The world around war 93Revolution, proved to be a disaster. Inflation
began almost immediately and quickly grew
worse. The northern blockade, loss of
agricultural areas to advancing Union armies
and disruption of the southern
transportation network (due to military
activity and the absence of an industrial base
able to replace worn-out tracks, engines, and
rolling stock) caused shortages of crucial
goods. These shortages combined with ever-
larger issues of paper money to fuel inflation.
A clerk in the Confederate War
Department named John Beauchamp Jones
kept a diary that charted increasing financial
hardships. In November 1861, he noted that
'dry goods have risen more than a hundred
per cent, since spring, and rents and boarding
are advancing in the same ration.' Ten
months later, 'blankets, that used to sell for
$6, are now $25 per pair; and sheets are
selling for $15 per pair, which might have
been had a year ago for $4.' Wood cost
$16 per cord and coal $9 per load, provoking
Jones to ask rhetorically, 'How can we live
here, unless our salaries are increased?' By the
end of March 1863, the prices for wood and
coal had reached $30 and $20.50 respectively,
meat had 'almost disappeared from the
market, and none but the opulent can afford
to pay $3.50 per pound for butter.'
Many Confederates attributed shortages
and soaring prices to hoarding by ruthless
speculators. A group of women took to the
streets in Richmond on 2 April 1863, to
protest against prices and scarcities,
smashing windows and looting stores in a
'bread riot'. Jones called it 'a frightful
spectacle, and perhaps an ominous one, if
the government does not remove some of
the quartermasters who have contributed
very much to bring about the evil of scarcity.
I mean those who have allowed
transportation to forestallers and
extortioners.' Another diarist, much
disturbed by news of the riot, remarked:
'I fear that the poor suffer very much; meal
was selling to-day at $16 per bushel. It has
been bought up by speculators. Oh that
these hard-hearted creatures could be made
to suffer! Strange that men with human
hearts can, in these dreadful times, thus
grind the poor.'
Working-class and poorer farming families
suffered most. Real wages declined by nearly
two-thirds from their late-ante bellum levels.
Soldiers earned only $11 per month
(Congress increased the sum to $18 in 1864),
which left them virtually powerless to
respond to pleas from home for economic
help. As in the North, wives on small farms
assumed greater burdens - but they did so in
the midst of far more pernicious inflation.
Many Confederates coped with spiraling
prices by adopting a barter system and
simply doing without items previously taken
for granted. In the spring of 1863, Congress
levied a 10 percent tax-in-kind on corn,
wheat, potatoes, fodder, and other
agricultural products, provoking outraged
complaints and hitting smaller farmers
especially hard.
Although formal parties never developed
in the Confederacy, the nation divided
politically over issues relating to the central
government's efforts to wage an expensive
war. The Richmond government not only
taxed its citizens (there had been no direct
taxes on citizens of the United States for
many years prior to 1861), but also
impressed supplies in return for paper
currency, imposed martial law in some areas
and, most ominously for those who feared a
strong central power, conscripted men into
the army from the spring of 1862 onwards.
Jefferson Davis and other Confederate
nationalists argued for the need to mobilize
manpower, food, and other resources by
whatever means necessary. A vocal minority
that included Vice-President Alexander
H. Stephens disagreed, accusing Davis of
trampling on sacred state and individual
rights. The President became a lightning rod
for sometimes intemperate criticism. An
extreme example of anti-Davis vitriol written
in 1863 called the President a 'miserable,
stupid, one-eyed dyspeptic, arrogant tyrant
who ... boasts of the future grandeur of the
country which he has ruined, the soil which
he has made wet with the tears of widows
and orphans and the land which he has