Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt (review)

Considering how many trees have been felled over the years in the service of books about one or another aspect of the American Civil War, it is surprising how little has been written about the agricultural sector during that horrendous conflict. Indeed, over the course of the last half century, only one full-scale book on the subject has appeared—Paul W. Gates’ Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965). To be sure, there is plenty of relevant journal literature on agricultural concerns of one type or another, and John Solomon Otto devoted a chapter to the war years in Southern Agriculture during the Civil War Era, 1860–1880 (Westport, 1994). But scholarship about this sector is nonetheless paltry in comparison to, say, that concerning the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). It is the southern portion of this gap that Hurt seeks to fill in Agriculture and the Confederacy.

Hurt’s quality as a straightforward scholar comes through clearly in his latest book, in which he is concerned, first and foremost, with tracing the uneven but increasingly unrelenting decline of the South’s agricultural sector between 1861 and 1865. This decline occurred for a variety of reasons and played out in sundry ways in different parts of the region, but by 1865, the entire sector was in ruins. Ironically, even though agriculture was viewed by most white southerners as a source of strength on the eve of the war, ultimately it helped to ensure the Confederacy’s undoing.

The author’s “death by a thousand cuts” interpretation of the southern agricultural sector’s decline and fall is generally convincing. Given all of the factors impeding the sector during the war years, it is in some ways surprising that it performed as well as it did for so long. For starters, production was often disrupted by fighting armies. The markets for cotton—the South’s principal cash crop and the most important U.S. export by far in 1860—were closed off. Transport facilities in the region, already inadequate when the war started, were further degraded during the protracted conflict, and many of the South’s leading grain-producing and meat-producing regions were either cut off from intraregional trade or overrun immediately by Union forces. Confederate policies regarding food production and distribution—most notably, the impressment of crops and draft animals, taxing in kind, and mandated below-market pricing of agricultural products—caused additional problems, as did accelerating inflation and the erosion of slavery as the war progressed. For these reasons and others, it was apparent by 1864—that is to say, well before the end of the war—that the once powerful sector could not survive much longer.

Hurt treats all of the above developments in close detail in Agriculture and the Confederacy, tracing the farm sector year by year in both the eastern and western theaters. In so doing, he makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both the problems plaguing southern agriculture and the reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat.