Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

Neither private ventures nor government regulations were ever able to deliver to the South the kind of triumph over the blockade that the Confederacy needed. In terms of simple numbers, the successes of the blockade-runners appear impressive: over the course of the war, some 300 blockade-running steamers made approximately 1,300 attempts to run the blockade and made it through unscathed more than 1,000 times; even in 1865 103 of the 153 attempts to penetrate the blockade were successful.65 But the real success of the blockade has to be measured not in terms of how many cleverly designed blockade-runners squeezed through it but by how many ordinary ships from around the world never tried it at all. By comparison with the South’s prewar import-export trade, the blockade-runners amounted to little more than a trickle. The South exported fifty times as much cotton in 1860 as it was able to pass through the blockade during all four years of the war; nearly five times as many ships called at Southern ports in 1860 as made it through during the four years of blockade.66

The blockade was a lethal drain on the South simply by the fact of its existence, irrespective of how many blockade-runners wriggled out of the hands of Federal sailors. It drove the costs of goods within the Confederacy to astronomical levels, wrecked the Confederate currency, and demoralized its people. Although by itself the blockade may not exactly have won the war for the Union, there it is no question that it seriously constricted the South’s ability to make war, much less to win it.

SUPPLYING THE WAR

American society and government before 1861 were utterly unprepared for the organizational demands placed upon it by a major war. As late as 1830, the entire Federal bureaucracy in Washington consisted of exactly 352 people, and in 1861 the total number of government employees (including non-Washingtonians such as postmasters and customs officers) numbered less than 40,000. The entire army Quartermaster’s Department civilian workforce in Washington embraced thirteen clerks. Up until 1854, the city of Philadelphia was still governed as a collection of twenty-seven separate colonial-era municipalities; it pumped its city water through wooden pipes until 1848, and pigs were still scavenging in the city streets in the 1860s. Backyard trenches served as toilets for much of New York City, and garbage and wastewater ended up in street gutters, where it bred cholera, typhus, and other contagious diseases. Louisiana did not possess a single macadamized road before 1861.67

The Civil War thus threw into the laps of the Richmond and Washington governments an immense and hitherto inconceivable problem in management. “Let the people know that we are desperately in want of men, desperately in want of arms, desperately in want of money, desperately in want of clothing, desperately in want of medicines and food for our sick,” Frederick Law Olmsted complained to a Northern official in 1861. It seemed to Olmsted that it ought to be possible for the North, with its resources, to “be relieved of our difficulties as a suffocating man is relieved by opening a window.” But in many cases the windows Olmsted needed to open did not even yet exist in American society, and a whole new apparatus for government and administration would have to be created to put those windows in place. “We have more of the brute force of persistent obstinacy in Northern blood than the South has,” Olmsted wrote hopefully, “if we can only get it in play.”68

The ultimate means for getting a Federal supply system in play was the secretary of war, Edwin McMasters Stanton. “He was in no sense an imposing person, either in looks or manner,” wrote John Pope, who briefly led the short-lived Army of Virginia in 1862. “He was below the medium stature, stout and clumsy,” with a “shaggy, belligerent sort of look, which, to say the least, was not encouraging to the man in search of favors.” A former attorney general (in the closing months of the Buchanan administration), Stanton possessed an immense, coarse black beard threaded with white, rude and dictatorial manners, and “a perpetually irritable look in his stern little eyes.”69 His appointment as secretary of war on January 20, 1862, to replace Simon Cameron, came as a surprise, and to no one more than Stanton. Not only was he a lifelong Democrat, but in 1855 he had personally snubbed Lincoln as “that giraffe” and that “creature from Illinois” when both were retained as counsel in a patent case involving the McCormick Reaper Company.70 Stanton was a solid Union man, however, and heartily anti-slavery. The fact that he was a Democrat could actually have been considered an advantage to Lincoln in trying to garner increased Democratic support for the war. And he had what few of the Republicans had: extensive experience in the inner workings of national government.

Whatever Lincoln’s reasons were, time soon justified them, for Lincoln could not have chosen a better foreman to run his wartime workshop. Within a week of assuming office, Stanton wrote to Charles A. Dana that as soon as he could “get the machinery of the office working, the rats cleared out, and the rat holes stopped we shall move.” Move is precisely what Stanton did. He became the “black terrier” of the cabinet. He drove himself and his staff of undersecretaries with maniacal fury and animation, auditing government contracts, reviewing and digesting military data for Lincoln’s use, intimidating army contractors, barking orders, and banging on his stand-up writing desk to make his point. He also took it as his duty to keep the Union army’s generals in line with administration policy. Where they did not, they found Stanton an implacable and unforgiving enemy, and sooner or later he had them sacked; where they did, they found themselves promoted. It was Stanton more than anyone else who would help bring Ulysses Simpson Grant to the command of all the Union armies in 1864; it