How are you all doing . Our topic for today is the second part of our civil war content for the semester. I want to talk today about Economic Policy and social events that are tied to the economy. I titled this feeding the confederacy. We will focus most of our attention on the Confederate States. We will talk about the crucial of we will talk about the crucial issue of how you make sure your soldiers and civilians have enough to eat over the course of the war. There are two key ironies of this confederate experience for me, that historians who studied the confederacy point to. One is that the Confederate States of america is a predominantly agricultural nation. The vast majority of the union and confederacy live on farms. But especially in the Confederate States. We are dealing with a population that is overwhelming people who live on farms. Yet, they will struggle to feed themselves more often than they will run out of bullets and armaments. This is surprising when you think of an agricultural nation. The second big irony here is that the foundations of the confederacy, the founding documents, the secession documents of the states before they joined the confederacy said, we want a limited government with more power given to the states. Yet the confederate government will become stronger and more invasive than any Government People had seen to this point in order to wage war and try to feed everyone. Two key ironies. We will talk about how they come about. A flashpoint for this question of how you feed everyone is a series of riots in the spring of 1863 in the confederacy, most notably in the capital city of richmond, although it happens elsewhere as well. Spring 1863 timing here is crucial. We talked last time about the anaconda plan and the blockade. We are more than a year into the war, we are almost two years into the war. The blockade is now effective enough that it is getting difficult to find special commodities and key foods that cannot be grown locally throughout the south. That is one key factor. Another key factor is that it is simply early spring and the food people stored in the fall and early winter as they were getting in their crops, they are starting to run out of it. The new things they planted in the spring have not come into the ground yet. There is always going to be a shortage of food at this particular moment. It is exasperated by elements of the war, as we will see in a moment. The richmond bread riot is primarily enacted by women. Women working in the factories of richmond who were shopkeepers, who were small producers. Smallscale farmers who lived on the outskirts of the city. They have a number of concerns. The smallscale farmers found it harder and harder to bring their produce into the cities markets and sell it. The women working in the factories and shops cant get the food they need for their families. Their wages arent keeping up with the cost of commodities, as it is getting harder to find things. Most of their husbands are in the army, or there are a number of widows prominently involved in this. Their initial plan is to talk to the governor and see if the governor can help them. Richmond is the capital of the confederacy, but also the capital of virginia. They get to the governors house early on the morning of april 2 and find out he already left to go to the capital. So they march further into town. People join them. It gets bigger. It gets rowdier. Breaking into stores and grabbing the food and clothes that were hard to get hold of, that was the start of the protest anyways. It becomes destructive. They get to the capital and the president of the confederacy, Jefferson Davis, comes out and orders them to disperse. Tells them he is contemptuous of them. He tells them, go home to your families, do what women are supposed to do. They say, we are trying to feed our families, this is what women are supposed to do. He throws gold coins at them and tells them they will be fired on by soldiers if they dont leave within five minutes. All in all, this is not good press for the confederacy. Richmond gets a lot of attention. This is an illustration that comes from a northern newspaper mocking the women, showing them sending their husbands off to war early on, the southern belles and beautiful dresses, and after two years of war, they have become these sort of unattractive, animallike women in the streets stealing food. There are riots elsewhere, but richmond gets the most attention because it is the capital and also because of the way Jefferson Davis responded. Particularly the soldiers in the Confederate Army are not too thrilled when they hear the president suggested firing guns on women in the streets, some of whom might be their wives or sisters, who are just demanding food. So the response from the government will be important. It doesnt look to a lot of people like the confederate government does anything in response, but that is not the case. We will see that as we move forward. But i want to go back a little bit to what leads up to this. What causes this particular crisis . What are the factors going on in the confederacy . On some level, there are deep roots in the agricultural choices made in the 20 years prior to the civil war. Nobody expected a civil war, so they were preparing for that. We talked about this effective, projective, slaveholding economy that created great wealth. People invested their money and energy in land and slaves and in the cash crops of cotton primarily, but also, to a lesser extent, things like rice and sugar. Then in virginia, where we looked at some of that data, wheat being the key cash crop. A lot of energy put into getting crops to