backwardness when compared to the more dynamic North. And everywhere, observers noted that the more dependent on slavery an area became, the lower its productivity.

At the center of all this was, of course, the slave-based economy, and I’d argue that it goes to the basic nature of the antebellum South’s socioeconomic system. Since the earliest days of Jamestown, the South had been primarily a commodities-based economy. Wealth was derived primarily from the production of certain natural products such as tobacco, indigo, and especially cotton, and these were by and large fixed to inputs of land and labor. Whereas in the North wealth accumulation was a matter of efficient organization developing new technologies, in the South it was more or less a zero-sum game based on playing the market right, acquiring land, and squeezing as much value out of labor as possible, leading to the logical conclusion of slavery. There was relatively little advantage in, say, investing in public infrastructure or trying to engage the creative potential of everyone through education. Meanwhile, the predominance of commodities markets crowded out manufacturing and other industries in a phenomenon later known to economists as “Dutch Disease.” This all precluded the development of industry, and led to a pernicious concentration of wealth.

All this tracked the South along a path of chronic under-development, even as people gradually began to realize how important industry was. The severe wealth inequality of the system meant there was no adequate base for industry to build on, as slaves and subsistence farmers constituted a poor basis for mass markets. The fact that infrastructure had only been invested in insofar as it enabled commodities like cotton and tobacco to reach export markets meant that the South was a patchwork inefficient system poorly suited to the tasks of economic integration. Even where manufacturing had taken hold the emphasis was typically more on slashing labor costs to the lowest levels possible rather than making long-term investments in productivity. For example, the Tredegar Iron Works, the most prominent foundry in the South, which was well known for incorporating slavery into its factories, had failed to make the transition to steel even a decade after the Civil War.

Worse yet, the long-term effects of the slave-based economic model lingered on long after emancipation and the end of king cotton. The reinstatement of slavery in all but name through the sharecropping system, mass disenfranchisement, the jealous monopolization of power by the old slaveholding aristocracy, and basically every other attempt to maintain the status quo antebellum kept the region a stagnant backwater for almost a century. When the South finally pursued a more aggressive policy of industrialization through a deliberate effort to undercut other states in labor costs and taxes, this strategy achieved only a modicum of success. And that strategy rarely ever attracted the most lucrative jobs for researchers and designers, who had no interest in relocating to places with dysfunctional schools and public research institutions. Meanwhile the jobs it did bring were low-skill jobs highly vulnerable to foreign competition and automation. Long-term investments in education and infrastructure were still regarded as merely the source of burdensome taxes. Workers were still seen as little more than dependents with nothing to offer in terms of creative input, and any attempt to delegate power downward in the workplace was violently resisted. The net effect of this is that gross and unsustainable inequality and a dearth of dynamic local industry and innovation stubbornly persisted. Indeed, the region’s deficiencies in this respect are striking even to this day.

The Confederacy Generally Failed At Basic Tasks Of Administration And Institution Building

As much as we complain about bureaucracy and the like, it basically is understood that neutral institutions and efficient systems of centralized administration are essential for a functioning society. They’re even more crucial in military conflicts, which require the mass mobilization of men and materials. When the Civil War started, the Confederacy had a daunting task of building up its institutions on the fly, even as it conducted war at an unprecedented scale and intensity.

And in this task, it failed, spectacularly, from top to bottom.

From day one the Confederacy was always terrible about instilling in its soldiers a certain professional ethos that enabled them to put aside their private hang-ups in the interest of achieving common goals. This is absolutely essential for a military organization, but the Confederate military was riven with personal rivalries. The diaries of Confederate soldiers are replete with anecdotes of people disobeying and even thrashing their officers over petty matters of honor, while officers would often make decisions regarding promotions and deployments out of personal favoritism or spite. Despite attempts by some to create a more professional culture in the Confederate military, notably by Robert E. Lee, this continued up to the bitter end.

