As one looks to-day over the sources of the history of the great Civil War, it seems plain that the responsible spokesmen of the Confederacy should have made overtures to the North for peace on the basis of an indissoluble union of the warring sections in the autumn of 1863. But the Southern leader who proposed reunion at that time would have been regarded as untrue to his cause or unduly timid. Neither Jefferson Davis nor General Lee had any thought of surrender, though from the attitude of representatives of the United States it was plain that an offer to return to the Union would have been met with ample guaranties to the owners of slaves and full amnesty to those who had brought on the war. Alexander Stephens alone foresaw the outcome and began now to ask for a new national convention in which terms of restoration and permanent union should be fixed. Stephens was, however, already out of harmony with President Davis; and the State of Georgia, led by Joseph E. Brown, the Governor, and the Confederate Vice-President himself, was regarded by loyal Southerners as recalcitrant and therefore not authorized to propose solutions of the problem. The cup of Southern defeat and humiliation had not been drained to the bottom.
The Confederacy owed, at the end of the year 1863, $1,221,000,000; the State Governments, the counties and cities, probably owed as much more. Paper money, the only medium of exchange, was fast giving way to barter. One dollar in gold was worth twenty dollars in Confederate currency. The monthly wage of a common soldier was not sufficient to buy a bushel of wheat. People who lived in the cities converted their tiny yards into vegetable gardens; the planters no longer produced cotton and tobacco, but supplies for “their people” and for the armies. The annual export of cotton fell from 2,000,000 bales in 1860 to less than 200,000 in 1863, and most of this came from areas under Federal control. The yearly returns to the planters from foreign markets alone had fallen from the huge returns of 1860 to almost nothing in 1863, and with the disappearance of gold, or international money, from the South, the Governments, Confederate and State, found their systems of taxation breaking down. Early in 1864 taxes were made payable in corn, bacon, or wheat, not in paper money, which every one refused to accept at face value. Planters and farmers great and small were now required to contribute one tenth of their crops to the Government. This would have given to the armies an ample supply, but the railroads were already breaking down, while wagons and country roads were also unable to bear the unparalleled burden. It was a difficult situation. The States made it worse by resisting the authority of the Confederacy; while the Confederacy was unable either to raise money on loans or gather taxes in kind from farmers who preferred always to pay in "lawful money." The Confederacy was getting into debt beyond all chance of redemption, and the States were likewise mortgaged to the utmost limit of their credit before the end of the year 1864.
But the tax law of 1864 was only one of the burdens under which Southerners, who had never accustomed themselves to paying taxes in any large way, groaned. In 1862 General Lee had urged upon Davis a conscript law which would keep his ranks full. Congress grudgingly enacted the required legislation, and later more drastic laws were passed; but the simple people who occupied the remote mountain sections of the South and the small farmers and tenants of the sandy ridges or piney woods responded slowly when confronted by the officers of the law. Thousands positively refused service in the armies and resorted to the dense forests or swamps, where they were fed by friends and neighbors who refused to assist the government recruiting agents. In the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee these people were so numerous that the presence of troops was required to keep up the semblance of obedience to law. Local warfare was the result in many places. Unionists who had not been able to join the armies of the United States assisted those who refused to serve in the Confederate ranks. As time went on thousands of deserters joined the recalcitrants in the Southern hills, and during the last year of the war it was a serious problem of State and Confederate authorities what to do with these people, who now numbered quite a hundred thousand men.
Resistance to tax-gatherers and to recruiting officers, and the despondency which followed the disasters of 1863 and the tightening of the Federal blockade, led to dissatisfaction and even resistance in the loyal black belts. In North Carolina a peace movement, led by an able newspaper editor, W. W. Holden, gained the sympathies of Governor Vance, who had never liked Jefferson Davis nor really sympathized with the cause of secession. In Virginia the friends of John B. Floyd, who had been summarily dismissed from the army for his hasty surrender of Fort Donelson in 1862, aided by the followers of John M. Daniel, editor of the Richmond Examiner, did what they could to embarrass the Confederate President. The Rhett influence in South Carolina and the long-standing quarrel of Governor Brown of Georgia with Jefferson Davis still further weakened the arm of Confederate administration. Even William L. Yancey, the most fiery of the secessionist leaders of 1860, devoted all his eloquence and abilities, from 1861 to the time of his death in 1863, to attacking the Government of his own making. And to make matters worse, the supreme courts of North Carolina and Georgia undertook to annul the conscript law and other important acts of the Confederate Congress, and thus inaugurated a war of the judges which seriously undermined the prestige and the morale of the Confederate Government. Confederate officers enrolled men for the army only to have them released by state judges supported by their respective governors. All the influence and abilities of Lee and Davis were required to prevent a break-down in the spring of 1864, when the calls for more troops and additional supplies were so numerous and pressing. West Virginia was gone, Kentucky and Missouri, too, were wholly within the Federal lines; and most of Tennessee, half of Mississippi, and nearly all the region beyond the great river were lost to the Richmond Government. New Orleans and Norfolk were once more parts of the United States, while large strips of territory in eastern North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida were held in subjection by frowning gunboats.
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A little cotton found its way through the beleaguered ports of Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington to Europe, and brought the lucky blockade runners and their owners rich returns. But trade was so small and the dangers of capture were so many that few could look with any real hope for a return of prosperity until the war was over. Europe must intervene if cotton and tobacco and sugar were to regain their kingly state. And this was the warmest wish of the Confederate chieftains. When the battle of Fredericksburg was fought, all the world thought that the desired recognition would come at once. James M. Mason, the commissioner to England, wrote home that a large majority of the House of Commons was willing to vote for acknowledging Southern independence, and Charles Francis Adams, the Minister of the United States, was of the same opinion. Gladstone, then one of the most popular members of the British Cabinet, and a majority of his colleagues favored the South. Palmerston declared, when the Emancipation Proclamation was read to him, that Lincoln abolished slavery where he had no power to do so and protected it where he had power to abolish it. Of the million voters in England at least three fourths seemed ready to vote for Southern recognition, and all the great manufacturers, the powerful merchants, the country gentry, and great nobles were openly contemptuous of the cause and policy of the North. Carlyle ridiculed the “Yankees,” and Dickens made fun of Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, and the rest. It was apparently only a matter of weeks before Lord Palmerston would ask Parliament to authorize him to intervene in order to stop the “useless” bloodshed and slaughter of the war between the States.
In France the ruling class, the bankers, the industrialists, the higher clergy, and many of the party of free trade supported Napoleon III in his well-known friendliness for the South. Moreover, the Emperor was promoting a scheme to build for his Austrian friend, Maximilian, an empire in Mexico, where the perennial war of factions was hotly raging. Davis might aid such a move as a consideration for recognition, and certainly Seward was too busy with his own troubles to intervene on behalf of an “outworn” Monroe Doctrine. Slidell, the shrewd Confederate commissioner to France, led the Emperor to expect Southern support of his scheme, and at the same time borrowed millions of dollars in gold from rich Paris bankers and hurried it off to the famishing Confederacy. No revolutionary power ever had a fairer chance of winning its goal than did that of Davis and Lee in the autumn of 1862 and winter of 1863.