market quickly and shared quickly was focused on cotton and export, rather than spreading food around the south. That was less of a priority because that was not where money was to be made. It was an economically logical decision in the 20 years prior to the war. It ends up being a problem because this war is going on and on and on. We said last time, nobody thought it would last more than a couple months. Here they are two years in, all these problems have begun to emerge. We said last we will see fewer problems getting food to the people who need it in the United States, in the northern states, the union states, because there had been more effort put in the 1840s and 1850s in processing food crops and preparing them for distribution and markets. We talked about the stockyards in chicago and wheat being brought in there and processed in huge quantities and shipped out. There is a mechanism that already exists for getting pigs to markets, slaughtered, turned into edible and distributable meat. There is a process that already exists from doing that with wheat that is very much in place that can be used by the United States army. The confederacy does not have the similar equivalent for the distribution of food, because it had not been necessary before. They are trying to make up for that. They make up for it better than anyone was necessarily anticipating, but it is still not a perfect system. When we turn to the events of the war itself, where were they at the time in 1862 . They are in virginia and tennessee and the upper Mississippi River valley. These are the places that grew most of the food, particularly the big wheat farms of slaveholding states were in these regions that are more heavily invested, and have more armies trampling through them far more often in the first two years of the war than some of the places that would have primarily been growing things like cotton and sugar. That is another key factor. I mentioned the blockade has started to be effective. Not keeping out everything by 1863, but it makes a difference in what people can get a hold of and how much it costs. Wealthy people might be able to get things, but the people involved in the bread riots are really going to struggle to get commodities. Not bread so much, but coffee, things that had to be imported into the confederacy. Two other key factors tied to policies set in place by state and National Government in 1862 to help the confederacy wage war, the first of which is conscription, the draft. I said this last time. The draft of the confederacy already began in spring of 1862. When they are facing that string of defeats in the mississippi theater, in tennessee but the Mississippi River process, all of those things were leading up to a sense in spring of 1862 that the confederacy was struggling. The draft is part of that. What this does is take more men out of the field, out of the farm, and puts them into the army. It sets in motion a process that by the end of the civil war, will put over 80 of adults and older, teenaged, white men into the armies. That is a huge number. Under any circumstances, it will be difficult to keep the home front economy going when you are pulling that massive portion of the population and putting it in the army. That process is not complete by the spring of 1863, but the draft existed for almost a year and is having an impact. Another thing that is having an impact on labor available, is free black slaves and American Indian men to do work for the army. We heard about this with the guest lecture we had at the end of last month. These laws start at the state level. The state of virginia in fall of 1862, the state of North Carolina later in the fall of 1862, put laws in place to make it easier to gather and enforce slaveholders to give up their workers for several months at a time and send them to dig ditches, build fortifications, help build railroads, do the manual labor that the army needs. That is going to pull more people out of the fields. It starts in october when the harvest is still going on. It continues into the spring and march when spring planting needs to happen. Those factors are reducing the number of people available to grow and maintain and harvest the crops in many of those food producing areas of the confederacy, leading up to the bread riots. Another key factor in peoples ability to buy food if you live in a city and are not growing your own food, how you are getting it is you are buying it in your own local stores or from local producers. The cost of stuff is going up dramatically. Things are getting more expensive because of inflation. The confederacy prints massive amounts of Paper Currency. This gets underway in 1862 as well. By the spring of 1863, things are not looking great. This graph will show you the increase in the cost of gold. What it takes to buy a dollar worth of gold in confederate dollar bills. The real jump is a little bit later in the summer of 1863 and 1864. We are not quite there yet in the spring of 1863 when the bread riots are happening. But it is starting. Prices are going up. I know its hard to see these very tiny dates. This midway point is the start of 1863. We are seeing things really starting to shoot up in costs. The value of that confederate Paper Currency is going down. The states are printing their own currency. There is money everywhere. The more there is, the less it is worth. Which makes it harder to buy things, particularly for factory workers being paid in currency and their wages are not going up every time the inflation rate goes up. They are really struggling. That is another key factor in all of this. To put that inflation rate in