In our Northern States the militia has rarely exceeded ten per cent. of the population. At least one-half of the population is composed of females; one-half of the residue is below the age of sixteen. If we deduct from the remainder three-twentieths for those below eighteen, those above forty-five, and those exempted by law or infirmity, one-tenth alone will remain.
It is said that the Confederacy has called out all the white males between sixteen and thirty-five, and proposes to summon all those between thirty-five and fifty. If it does so, we may well expect such forces to break down in heavy marches or suffer from exposure. But let us assume that it can bring into the field fourteen per cent. of its entire population—(and we must not forget that this is a high estimate, as all the able-bodied men of Massachusetts are but twelve per cent. of her population, or one hundred and fifty-five thousand): upon this assumption, the effective force of the Confederacy at the start was but five hundred and sixty thousand, and if to this we add forty thousand more for volunteers and conscripts from Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and East Tennessee, we have a capacity for six hundred thousand only. Of these there has been a continual waste from the outset by sickness, desertions, capture, and the casualties of war. The Union army has lost at least one-third, and been reduced from six hundred thousand to four hundred thousand by such depletion; and in the same ratio, the South, with inferior supplies and stores, and with greater exposure, must have lost at least an equal number.
In estimating its present capacity at four hundred thousand men, we undoubtedly exceed the actual resources of the South. To meet this we have at least four hundred thousand effective men now in the field, to be increased to a million by the new levies, and soon to be aided by thirty mail-clad steamers added to our present fleet on the ocean and the Mississippi,—a naval force equivalent to at least two hundred thousand more.
To sustain such forces in the field and on the water will doubtless tax all the energies of the Union; but how is the inferior force of four hundred thousand to be clad, fed, and paid by the exhausted Confederacy, with a white population less than one-sixth of that opposed to them, without commerce and the mechanic arts, and with no productive agriculture?
The pecuniary resources of the South for carrying on this war have thus far consisted principally of a paper currency and bonds, with a forced circulation. It has drawn little from taxes or forfeiture, although it has been aided by the appropriation of both public and private property of the United States.
We have no record of the currency issued, but we know that both prices and pay have been higher in Southern than in Northern armies; and if with us it has cost a thousand dollars per annum to sustain a soldier in the field, it has cost at that rate four hundred and sixty-seven millions to maintain three hundred and fifty thousand men for the last sixteen months in the Southern army, and of this at least four hundred millions has been met by the issue of paper.
Such an issue would be equivalent to an issue of seven times that amount, or of twenty-eight hundred millions, to be borne by the whites who now recognize the Union. How long can the South continue to float such a currency? Does it not already equal or exceed the paper currency of our Revolution, which became utterly worthless, notwithstanding our nation achieved its independence?
Our fathers, long before the surrender at Yorktown, resorted to specie, to the bank of Morris, and to French and Dutch subsidies: but how is the South to command bank-notes or specie, or to buy arms, powder, or provisions, or to satisfy soldiers with a currency such as has been described, or to make new issues at the rate of twenty-five millions per month?
At Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, gold ranges from 125 to 150 per cent. premium. Must not this advance require a double or triple issue of currency, namely, fifty to seventy-five millions per month, to accomplish as much as has already been effected? And how as has already been effected? and how long can such a currency be floated within a contracting circle, and in the face of our new levies and our unbounded national credit? If the war should last another year, and this depreciating currency can be floated at all, it is safe to infer from the history of the past that the debt of the South must increase at least one thousand millions. Under the pressure of such growing weight its end may be safely predicted.
Thus far in the contest the South has possessed one great advantage. The planter's son, reared to no profession, in a region where the pursuits of trade and the mechanic arts have little honor, has been accustomed from childhood to the use of the horse and rifle. In most of the towns of the South you will find a military academy, and here the young cadet has been trained to arms and qualified for office: we have no such class in the Free States, except a few graduates from West Point. Under such officers, a motley army has been collected, composed of foreigners who have toiled in Southern cities as draymen and porters, of Northern clerks driven by coercion or sheer necessity to enlist, the poor whites, the outcasts of the South, a class the most degraded in public estimate,—a class which has the respect of neither the white man nor the negro. These people inhabit to a great extent the scrub-oak or black-jack forests, the second growth which has sprung up on exhausted plantations. Destitute of schools, churches, and newspapers, unable to read or write, without culture, generally steeped in whiskey, their sole property a cabin, and perhaps a few swine, which roam through the forests, these Pariahs of society gain a precarious subsistence by hunting, fishing, and occasional depredations upon the property of the planters. During a brief visit to Columbia, in 1860, one of these outcasts was arraigned before the Court of Sessions for stealing black-jack from a plantation and selling it in the streets of Columbia; and the judge in his flowing robes, while enlarging upon the offence, facetiously remarked, that the prisoner had doubtless swallowed the black-jack,—an allusion to the habits of the class which seemed well understood by the bar.