"The South's Achilles Heel" Topic

"Hurt makes several fascinating points during the interview, such as, "By 1861, you have the Confederate Congress and states telling people to plant less and less cotton and dedicate their acreage to food crops. But planters and farmers really didn't want to plow under their crop. They saw that as a bad risk. Most of the cotton had been planted on credit anyway. It was a tough issue that planters, farmers and politicians really wrestled with, and they never got control of it." [p. 20] In response to a statement about the amount of cotton and tools the confederacy had, Hurt says, ""Southerners really depended upon the Northern agricultural implement industry. And when the war begins they are at the mercy of what they have. Those industries that were producing agricultural implements converted fairly rapidly to wartime production from contracts from the Confederate government. It had been easier and cheaper to buy from the North, and then you get the matter of keeping people busy all year. You have a large investment in slave labor, so maybe it's best to let people do things by hand with simple instruments rather than invest in a reaping machine that would complete a task very quickly." [pp. 20-21]

The Border States were a key loss to the confederacy. Professor Hurt says, "Confederate farmers and planters relied for their mule supply on Kentucky and Missouri, which had a national reputation for producing mules of great strength and reliability. Once that was gone, Southern planters began to feel the pinch fairly quickly, but even more so the Confederate military, because there was really no replacement of horses and mules once the Northern supply was cut off. By the time the war ended, the average life of a horse pulling artillery or wagons was about seven months. Sometimes cavalry horses lasted less than that. There's also the problem of very serious disease among horses, particularly with glanders [a contagious bacterial disease], and that took its toll as well."…"
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Amicalement
Armand

The South's Achillies heel was that it was the south.

I was gonna say "THEY WERE DEAD WRONG" or maybe "THEY WERE FIGHTING FOR THE WORST POSSIBLE REASON ON EARTH" or "AGAIN 1% OF THE SOUTH(the rich ones)GOT THE OTHER 99% TO FIGHT THEIR WAR FOR THEM FOR THE WOST POSSIBLE REASON ON EARTH" but Otto is close enough. And this is from a Southerner.

"Southerners really depended upon the Northern agricultural implement industry". It wasn't just implements. When talking about just how bad off the confederacy was, I like to bring up the fact that during the entire existence of the rebellion, not a single steam engine was produced in the south while thousands were produced in the north during the same period.

In Missouri during Prices campaign, a lot of the Confederate soldiers marched north armed with SPEARS.

That says it all!

The Confederacy feels a lot like hitting the reset button back to the 1770's when the 13 colonies were still trying to figure out what to do next. While they were all nominally "in the same boat" they were pulling their own statehood ahead of anything else and threatening to reject any overarching instance as they perceived it as a sneak attempt to establish the exact same regime they had fought to overthrow. At the same time, some smaller states were keen to form any kind of union that would help protect them against some neighbors that displayed rather alarming expansionist tendencies.

Jefferson Davis was busy selling the furniture to even keep the various states in the Confederacy during the war and making a bunch of promises that would have weakened the entire system, even if they somehow survived the war. It would have been a daunting task to keep even a nominal Confederacy going. In all likelihood the states would have hollowed out any power Richmond may have had to the point that it would have been a mere symbolic structure. At the same time the differences between the Southern states would have lead to conflict and all kinds of entanglements.

Unless strong figures rise to the occasion and manage to make key reforms that would strengthen the cohesion of the Confederacy for the long term.

the differences between the Southern states would have lead to conflict and all kinds of entanglements.

If secession has succeeded once, it would have been tried again the first time a state disagreed strongly with Confederate (or Federal) policy. The result would have been a scattering of independent states and coalitions.

When I said that the South's Achillies Heel was the South, was I meant that the South had developed totally fantastic ideas of itself. This is perhaps best embodied in the opening words of Margaret Mitchell epic "Gone with the Wind" where she says that the ante-bellum South "only wanted to be beautiful." Slavery in the South was in many ways the least of its worries. Between the Slave and Planter was a huge segment of Southern Society abysmally as dirt poor as the slaves with no one to provide for them in hard times except the church societies and charity from the planter which little differed from the dole of the slaves. Indeed the institution of slavery was necessary in this case to provide a buffer for the poor white to gild his miserable condition with the self satisfying statement that they were at least above those "n….s on the plantations. Thus you can understand the oft repeated complaint about the North wanting to take away their (blacks) and make them all slaves. Indeed that was precisely what would happen. The only opportunity for many of these very poor whites was to enter the plantation system as overseers or as "captive vendors" to the planters who the planters could manipulate by the very debts they owed them that is the fact of non Payment. If you read John Mack Farraghers "Sugar Creek: The population of the Indian frontier" you see that most of the settlers of this region and Illinois was from the upper south and they were fleeing the grinding poverty of the slave system. This made them eager and fertile fields for abolitionists, but that meant that they hated slavery, they did not love the slave.

The other factor was that the South in the Union had developed for itself a privileged position CONSTITUTIONALLY which was going to exert its power ONLY so long as the South Remained in the Union and could avail itself of those benefits of 40 years of constitutional jobbing. All of that disappeared when they left the union. What the South wanted was in fact the untrammeled right to determine who and what positions could be held in running for president.

The third illusion was that they had wealth of any sort. When it comes to liquidity the Plantation owner was as poor as his sharecroppers or even his slaves. Beyond the manufacturers of the North, it was thejobbers of th cotton trade who controlled the prices he could sell for his produce and each plantation was heavily in debt to English banks who simply traded on credit.

The final problem was that underneath it all the family histories these planters appropriated to themselves were likewise as much a work of fantasy. People calling themselves Francoise, Tacredi, Fuentes-Tourmalihe Dupaine, and Efferton- Palaver- Marcuse a generation before had been called Buts, Potts, and Mushmouth and one could stills ee the grubby-necks below the white white collars. Curiously their "myths of origins" traced back to the Normans of the Norman Conquest, a natural aristocratic class who brought civil government to the brutish half animal Anglo-Saxons. After the war they switched around and they became the poor oppressed blonde haired blue eyed Anglo Saxons suffering under the now conquering (Northern) Yoke.

The south lived by fantasy and once war pricked that bubble there was nothing left.

The whole myth of the "Lost Cause" the "Grey Ghost" and the noble struggle are just a continuation of that.

NO!!!! They were not evil. They were not bad men, they were not vile oppressors. They did not even struggle for a bad cause or the worst of them. They simply let their glasses become rose-tinted and blind them to realities.

Every body does it.

The abolitionists of the North in many ways were just as deluded.

But that's the history of mankind, always setting into play forces he cannot control and then bearing the consequences.