Randolph H. McKim

“ Not only had the South to provide from her seven millions of white population an army larger than that of Imperial France, but from a nation of agriculturists she had to provide another army of craftsmen and mechanics to enable the soldiers to keep the field. For guns and gun carriages, powder and ammunition, clothing and harness, gunboats and torpedoes, locomotives and railway plant, she was now dependent on the hands of her own people and the resources of her own soil. ”

“ Let it be observed, finally, that when we have reached a reasonably probable conclusion of the men enlisted in the Confederate armies during the four years of war, we must then proceed to ascertain, if we can, the probable number of these enlisted men who were detailed for various duties and occupations ancillary to the support of the government and the army. And only when this number has been deducted from the total enlistments will we have ascertained the probable number of men actually serving with the colors and making up the fighting force of the Confederacy. ”

“ Whoever will fairly consider that the South had to provide out of her indigenous male population of military age, a fighting army, an industrial army, and an army of civil servants, will not be surprised if it shall appear from the evidence available that she was not able to muster in battle array more than six hundred thousand men. ”

“ And so our question is, How large a proportion of this number is to be credited to that part of the Confederacy which by May, 1862, was occupied by the Federal armies? If we assume that the part of the country thus occupied furnished as large a proportion as the rest of the Confederacy (a large assumption) , then, as the population of the occupied part is estimated to have been about one-fourth of the whole, we may suppose that it furnished the Confederate army one-fourth of the total 340,000; that is to say, 85,000 men. ”

“ Again, a large contingent of men had to be retained as railway servants and government clerks, and for purposes of agriculture, for it must be remembered that not one in ten of the soldiers in the Confederate army was an owner of slaves, and therefore a very large proportion of the agriculture of the country had to be carried on by white men. It is also overlooked that the complicated machinery of civilized government had to be maintained in eleven States with the necessary officers and clerks pertaining to their administration. ”

“ In conclusion I am reminded of the words of General Lee in a letter to General Jubal A. Early, shortly after the war, "It will be difficult to get the world to understand the odds against which we fought."
Still I cannot help thinking that the statements of the adjutant-general of the Confederate armies in his official reports, and the testimony of Gen [Pg 71] eral Lee himself in regard to the numbers in his army, will ultimately be considered by the world more reliable than the a priori estimates of even so careful and honest an investigator as Colonel Livermore. ”

“ 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." ”

“ He says:
"The men stepped out one by one and re-enlisted, all but one man, and he exercised the liberty which all had, of declining to re-enlist. This was in January, 1864."
I quote also an order of General Lee's on the subject, February 3, 1864: "The Commanding General announces with gratification the re-enlistment of the regiments of this army for the war, and the reiteration of the war regiments of their determination to continue in the army until independence is achieved." The fact of re-enlistment then is absolutely established. ”

“ My argument was that the comparison of the Confederates with the Boers was not fair, the Boers being at a primitive stage of civilization—a pastoral and agricultural people with no arts, no culture, and no wants beyond a bare subsistence. ”

“ The Union at that time had, it is said, a million men on its muster rolls.... It might possibly have been able to put 500,000 men into the fighting line. On the other side ... the fighting strength of the Confederacy cannot have been less than two-thirds its normal strength. The South should have been able to muster, on paper, 900,000 men." (Idem, pp. 241-2.)
Compare this statement of what the South should have been able to muster with the consolidated abstract of the latest returns of the Confederate army showing what she was able to muster. ”

“ But the alleged enrollment in the Confederate States army is 120,000, which is 7,110 more than the available military population, making no allowance for the failure of the conscript officers to put into the army every man liable to military duty, and none for the thousands exempt from service. ”

“ After all, the most important question to determine is the number of men actually serving with the colors in the armies of the Confederate States. And even if we admit an enrollment in the Confederate army of 700,000, and reduce our estimates of exemptions and details for special work from 125,000 to 100,000, there remain apparently for service in the field only about 600,000 men ”

“ You have shown that the Confederates on the other hand were highly civilized, with national, State, and municipal institutions to maintain, and, being cut off from supplies from the outside world, obliged to extemporize varied manufactures of powder, cannon, small arms, clothing, shoes, hats, and every sort of material needed by their railway systems and their people at home as well as the armies in the field. ”

