WEAK POINTS IN GENERAL ADAMS' ARGUMENT
Now in making the calculation previously alluded to, it appears to me that our gallant and generous friend has overlooked some important considerations bearing on the problem discussed.
1.—During the first year of the war the Confederate Government could not have availed itself of even half a million of men for its armies, inasmuch as it was utterly unable to arm and equip them. The supply of arms and of artillery was utterly inadequate for even half that number.[7] As the war progressed the muskets, the sabers, the cannon, used in the Confederate army, if examined, would have been found to have been in larger part captured on the field of battle. Pompey the Great is reported to have said, "I have only to stamp with my foot to raise legions from the soil of Italy." Had Jefferson Davis been able by a stamp of his foot to summon a million men to the Confederate colors in the spring of 1861, what advantage would it have been? He could not have armed them, even if he could have fed and clothed and transported them. As General Adams himself has said: "The strength of an army is measured and limited not by the census number of men available, but by the means at hand of arming, equipping, clothing, feeding, and transporting those men."
2.—General Adams appears to have overlooked the fact that by May, 1862, the Northern armies were in permanent occupation of middle and west Tennessee, nearly the whole of Louisiana, part of Florida, the coasts of North and South Carolina, southeastern Virginia, much of northern Virginia, and practically the whole of that part of Virginia known as Western Virginia. The population thus excluded from the support of the Confederacy may be estimated conservatively at 1,200,000, leaving 3,800,000 to bear the burden of the war. Hence the estimate of the arms-bearing population in 1862, when the real tug began, would be not 1,000,000, but 760,000. Of this number, one-fifth, as General Adams admits, would be regularly exempt, i.e., 152,000; and many thousands more were detailed for various branches of industry. Doubtless during the first year thousands entered the Confederate army from this territory—a fair proportion of the 340,000 on the muster rolls in March, 1862; but the conscript law could not operate—never did operate—in this fourth of the Southern territory.
3.—The seceded States (including West Va.) furnished the Northern armies, according to the returns of the War Department, 86,000 men. I do not remember any mention of this by Mr. Adams, though he alludes to the statement that 316,000 men were furnished by Southern States to the Union armies, including the Border States, which did not secede. (The records of the War Department show a total of white soldiers from all Southern States, including Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware and District of Columbia, of 295,481.)
4.—It must be remembered that while the unanimity with which the Southern people supported the war has perhaps never been surpassed in so large a revolution, yet there was a large element of disloyalty, especially in the mountainous regions of the South. For instance, in the Valley of Virginia there were large numbers of Quakers and Dunkards, all opposed to war. There were also in that region the numerous descendants of the Hessian prisoners, who were not in sympathy with us. The number of Union men in the South who did not take up arms has been estimated at 80,000.
5.—It must also be remembered, as Dr. Bledsoe said in his article in the Southern Review, that "there was also a large element of baser metal,—men who begrudged the sacrifice for liberty and shirked danger."
6.—General Adams says that the Confederate States passed the most drastic conscript law on record—which may be true; but he is mistaken in supposing that this law was successfully executed. Thus, General Cobb writes, December, 1864, from Macon, Georgia, to the Secretary of War: "I say to you that you will never get the men into the service who ought to be there, through the conscript camp. It would require the whole army to enforce the conscript law if the same state of things exist throughout the Confederacy which I know to be the case in Georgia and Alabama, and I may add Tennessee." (W. R., series iv, vol. iii, p. 964.)
Again, H. W. Walters, writing from Oxford, Mississippi, to the Department, December, 1864, says: "I regard the conscript department in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi as almost worthless." Yet again General T. H. Holmes reports to Adjutant-General Cooper as to North Carolina, April 29, 1864: "After a full and complete conference with Colonel Mallett, commandant of conscription, ... I am pained to report that there is much disaffection in many of the counties, which, emboldened by the absence of troops, are being organized in some places to resist enrolling officers." And General Kemper reports, December 4, 1864, that in his belief there were 40,000 men in Virginia out of the army between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. (W. R., series iv, vol. iii, p. 855.)
In support of his thesis that the whole military population was enrolled in the Confederate armies Colonel Livermore quotes a letter of General Lee, urging the necessity of "getting out our entire arms-bearing population in Virginia and North Carolina." But this letter, written October 4, 1864, six months before the surrender, is strong evidence that up to that time the stringent conscript laws had failed to get out even in Virginia and North Carolina, "the entire arms-bearing population." (Livermore, "Numbers and Losses," p. 17.)