Squeezing the South into Submission

Though the Union army was still getting its war footing, by August 1861 the Northern blockade of Southern ports and waterways was almost complete. That month federal ships closed the Mississippi River to commerce between loyal and secessionist states, while naval squadrons were in place off the <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/index.php"><strong>lv men glasses</strong></a> coast of most Southern cities, from south Texas to the Chesapeake. President Lincoln had approved the blockade, known as the "Anaconda Plan," in April. At first it was widely derided in the North and dismissed in the South—the American navy, people said, was in no shape to clamp down on thousands and thousands of miles of coastline. Nevertheless, this massive operation had an immediate impact on the Confederate economy and, as it tightened its grip on the Southern coastline, began to choke the South into submission.That is not to say that the blockade was perfect; in fact, scholars since have pointed to the seemingly large number of blockade runners who managed to slip past the Union ships. But the relevant data point is not how many ships evaded capture, but how many ships never sailed that, undeterred, otherwise would have. From that point of view, the blockade was an unimpeachable success: blockade runners only accounted for about five percent of the regular incoming and outbound trade that would have otherwise been conducted.Moreover, these were commercial ventures, unguided by some overarching strategy in Richmond. Not surprisingly, they were disproportionately concerned with the importation of luxury goods, which were much more valuable by volume than commodities but which did little to actually support the Southern war effort. And the South desperately needed commodities, particularly foodstuffs: while the South had an agricultural economy, most of what it grew were cash crops like cotton and tobacco, and it imported great quantities of food from both the northern United States and overseas."From the beginning, the blockade reduced food imports into the South," writes the historian Andrew F. Smith in Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War. "Coffee, tea, spices, and wine quickly became difficult to acquire. More important losses from a nutritional standpoint were apples and dairy products, such as butter and cheese, which had been imported from New England; citrus fruits, dates, pineapples, and vegetables, which had been imported from Bermuda and the Caribbean Islands became scarce, as did salt … which had been mainly imported from abroad before the war." With the halt of trade between the two halves of the country via the Mississippi, the South also lost its imports of grain from the Midwest.Southerners also depended on external trade to provide most of their manufactured goods, including ones made from raw materials they produced. While the South grew more cotton than any other region in the world at the start of the Civil War, there were single towns in New England that produced more cloth in their mills than all those of the Confederacy combined.But it was the loss of salt — most of it brought from Wales as <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/women-pants-c-1138.html"><strong>women skirts onsale</strong></a> ballast in ships — that perhaps most profoundly affected the South, because it was so critical in the preservation of food, particularly meat. Without adequate supplies of salt, Southern pork and beef could not be preserved and then sent from the areas where it was produced to the places where it was needed — particularly cities and wherever the rebel armies were located. The Confederate government encouraged domestic salt production but, despite some dramatic local successes, this never came anywhere near to meeting the South's civil or military needs."The obtaining of salt became extremely difficult when the war had cut off our supply," wrote the Alabama native Parthenia Antoinette Hague of her wartime experiences:This was true especially in regions remote from the seacoast and border states, such as the interior of Alabama and Georgia. Here again we were obliged to have recourse to whatever expedient ingenuity suggested. All the brine left in troughs and barrels, where pork had been salted down, was carefully dipped up, boiled down, and converted into salt again. In some cases the salty soil under old smokehouses was dug up and placed in hoppers, which resembled backwoods ash-hoppers.While the blockade precipitated increasingly severe and widespread shortages throughout the South, numerous other factors exacerbated their effects: the diversion of resources to the Confederate armies; the decrease in food production caused by so many able-bodied men being put under arms; wastage in areas exposed to combat; deliberate destruction of agricultural production by Union forces in occupied regions and coastal areas; reduced production caused by the flight or liberation of plantation slaves; the migration of refugees, many of whom had previously been involved in food production, from occupied zones into urban areas; and the degradation of the Southern railroad system.Indeed, the blockade of Southern ports did not just shut down trade with third parties, it also curtailed coastal trade within the Confederacy itself and made such commerce dependent on other modes of transportation, primarily the railroads. Even as more strain was being placed upon the rail system, however, the non-industrialized South was less and less able to adequately maintain or repair them.The 10 percent of Southerners who lived in urban areas were the first and most severely affected by shortages, and actual starvation threatened the populations of cities like New Orleans by midsummer 1861. Rural folk of all economic levels, black and white, were at least able to fall back on subsistence farming (though everyone was subject to being shaken down by commissaries collecting foodstuffs for the armies in the field).The Confederate government did try to encourage plantation owners to curtail cotton production and shift over to food crops. While it had some limited success in this endeavor, the nature of the secessionist government, with its states' rights-centered constitution, was such that it did not force the issue, and most planters followed what they thought was still the path to profit and continued to grow cotton.Aside from the effects of war and the blockade, Southerners also had to contend with maldistribution. In fact, throughout the conflict the South produced enough food for its civilians and soldiers, but it found it increasingly difficult to preserve surpluses and in move them to areas of scarcity. Besides the preservation problem, interdiction of coastal traffic also meant that transportation of goods depended on the South's rickety railroad system, which was never adequate to the demands placed upon it. Confederate armies, at the far end of the supply lines, were nearly always short of food and materiel, especially as the war progressed.Shortages led to inflation and, as the price of foodstuffs spiked, buying power steadily decreased, by about a sixth during the first year of the conflict. Increases in prices were especially marked in areas close to the front lines,where food distribution was directly affected by the fighting. A typical Southern family's food bill was 6.65 per month at the time of secession, 68 per month in 1863, and 400 per month in 1864. Indeed, by the spring of 1863, prices for food and dry goods were going up about 10 percent a month. Butter that cost 20 cents a pound when secession was declared commanded seven times as much a year later — and up to 100 times as much in some locales, if it was available at all, during the last year of the war. Untenable prices led to outbursts of civil unrest and incidents, ranging from the looting of supply trains to bread riots in Richmond and other Southern cities.Before the first summer of the war was over, Southerners had already begun to suffer the effects of shortages imposed by the conflict. Few could conceive, however, just how severe the privations they would ultimately have to endure would become in the months and long years that followed.Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. Sources: Parthenia Antoinette Hague, "A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War"; Mary Elizabeth Massey, "Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront"; Judith W. McGuire, "Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War: By a Lady of Virginia"; Andrew F. Smith, "Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War"; Michael O. Varhola, "Life in Civil War America." <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/index.php"><strong>d&g winter shirts</strong></a> Michael O. Varhola is a writer, editor and publisher who lives in the hill country north of San Antonio, Tex. He is author of "Life in Civil War America" and "Everyday Life During the Civil War," is a co-author of "Armchair Reader: Civil War," and has written many articles on the conflict.