“ Charles Francis Adams in his "Military Studies," p. 282. He says "that the States named [meaning Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia] sympathiz [Pg 67] ing, as at the time the Southern authorities claimed, most deeply with the Confederacy should have furnished over 316,000 recruits to the Federal army, and only 117,000 to that of the Confederacy is, to say the least, deserving of remark,—it calls for explanation." Again he says: "It would be not unnatural to assume that these States furnished an equal number of recruits to the Confederacy." ”

“ Some Southern writers estimate 80,000 as the number of Union men who refused and evaded service in the Confederate army. If there were only one million of these mountaineers, they would represent 160,000 men of military age and fitness. ”

“ The estimate above alluded to, of 20,000 Marylanders in the Confederate service, rests apparently upon no better basis than an oral statement of General Cooper to General Trimble, in which he said he believed that the muster rolls would show that about 20,000 men in the Confederate army had given the State of Maryland as the place of their nativity. ”

“ I submit then that these preliminary considerations quite do away with the presumption that an army of only six hundred thousand men serving with the colors, would have been unworthy of the devotion or the patriotism of the Southern [Pg 20] people, or inadequate to what might have been expected of a nation of five millions of whites. ”

“ Adams is right in estimating the Southern armies at nearly 1,300,000 men, then we face the remarkable fact that a white population of a little more than 5,000,000 people sent to the front almost as many men as a population of over 22,000,000. For Colonel Livermore tells us there were 2,234,000 individuals in the United States army ”

“ This represents an arms-bearing population of 1,000,000 men between eighteen and forty-five years of age. To this he adds thirty per cent, for those males between sixteen and eighteen years, and between forty-five and sixty years of age—added by law, so he states, to the military population—making 300,000 more. [1] Now, further add twelve per cent.—or 150,000—for youths reaching, between May, 1861, and May, 1865, the age of sixteen years, and we have a total aggregate Confederate arms-bearing population of 1,450,000. ”

“ F. Fox, "Regimental Losses in the Civil War," we find the strength of the Confederate armies furnished by the seceded States and by the border States as well, reckoned as follows: 529 regiments and 85 battalions of infantry; 127 regiments and 47 battalions of cavalry; 8 regiments and 1 battalion of partisan rangers; 5 regiments and 6 bat [Pg 25] talions of heavy artillery, and 261 batteries of light artillery—in all equivalent to 764 regiments of 10 companies. In making this statement Colonel Fox assures his readers that "no statistics are given that are not warranted by the official records." ”

“ Under the head of "Public Necessity" we find exemptions for railroad companies, telegraph companies, navigation companies, cotton and wool factories, paper mills, iron manufactories, foundries, printing establishments, fire department, police department, gas-works, salt manufactories, shoemakers, tanners, blacksmiths, millers, millwrights, ferrymen, wheelwrights, wagon-makers, express companies, equity, justice and necessity, indigent circumstances, and miscellaneous. ”

“ It comprehended among its subjects at least an hundred divers races, numbering about 85,000,000 people; and yet the historian tells us that the entire armies of the empire, exclusive of some battalions maintained in Rome [Pg 19] itself, did not exceed 340,000 men, [3] there being at the time among the citizens, exclusive of the subjects, 5,984,072 males of military age.
I have quoted Colonel Henderson's admiring comment on the size of the army the South was able to put in the field. In doing so I have not forgotten that he estimates that army at 900,000. ”

“ They must be cut down by several hundred thousand. A large element of this error is to be found, as I have suggested, in the failure to observe the great number of re-enlistments that undoubtedly took place, especially in 1862, when the terms of service of nearly all the Confederate regiments expired. [Pg 61] This duplication, in the opinion of the military Secretary of the United States, reduces the total by twenty per cent. ”

“ These figures as to the killed and died of wounds, and of disease, are taken from Fox's monumental work on regimental losses. He "conjectures" that nearly 20,000 must be added to the 74,508 given above, making 94,000 ”