The numerical strength of the Confederate army Part 1

The numerical strength of the Confederate army.

by Randolph H. McKim.

PREFACE

The distinguished soldier and critic whose name appears on the t.i.tle page argues, as do various other Northern critics, that the usual Southern estimate of the strength of the Confederate army is too small by half. This conclusion is supported, they contend, both by the census of 1860, according to which there were at the very beginning of the war between the States nearly a million men in the Southern States of military age, and by the number of regiments of the several armies, as shown by the muster rolls of the Confederate army, captured on Lee's retreat from Richmond, and now stored among the archives in Was.h.i.+ngton.

This second line of argument has been developed, among others, by two well-known military critics, Colonel Wm. F. Fox, in his monumental work ent.i.tled "_Regimental Losses in the Civil War_" (who concludes that the Southern Armies contained the equivalent of 764 regiments, of ten companies each), and by Thomas L. Livermore, Colonel of the 18th New Hamps.h.i.+re Volunteers, in his laborious and painstaking monograph, "Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America," published in 1901.

Both these authors have had the advantage of studying the Muster Rolls of the Confederate army just alluded to, but General Marcus J. Wright, of the Adjutant General's Office, War Department, Was.h.i.+ngton, writes me that he knows of no Southern man who has ever examined these Rolls, although General T. W. Castleman of Louisiana has recently received permission to copy the Louisiana Rolls. Colonel Walter H. Taylor, of General Lee's staff was also permitted to examine some of the official returns of Lee's Army.

Although the author of the following pages has not had the opportunity of studying those precious Muster Rolls, he hopes that he has been able to show that the thesis maintained by the distinguished critics just mentioned rests on no sufficient foundation and ought to be rejected by careful thinkers.

The main points of my counter argument are these: 1. The lack of arms limiting the enrolment of soldiers the first year of the war. 2. The loss of one-fourth of our territory by the end of the first year. 3. The loss of control of the Trans-Mississippi in 1863-4. 4. The enormous number exempted from enrolment for every sort of State duty, and for railroads and new manufacturing establishments made necessary by the blockade of our ports. 5. The opposition of some of the State governments to the execution of the Conscript law. 6. The comparative failure of the Conscript law. 7. The disloyalty of a part of our population. 8. The necessity of creating not only an army of fighters, but also an industrial army, and an army of civil servants out of the male population liable for military duty.

The character of the evidence available precludes a precise estimate of the actual strength of the Confederate army. As Colonel Walter H.

Taylor, Lee's Adjutant General, says in a letter addressed to the author, "I regret to have to say that I know of no reliable data in support of any precise number, and have always realized that it must ever be largely a matter of conjecture on our side."

R. H. MCK.

THE NUMERICAL STRENGTH OF THE CONFEDERATE ARMY

Charles Francis Adams holds a warm place in the hearts of the survivors of the Army of Northern Virginia, and, indeed, of all the Confederate Armies, not only because of his splendid tribute to General Robert E.

Lee and to the army he commanded, but also because of his generous recognition of the high motives of the Southern people in the course they pursued in 1861.

It is therefore in the friendliest spirit that I undertake to question the accuracy of his conclusion as to the numerical strength of the Southern forces engaged during the four years of the War between the States. In his recent volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," p. 286, he states "that the actual enrollment of the Confederate Army during the entire four years of the conflict exceeded 1,100,000, rather than fell short of that number."

General Adams is of the opinion that it is a mistake to suppose that the Confederate States were crushed by overwhelming resources and numbers.

He calls attention to the statement usually given by Southern writers, that the South had on her muster rolls, from first to last, about 600,000 men, and refers to this as a "legend" (p. 287), "opposed to all reasonable a.s.sumption and unsupported by doc.u.mentary evidence"; "based on a.s.sertion only" (p. 286).

His argument is chiefly _a priori_, and proceeds substantially thus: The census of 1860 shows there were upward of 5,000,000 white people in the States which subsequently seceded. This represents an arms-bearing population of 1,000,000 men between eighteen and forty-five years of age. To this he adds thirty per cent, for those males between sixteen and eighteen years, and between forty-five and sixty years of age--added by law, so he states, to the military population--making 300,000 more.[1] Now, further add twelve per cent.--or 150,000--for youths reaching, between May, 1861, and May, 1865, the age of sixteen years, and we have a total aggregate Confederate arms-bearing population of 1,450,000.[2] From this total General Adams deducts twenty per cent, for exempts of all cla.s.ses. "There were then remaining a minimum of 1,160,000 effectives, to which we must add men from the Border States 117,000; giving a total Confederate strength of 1,277,000." He says also: "The whole male arms-bearing population was thus put in arms."

Now I wish on the very threshold to acknowledge freely that this conclusion is not, in the opinion of General Adams, discreditable to the South, but the reverse. He holds that the Southern estimate of a total strength of only 600,000 with the Confederate colors, is discreditable to the spirit and the patriotism of our people. In his opinion a just appreciation of the virtue and self-sacrifice exhibited by the men of the South should lead us to accept the much higher estimate which he gives, not reluctantly, but freely and cheerfully. He thinks that we who contest it place the Southern people on a lower level of devotion than the Boers of South Africa.