Granted, this sort of thing cannot be completely avoided in any organization, but in the Confederacy it was particularly endemic, with disastrous consequences. For example, cavalry commander Jeb Stuart famously left the Army of Northern Virginia without cavalry support during the Gettysburg campaign because he personally hated two of his subordinates and wouldn’t allow them to take part in the campaign. This left Lee’s army blind, and perhaps was a major factor in the South losing not only the battle of Gettysburg, but also the entire war. On the other hand, personal favoritism was perhaps the only reason Jefferson Davis made Braxton Bragg de-facto head of overall Confederate strategy in 1863-1864, a task for which Bragg was woefully ill equipped. The relevance of these particular episodes is debatable, and historians still differ over whether cavalry really made a difference at Gettysburg, or whether Bragg was really that incompetent, but none of this paints the Confederacy as a model of organizational decision making.

In addition to personal rivalries, there were also quite intense interstate rivalries. While in the North the war was something of a crucible that melded the states together, in the South this didn’t happen. People from one state, from politicians down to common soldiers, constantly took pot shots at people from another state. After the disaster of Pickett’s charge, for example, the Virginia pressed consoled readers by praising the valiant conduct of Virginia soldiers while trashing that of North Carolina’s soldiers, causing much consternation among the latter. These rivalries undermined internal cohesion in politics and the military, but also created more tangible logistical problems, as states often were unwilling to work together to coordinate resources. There was even an internal passport system that severely complicated the movement of men and material within the Confederacy.

The reason why the South wasn’t able to come together effectively as a unit is because there were no strong national institutions for them to rally around. This wasn’t unintentional. Contrary to its rhetorical focus on liberty and rights, the Confederacy was just as heavy handed with its citizens as the North, if not more so. But in the South a visceral distrust of any centralized administration in anything above the state level was certainly present, and it resulted in numerous dysfunctions. The Confederacy never formed national political parties, which made passing legislation and holding leadership accountable more difficult. A centralized military command wasn’t created until very late in the war, which prevented the government from formulating a coordinated defensive strategy, and effectively put Jefferson Davis, rather than a professional military staff, in direct control of Confederate armies. The government did not develop a centralized system of military recruitment, which made an already severe disadvantage in manpower even worse.

There were also several smaller, but pernicious ways in which the Confederacy was just horribly run. Many people simply didn’t do the legwork necessary to keep things running. Soldiers felt that manual labor was for slaves, while officers regarded paperwork as the sort of bureaucratic bean counting for which they regularly scoffed at Yankees. When Lee took over the Army of Northern Virginia, he found that the soldiers had been reduced to eating rats for the simple reason that officers weren’t filling out their requisition forms. A misguided sense of chivalry led many competent soldiers to turn down promotions, allowing their incompetent peers to lead instead.

The net effect of all of this was significant. While the quality of Union organization and leadership steadily improved throughout the war, Confederate organization steadily declined. By 1864 the Union was launching simultaneous offensives across a 1,000-mile front and maintaining extensive supply lines deep into enemy territory. On the other hand, the Confederates were failing at the most basic task of keeping their soldiers fed. The typical soldier was subsisting on roughly 900-1,200 calories per day, which is only about a third of what combat soldiers typically require. Soldiers were forced into plundering local farmland just to get by as early as 1862. There was food available, but it was often left to rot in warehouses due to mismanagement, while the food that did make its way to the front did so along railroads that were in such disrepair that they were all but inoperable. And that was before the Union Army even got there.

Conclusion

All of this is interesting in its own right, but I think bringing it up also serves a practical function. It helps combat the Lost Cause myth that has dominated so much of Civil War history and discussion, and helps recast the war in the popular imagination into something morally tenable and intellectually honest. Second, it’s good to remember this because in many ways the battles of the Civil War are not over. We’re still engaged in questions regarding enfranchisement of an expansive view of the citizenry versus a narrow ethno-nationalist and/or elitist view. We’re still engaged in questions about how to achieve prosperity, whether that means unleashing the creative potential of everyone or beating them down under the authority of owners. We’re still engaged in questions about the proper role of national institutions in the face of active attempts to undermine them. To this end, it’s essential for us to know our history.