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Men, Munitions, and Money

© Craig E. Hutchison

The cause of the American Civil War has been and will be debated forever. However, the inevitability of which side would win the war really came down to which side had the most men and which side could make the most guns and bullets and implements of war and which side had the greatest number of natural resources. There was also the question of money, of which the Union had the advantage. The Confederacy tried to make due as best it could in all of the areas above, but in the end, the Union's advantage was just too great.

In order to raise money for the war effort in the North, Congress established the first income tax, a national banking system, and printed the first national currency. War bonds were sold. Northern business grew at a tremendous rate, especially those that became government contractors. Southern industry grew as well, although, they had much less to work with. The Confederacy had to resort to means such as sending agents to the north to buy arms and smuggle them back to the south. Blockade runners were sent to Europe to buy as many supplies as they could. In addition, after a battle, Confederate soldiers would collect Union arms from the battlefield. Amazingly, in 1862 alone, Confederate soldiers collected over one hundred thousand Union rifles. In order to be able to make arms for itself, the Confederacy constructed arsenals, foundries, rolling mills, and sought out supplies for each.

In terms of men, because of numerous defeats and the expiration date of the term of enlistment for the early recruits coming soon, the Confederacy was forced to extend all enlistments for the duration of the war. The Confederate Congress also had to institute the first draft in American history.

A cold hard look at the numbers gives one a sense of what the Confederacy was up against. At the beginning of the war, the eleven Confederate states had a population of 5,449,467 whites and 3,521,111 slaves. The nineteen Union states consisted of a population of 18,936,579. In terms of free males aged eighteen to sixty, the Union to South ratio was 4.4 to 1. The discrepancies in production and supplies were even more stark. The following are the North-South ratios that spelled doom for the Confederacy: 10 to 1 in factory production; iron 15 to 1; coal 38 to 1; firearms production 32 to 1; wheat 412 to 1; corn 2 to 1; textiles 14 to 1; merchant-ship tonnage 25 to 1; wealth 3 to 1; railroad mileage 2.4 to 1; farm acreage 3 to 1; draft animals 1.8 to 1; livestock 1.5 to 1. The only commodity in which the South could boast an advantage was cotton.

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