THE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BOERS AND THE CONFEDERATES

He says, at p. 239 of his "Military Studies": "How was it under very similar circ.u.mstances with the South Africans? On Confederate showing, they are a braver, a more patriotic, and self-sacrificing race!" He goes on to show that the Boers had in actual service more than 1 in 4 of their population; while, if it be true that there were only 600,000 Southern soldiers in the Confederacy, there was only 1 out of 12 at the front. This, he thinks, would be discreditable to Confederate manhood; he cannot believe that the Southerners of that period were a race of such "mean-spirited, stay-at-home skulkers."

In answer to this I shall undertake to show in the following pages that Mr. Adams' figures are very wide of the mark, so that the proportion of fighting men in the Confederate army was enormously greater than he admits in this pa.s.sage, not less than 1 in 6 of the population. But the fact is that the conditions in the cases of the Boers and the Confederates were about as dissimilar as they well could be. In the one case there was a small, compact population, for the most part half civilized, and occupying a territory less than a quarter of that included in the Confederacy. They had no highly differentiated civilization to support. In the Confederacy there were eleven States, each of which was organized as a distinct government and each of which required a large number of men to fill its offices and to maintain its civilization. Large numbers of men were also needed, as I shall show, for purposes of manufacture, and to supply the army with food and munitions of war. To compare a small community of 323,000 (Boers) with a nation of 5,000,000 whites, besides 3,000,000 blacks; a perfectly h.o.m.ogeneous people with one containing divers elements; a semi-civilized people with one whose civilization was highly differentiated; a people accustomed to live on the veldt in the saddle, with one dwelling largely in towns and cities and engaged in diversified occupations--is to make a comparison illusory in a high degree.

In confirmation of the preceding statement, I add the following pa.s.sage from a letter addressed to me by my friend, Colonel Archer Anderson, of Richmond, Va.:

"My argument was that the comparison of the Confederates with the Boers was not fair, the Boers being at a primitive stage of civilization--a pastoral and agricultural people with no arts, no culture, and no wants beyond a bare subsistence. Such a people can call out a large proportion of its population, and in their case there was the particular advantage that through their relations to the great mining region operated by foreigners, they had acc.u.mulated a vast treasure and a great stock of European munitions of war, and for a long period were able to draw what they further needed from Europe through their railway communication with the Portuguese port on Delagoa Bay. You have shown that the Confederates on the other hand were highly civilized, with national, State, and munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions to maintain, and, being cut off from supplies from the outside world, obliged to extemporize varied manufactures of powder, cannon, small arms, clothing, shoes, hats, and every sort of material needed by their railway systems and their people at home as well as the armies in the field. The maintenance of civil government, and such a task of production over and above the yield of agriculture, required the abstraction of a vast number of men from military service."

It is instructive, in considering this argument to recall what a great historian tells us of the Helvetii, in their contest with Caesar. He says,

"The whole population of the a.s.sembled tribes amounted to 368,000 souls, including women and children: the number that bore arms was 92,000."

(Merivale, History of the Romans, vol. I, pp. 242-3.)

Here is a real historical parallel between two peoples at a not dissimilar stage of civilization. Their numbers were very nearly the same: in one case 323,000, in the other 368,000; and their fighting strength was about in the same proportion,--one in four of the population; 89,000 in one case, 92,000 in the other.

It may be added that if Mr. Adams is right in estimating the Southern armies at nearly 1,300,000 men, then we face the remarkable fact that a white population of a little more than 5,000,000 people sent to the front almost as many men as a population of over 22,000,000. For Colonel Livermore tells us there were 2,234,000 individuals in the United States army; but of these, 186,017 were negroes, 494,000 foreigners, and 86,000 from the Southern states; so that the North only sent into the field 1,467,083.

Judged then by the numerical standard, the patriotism and devotion of the Southern people, according to this showing, was to that of the North as four to one. And this takes no account of the many thousands who served the South as mechanics, laborers, etc.

FUNDAMENTAL ERROR IN THE ARGUMENT OF NORTHERN WRITERS

It seems to be overlooked by General Adams, Colonel Livermore, and other persons, in their estimates of the population available for military purposes, that the Confederate States' Government had not only to organize an army, but also to establish extensive manufacturing plants for the equipment of the army; for clothing, for harness, for saddles, for guns, powder, and ordnance; even for mining the ore which had to be worked up into iron for the Tredegar works and other similar plants within the limits of the Confederacy.

Again, a large contingent of men had to be retained as railway servants and government clerks, and for purposes of agriculture, for it must be remembered that not one in ten of the soldiers in the Confederate army was an owner of slaves, and therefore a very large proportion of the agriculture of the country had to be carried on by white men. It is also overlooked that the complicated machinery of civilized government had to be maintained in eleven States with the necessary officers and clerks pertaining to their administration. (This is one of the particulars in which the case of the Boer Republic differs so radically from that of the Southern Confederacy that the comparison between the two is quite illusory.) If, as General Adams insists, "the whole male arms-bearing was thus put in arms," one cannot but wonder who did all these things just enumerated?

