"The Cry of the Sufferers": The Problem of Welfare in the Confederacy

"THE CRY OF THE SUFFERERS": The Problem of Welfare in the Confederacy Paul D. Escott The Confederacy has captured the interests of hundreds of historians over the years, yet, some aspects of its history have been neglected. While scores of books deal with the armies, famous generals, and grand issues of strategy and government policy, relatively few probe the internal problems which plagued the South.1 During the war, southern society underwent a severe testing which brought many latent conflicts to the surface. Bitter controversies and class resentments often prevailed on the homefront. Mass poverty gripped southerners in an ever-tightening vise. Many of the South's oldest traditions crumbled before unprecedented forces, and southerners embraced a cluster of new ideas in an effort to solve their problems. This inner story, the internal history of the Confederacy is important, for it can teach us much about the southern social and political systems. One of the most crucial factors in this inner history is the existence of poverty in the Confederacy. In addition to its external problems, the new nation faced a major welfare problem. As southerners struggled against destitution, they revealed interesting facets of their political values, and as the problem remained unsolved, its effects spread widely and influenced other events. This paper attempts to accomplish two things: first, to present some new findings on Confederate welfare activities; and second, to show that the problem of welfare was a central problem in the Confederacy, one which boiled up from the lowest levels of society to affect politics at high levels. Specifically, the paper will suggest that many state rights controversies in the latter part of the war actually had their origin in the problem of welfare. The Civil War caused major dislocations in the southern economy and plunged hundreds of thousands of Confederate citizens into * The quotation in the title is from the Edgefield, S.C., Advertiser, November 12, 1862. A slightly different version of this paper was presented by the author at the Duquesne History Forum in October, 1975. 1 Among the best of those which do are: Bell Irvin Wiley, The Phin People of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1943); Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy, edited with an introduction by Wendell H. Stephenson (Baton Rouge, 1944); and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971). 228 poverty. The causes of this domestic disaster were many. For years the South had depended on northern or European manufacturers for its supply of many commodities, and the Federal blockade threw an unprepared region back onto its own resources. Within the South, the system of transportation and distribution was gravely deficient, so much so that perishable foods rotted at depots and many supplies which were available never reached their destination. Speculation and hoarding were also a problem. From the first days of the war greedy speculators snapped up stocks of scarce items in order to make immense profits later, and frightened citizens hoarded food.2 Naturally the tremendous destructiveness of the war also had a severe impact on the South. But when one descends from the level of macro-economics to the level of individuals, one finds that the reason for a great amount of poverty was simple: there was a serious shortage of labor in many communities and families, particularly in non-slaveholding rural areas. An early warning of this problem came at the outset of the war. Artisans and craftsmen played key roles in a rural society, and the War Department was inundated with petitions seeking the discharge of craftsmen who had volunteered. Citizens explained that they needed their blacksmith, who kept farming tools in repair, or their miller, who ground their grain into flour and meal, or their tanner, wheelwright, or potter.3 Conscription aggravated this problem, and it brought suffering directly into many homes. Non-slaveholding yeomen families often depended on qne man—the husband, father, and breadwinner. When the man from such a family went into the army, the woman left behind had more work to do than any single individual could manage. With children to supervise and household chores to perform, she found that she could...