In the fall of the following year, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta and proceeded to make plans for one of the most daring ventures in military history: a 285-mile march to the sea, to Savannah, Georgia, to be exact, a plan designed to deliver a psychological blow to the Confederacy from which, Sherman hoped, it would never be able to recover. Lincoln approved Sherman’s march, but deep down he had his doubts. “I know the hole he went in at,” he said when the march began, “but I can’t tell you what hole he’ll come out of.”8 It was a dangerous—some would say suicidal—plan.
Henry Hitchcock, an officer from St. Louis, reported excellent conditions early in the campaign. But by the sixth day out, things turned for the worse. “At last we get off,” he wrote on November 21, 1864, “floundered through heavy clay mud, under rain sometimes heavy, sometimes drizzling, threading our way through and by wagons laboring along, up hill and down, or stuck fast. No wonder the weather is such an element in warfare.” Hitchcock went on to describe “ruts today fully 18 to 24 inches deep through stiff heavy red clay, some half liquefied, some like wax, or thickened molasses.”9
Then, the following day, the skies brightened and remained clear for most of the balance of the journey. “As these memoranda show,” Hitchcock wrote on December 10 as the troops approached Savannah, “we have been most fortunate in weather—have had but two days of rain, one of cold (not severe) and one or two others only on which the weather was not everything we could wish.”10 Sherman succeeded in presenting Lincoln with Savannah in time for Christmas. But for the weather, however, Sherman’s march could have gone down as one of the most insane misadventures in the annals of military history.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
When the end came for the Confederacy, General Lee and his troops headed for Appomattox, with all but the officers reduced to eating horse feed. Sometimes, however, the men had to make do with leftovers. C. Irvine Walker, a southern officer, claimed that he “frequently saw the hungry Confederate gather up the dirt and corn where a horse had been fed, so that when he reached his bivouac he could wash out the dirt and gather the few grains of corn to satisfy in part at least the cravings of hunger.” Other southern military men, desperate to satisfy their hunger, spent time trying to develop a taste for rodents. “We were keen to eat a piece of rat,” one soldier wrote. “Our teeth were on edge; yea; even our mouth watered to eat a piece of rat.”11
Lee himself had wondered as far back as 1862 whether starvation, more than enemy forces, might prove the greater threat. Camped out in northern Virginia, Lee and his troops found the winter of 1862–1863 especially grueling. In 1862, a drought in the South severely depressed the corn supply, compounding the effect of the already meager meat provisions. Over the course of the war, Lee was repeatedly forced to shift his military strategy to make sure that supply lines remained open, at one point warning the Confederacy’s secretary of war of the army’s impending doom if it could not be furnished with regular and adequate rations. With bacon and other meat in very short supply, the southern forces were reduced to eating mainly cornmeal. Meanwhile, black humor circulated among the troops. Demoralized by the lack of variety in their diet, some Confederate soldiers talked of the “Fed and the Cornfed.”12
Meanwhile, the horses pressed into military service suffered as much or worse than the men they served. No one regretted this more than General Lee, a man so fond of, as well as dependent on, the animals that he once administered a lecture to his officers on how to adjust a saddle to care properly for a horse’s back. Some horses, desperate for food, chewed the bark from trees and ate small scraps of paper strewn about the base camp. Lee did everything he could to find food and save the creatures. He directed that forage in large sections near campaigns be reserved for the army. He forbade farmers from retaining more than six months’ worth of corn for use as feed. He even sent cavalry to distant points to save the forage in a given area for the animals pulling the supply train.13
By July 1863, as the tide turned militarily against the South, the quartermaster general reported a need for somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 horses to take the place of those killed or ruined by starvation and other battle threats. When Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, ordered troops to Georgia, in the wake of the defeat at Gettysburg, Gen. James Longstreet, in command of the mission, had to relinquish some of his artillery units because he lacked the draft animals necessary to haul the equipment. Near the war’s end, so little fodder remained near where the Confederate army camped on the Rappahannock that Lee had to send men and horses as far south as the North Carolina border on forage sweeps. “There can be little doubt …,” wrote Douglas Freeman, Lee’s foremost biographer, that the great general “saw in the prospective failure of the horse supply one of the most serious obstacles to the establishment of Southern independence.”14