When these things are taken into consideration, and the figures I shall present are carefully examined, it will be seen that to have put 600,000 men into the armies of the South--men serving with the colors--instead of being discreditable to the patriotism of the Southern people was in reality a great achievement.

One of the most accomplished English military critics of our time, Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, author of the Life of Stonewall Jackson, writes on this aspect of the subject as follows:

"Not only had the South to provide from her seven millions of white population an army larger than that of Imperial France, but from a nation of agriculturists she had to provide another army of craftsmen and mechanics to enable the soldiers to keep the field. For guns and gun carriages, powder and ammunition, clothing and harness, gunboats and torpedoes, locomotives and railway plant, she was now dependent on the hands of her own people and the resources of her own soil. The organization of these resources scattered over a vast extent of territory, was not to be accomplished in the course of a few months, nor was the supply of skilled labor sufficient to fill the ranks of her industrial army." (Life of Stonewall Jackson, II, 253.)

Upon this striking pa.s.sage one or two remarks may be appropriate. The distinguished critic tells us most truly that the South, by reason of her isolated situation, had to provide two armies,--an army of fighters and an army of workers. He might have said she had to provide three armies; for besides the industrial army and the army of soldiers, she had to provide an army of civil servants to man the offices necessary to carry on not only the Confederate States government, but also the government of eleven separate States, with their highly differentiated organizations.

Our author calls attention to the fact that the fighting army of the South was larger than that of Imperial France. Let me add that, even if the Southern army numbered no more than 650,000 men, it was nearly double the army of Imperial Rome in the reign of Augustus. Radiating from the golden milestone in the forum to every point of the compa.s.s, that vast empire extended from the Pillars of Hercules to the banks of the Euphrates, and from the coasts of Britain to the borders of the great African desert. It comprehended among its subjects at least an hundred divers races, numbering about 85,000,000 people; and yet the historian tells us that the entire armies of the empire, exclusive of some battalions maintained in Rome itself, did not exceed 340,000 men,[3] there being at the time among the _citizens_, exclusive of the _subjects_, 5,984,072 males of military age.

I have quoted Colonel Henderson's admiring comment on the size of the army the South was able to put in the field. In doing so I have not forgotten that he estimates that army at 900,000. But his judgment upon that point loses much of its weight when we observe that in two distinct pa.s.sages in his Life of Stonewall Jackson he gives seven millions as the white population of the South, instead of five millions, as it actually was. This error may serve to show how easy it is for a foreign critic to be mistaken upon a question of statistics. Apart from the influence upon his judgment of his error as to the size of the white population, it is evident, from the pa.s.sage quoted above, that Henderson included in the estimate of 900,000 many thousands of men detailed for the various industries he enumerates.[4]

I submit then that these preliminary considerations quite do away with the presumption that an army of only six hundred thousand men serving with the colors, would have been unworthy of the devotion or the patriotism of the Southern people, or inadequate to what might have been expected of a nation of five millions of whites.

In other words, we enter upon our argument without any reasonable presumption against the conclusion which it is our purpose to defend.

Whoever will fairly consider that the South had to provide out of her indigenous male population of military age, a fighting army, an industrial army, and an army of civil servants, will not be surprised if it shall appear from the evidence available that she was not able to muster in battle array more than six hundred thousand men.

AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF OUR CONCLUSION

We arrive at the result indicated above by several independent lines of evidence.

I.--Our figures are supported by the statements of a number of men who were in position to know what was the total effective strength of the Southern armies. Among them were General Cooper, adjutant-general of the Confederate armies, writing in 1869 (see "Southern Historical Society Papers," Vol. vii, p. 287); Dr. A. T. Bledsoe, a.s.sistant Secretary of War; General John Preston, chief of the Conscription Bureau; Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens ("War Between the States," 1870, Vol. ii, p. 630); General Jubal A. Early ("Southern Historical Papers,"

Vol. ii, p. 20); Dr. Joseph Jones (official report, June, 1890, "Southern Historical Society Papers," xix, 14), and General Marcus J.

Wright--who now, however, puts the numbers at 700,000 ("Southern Historical Society Papers," xix, 254). I ask what better authorities on this subject could be named than the adjutant-general of the army, the a.s.sistant Secretary of War, and the chief of the Conscription Bureau of the Confederate States?

In August, 1869, Dr. Joseph Jones sent to General Cooper a carefully prepared paper on this subject, asking his opinion as to the accuracy of the data contained therein. General Cooper replied that after having "closely examined" the paper he had "come to the conclusion, from his general recollection," that "it must be regarded as nearly critically correct." Is it credible that the adjutant-general of the army should have given as his opinion that this number--600,000,--was "_nearly critically correct_," if in fact there had been upon the rolls of the Confederate armies twice that number,--1,277,000 men,--as General Adams would have us believe?

II.--By adding together the Confederate prisoners in the hands of the United States at the close of the war, 98,000;[5] the soldiers who surrendered in 1865, 174,223; those who were killed or died of wounds, 74,508; died in prison, 26,439; died of disease, 59,277; died from other causes, 40,000; discharged, 57,411; deserters, 83,372; we get a total of 613,230.