Barely able to feed themselves, much less their mounts, both armies, North and South, dealt with the limited rations by foraging, a euphemism for what we commonly call stealing. Although required to provide compensation to those from whom they took food or animals, in practice soldiers roamed the countryside pillaging whatever they could find. “The government tries to feed us Texains on Poor Beef,” wrote one soldier, “but there is too Dam many hogs here for that, these Arkansas hoosiers ask from 25 to 30 cents a pound for there pork, but the Boys generally get it a little cheaper than that I reckon you understand how they get it.”15
FORAGE CALL
Constantly short of feed for their horses, the Confederacy called on farmers to supply it with whatever surplus forage they had available. (Lamont Buchanan, A Pictorial History of the Confederacy [New York: Crown, 1951])
As early as 1863, Lee worried that the meager rations provided his troops—18 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of bacon—might be weakening morale. One Confederate officer observed that the Union could easily track the movement of the southern forces by simply following “the deposit of dysenteric stool.” In the autumn of 1863, when President Jefferson Davis visited the Confederate Army of Tennessee, the troops shouted, “Send us something to eat, Massa Jeff. Give us something to eat, Massa Jeff. I’m hungry! I’m hungry!”16
With respect to provisioning its troops, the Union unquestionably had an advantage. Although hardly immune from hunger, northern soldiers received more food per person than any other army in the history of warfare. Bumper yields even allowed the North to earn valuable trade surpluses by doubling the amount of wheat, corn, beef, and pork it exported to Europe. How did the North achieve such a high level of agricultural production with a third of its farm workforce off at the front? Mechanization, in large part, compensated for the shortage of labor. “The severe manual toil of mowing, raking, pitching, and cradling is now performed by machinery,” Scientific American reported in 1863. Women, their husbands off at war, embraced the new technology. “Yesterday I saw the wife of one of our parishioners driving the team in a reaper; her husband is at Vicksburg,” an Illinois minister wrote. Union forces had not only more food but also a better variety of foodstuffs at their disposal. Items such as canned fruit and condensed milk had existed prior to the outbreak of hostilities, but wartime demands racheted up production. In 1859, Gail Borden opened his first factory for producing condensed milk. By 1863, army contracts boosted Borden’s production level to 17,000 quarts per day.17
Militarily speaking, the North ate better than the South, with the same imbalance holding true for their respective civilian populations as well. Food shortages and even periodic riots broke out in the Confederacy. Salt, in particular, was in very short supply, especially after the Union naval blockade kept ships, which used it as ballast, from entering southern ports. In December 1862, a group of 20 women cornered a railroad agent yelling “Salt or blood” and ultimately forced him to hand over a bag of the preservative, an absolute necessity in these days before refrigeration. The following year, in Salisbury, North Carolina, 40 to 50 hungry women wielding hatchets sacked several stores and escaped w
ith over 23 barrels of flour plus salt, molasses, and money.18
But the most famous food riot occurred on April 2, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia, where Lee’s forces stretched the local food supply to its limit. In the latter part of March, a snowstorm dumped a foot of snow on the Confederate capital, rendering roads used by farmers impassable and adding to the food shortage. When the snow melted later in the month, it damaged pumps at the city waterworks and inconvenienced people, mainly from working-class areas, who now had to trudge all the way to an old well in Capitol Square to get water instead of receiving it from a hydrant. The food and water shortage, combined with an explosion on March 13 at an ordnance laboratory that killed 69 people (most of them women), all helped to bring on the bread riot. From all over the city hundreds of women and boys converged on the square screaming “bread or blood.” The mob, armed with hatchets, pistols, clubs, bayonets, and “those huge old homemade knives with which our soldiers were wont to load themselves down in the first part of the war,” then proceeded to loot bacon, flour, and other items in short supply.19
More than simply hunger drove southerners to engage in mob violence. Principles too figured in the decision. The rioters also plundered food in the name of moral reason, refusing to live or, in this case, die by the logic of the market economy. In St. Lucah, Georgia, women food protestors—their husbands off at war—called attention to the storekeepers who stayed “back at home speculating.” “Unrelieved suffering,” read an editorial published in a soldiers’ newspaper on the first anniversary of the Richmond revolt, “asserts an absolute right to what is necessary for its removal.”20 In other words, the rebels rose up to defend an older, and to their minds more just, economic arrangement, a moral economy that entitled everyone to such basic necessities of life as food.
A number of factors lay behind the South’s wartime shortage of comestibles. The North’s naval blockade, proposed by Lincoln in April 1861, proved extremely effective in cutting off outside trade with the southern states. Equally important, the decisions of the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland not to secede from the Union dealt a devastating blow to the southern cause. Loyalty to the republic translated into lost meat and flour in the South, with the three states together representing a third of both the grain and livestock supply present in the slave South.21
Food scarcity in the South also had some less obvious sources. Poor weather was one of them. In 1862, drought reduced corn yields throughout large parts of the southern states. “Hundreds of families will not make enough corn to do them and many will make none of consequence,” a newspaper based in Greensboro, Alabama, reported. To make matters worse, the heavy rains that preceded the drought created conditions congenial for the development and spread of a rust fungus. The plant parasite devastated the wheat crop, in some places reducing it by a factor of six.22
In Mississippi, flooding combined with the 1862 drought to add to the South’s woes. High water—higher in places than at any time since 1815—breached levees along the Mississippi, Yazoo, and Ouachita rivers, laying waste to some of the region’s most productive land. “There is more to fear from a dearth of food than from all the Federal armies in existence,” declared a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper. Union forces, meanwhile, made their presence felt in the region. Grant geared up for his Vicksburg campaign late in 1862 and by May the following year had seized the city of Jackson in a campaign that Lincoln called “one of the most brilliant in the world.” Calls went out by the Confederate army for men to report for duty. Off they went to battle, leaving behind vast stretches of farmland soon to be taken over by weeds, adding to the scarcity of food. When Confederate soldiers capitulated at Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, Union soldiers refused to taunt their captives, knowing full well, in the words of one observer, that they “surrendered to famine, not to them.”23
Then came the winter of 1863–1864, described by one meteorological expert as “the outstanding weather event of the Civil War.” In Clarksville, Tennessee, beginning on New Year’s Eve, the temperature plunged a staggering 50 degrees in just 24 hours. In Texas, the Arctic outbreak killed half to perhaps as much as ninetenths of the cattle found on some farms. Confederate troops went two whole days without any food at all that winter. A soldier forwarded his meat ration to General Lee with a note lamenting that, despite his aristocratic heritage, he had been driven to steal in order to survive.24
Apart from bad weather conditions, southerners themselves played a hand in bringing on the chronic shortage of food. No trend contributed more to the dilemma than the move toward cotton monoculture. Cotton specialization would take a giant step forward after the war. But before that, in the 1850s, when the price of the white lint rose dramatically, planters invested heavily in the crop, so heavily that per capita production of such essential foods as corn and sweet potatoes fell over the decade. When the Civil War began, many southern agricultural leaders called upon people to show their support for the Confederacy by abandoning cotton and growing more corn. “Plant Corn and Be Free, or plant cotton and be whipped,” one Georgia newspaper declared. Confederate soldiers, the paper went on to explain, “will be powerless against grim hunger and gaunt famine, such as will overwhelm us if we insanely raise Cotton instead of corn.” It would not prove easy, however, for the planter elite to give up its money crop and risk the region’s monopoly over world cotton production, especially with many believing that foreign dependence on southern cotton would help bring such powers as Britain into the war on their side. Some planters went so far as to grow corn near roads only to sow cotton in more distant reaches where people would be unlikely to detect it.25
The reluctance of southern planters to grow food stemmed from more than simply greed and economic self-interest. A major concern involved what to do with their slaves, who would have more time on their hands if they were not out tending cotton. Planting corn exacted much time during the planting and cultivation stages, but came nowhere near matching the long cotton-picking season, which typically lasted four and often five full months. As one Georgia newspaper put it, “No grain crop in this climate needs cultivation more than four months of the year, the remainder of the working season is unemployed. Can the farmer afford to keep his negroes, horses and other capital idle and ‘eating their heads off’ for the balance of the season?” To deal with this issue, the states of Arkansas and Georgia felt compelled to pass laws aimed at diversifying agriculture, restricting the amount of land planted in the money crop.26
Meat also remained a scarce commodity throughout the war, not just on the battlefield but on the plantation as well. The South, as we have seen, had always had more limited livestock prospects than the North, and the corn shortage could not have helped any. Planters took to reducing the amount of pork they provided slaves, instead encouraging them to maintain vegetable gardens. Such gardens, one planter ventured in 1864, would allow blacks to “pass through the year on a small supply of bacon with much less inconvenience and suffering than the peasantry of the balance of the civilized world.”27
The ineffectiveness of this substitution soon became apparent. As the war progressed, slaves and planters struggled over game in the southern woods. Slaves had long been known to hunt deer, rabbit, and raccoon in order to supplement the diet provided on the plantation. But the reduction in rations may have spurred them to hunt further afield, at times bringing them into conflict with planters who charged them with killing hogs they had set free in the woods to forage. Thus did some planters’ pigs meet their sorry fate—dead because of a set of events that began with the opening salvos at Fort Sumter. Although bereft of the glory and theatricality of battle, the struggle to survive biologically in wartime was every bit as important. It figured centrally in the lives of everyone who lived through the era: white and black, soldier and field hand alike.
CONCLUSION
The North did not wage battle in the Civil War to make a moral point about the evils of slavery. Granting that some did oppose slavery passionate
ly, northerners mainly went to war to protect a particular vision of how society should be organized. The freedom to own one’s own property and labor power, they believed, stood at the heart of American culture. Only “free soil” and “free labor” could ensure people the economic independence fought for in the earlier American Revolution. The spread of slavery, in other words, threatened the very core of what it meant to be an American. Southerners, for their part, questioned just how humane a society built on wage labor and industrialization could be. As bizarre as it may seem to us today, they strongly felt that the slave system occupied the moral high ground.
These two vastly different conceptions of how a society should be run collided in the years leading up to the Civil War. But more than just politics and ideas were at stake in the two competing ideologies. The emphasis on free soil and labor in the North and plantation-based slavery in the South had implications on the ground itself. Early in the war, the South’s commitment to staple agriculture, to the production of cotton, hindered the ability of the Confederacy to feed itself. The more varied agriculture practiced in the North—a region not centered exclusively around one main crop for market—provided both its soldiers and its citizens with a better and more diverse set of dietary options.
A million different reasons might explain the triumph of the North, countless discrete human decisions, a thrust here, a parry there. But natural forces too had a hand in shaping the outcome. Weather influenced the course of combat, a concern with feeding troops and animals shaped major decisions by commanders on both sides, and climate encouraged the growth of staple crops in the South.
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 13