more real terms, because not that many people are going around buying gold, there is a clerk in the Confederate War Department named john jones who every so often would write in his diary the cost of a barrel of flour. I went through and kind of picked some of the dates. And the cost of the barrel of flour. This is a barrel of flour going up in cost from 18, 20 before the war begins in january of 1861, to the spring of 1863 its doubled. That is a huge difference. Compared to where it is going, 500 a barrel by the end of the war. 40 does not seem so bad in comparison. In two years the cost of that barrel of flour has doubled and your wages have nowhere close to doubled. This is a huge factor in peoples experience of the war. I said before that we often interpreted the federal governments response, the National Response to all of these economic crises, as being insufficient, that they did not really do anything. Part of why we have seen it that way, why historians have seen it that way and why People Living through it saw it that way is because of the way they responded. They did things, but often their response was through National Policies and approaches that got implemented by local governments. So they gave local governments tools or expressly told local governments to do things that would help mitigate some of this crisis. So they dont get credit for having done anything. The county court, the county commissioners, the home guard put in place by the state, other locally available elected officials, or appointed officials are the ones doing these things. It doesnt seem like it is the confederacy, but often there is a National Policy behind that. So what are some examples of confederate Economic Policy . One everyone knew was the confederacy. One they did not like was the tax and kind. Big surprise, people dont want to pay taxes. No one ever wants to pay taxes. We have had that before. The confederacy has no national tax in currency or in gold. The tax in kind is a tax in what it is you produce. If you were a wheat farmer, it was a portion of your wheat crop. If you raise hogs or cows, its a portion of your livestock. Whatever it is you are producing, it is a portion of your crops. Its for regularly scheduled collection on a certain day. The tax collectors will be coming through. They take your taxes and whatever it is you grow. If you are already struggling, if you live on the margins and your farm is just barely enough to make it, having to hand over 10 or 15 of the government is a big deal. Particularly if you were struggling before the war and now your husband is away at the war, or you have been injured and you come home and are trying to keep things going, this tax can be a significant burden for people. This is a policy everyone knows is the confederate government and no one is happy about it. Another policy everyone knows of the confederate government that most people are not happy about is impressment of stuff. Not just impressment of labor. We talked about slaves and free people of color, both africanamerican and americanindian being impressed. But the government is also impressing food, supplies, wagons, harnesses, horses, mules, cows, whatever they need when they come through your community. There are two types of impressment. One is, the army is here. Its marching through your town, they will take what they need. There is not a lot of notice that they are coming, necessarily. You pretty much have to give them what they are asking for. They will give you a receipt. The receipt is for confederate currency, which we already discussed is declining in value. People are often very unhappy about this. Sometimes they fight back. Sometimes they get arrested. Sometimes people are shot for refusing to hand over goods to the confederate authorities. It is a legal form of impressment, but it is not predictable. Its kind of hard to know what will happen. The other form of impressment is these quotas that each community is expected. On top of your tax in kind, you are expected to hand over another portion of your stuff for impressment. In this case, you get a receipt for reimbursement. Tax in kind, you dont get directly reimbursed. You get a government and an army. Impressment, you get promise of direct reimbursement. Sometimes you get paid if you live close to richmond and you can go and demand payment, you can get it. Sometimes the local impressment agent will come back and bring your payment. This is one of these policies that is a National Policy. There are state laws and National Laws about this, but the work of doing it is done by local people. I have been studying this man named william, he lives in a county in central virginia, he was appointed. He was in the Confederate Army sent home and what they call detailed to do this work. He was part of a prominent family. He was a teacher at some point in his life. He was well respected in his community. This is important. You want someone who is well respected and seen as honest and they will keep good records of what they have taken. He spends the whole spring, summer, and fall traveling around his county, collecting information from people about what they are growing and what they are producing so he can come back and collect corn, wheat, meat, things the army needs to function. And either provide payment or a receipt. He will collect it every so often on a boat he bought and take it to richmond to hand over to the War Department. This is happening in counties in the confederacy on a daytoday basis. We have this government intruding in your production on your farms on a daily basis. We will see a number of other state policies. I did not line them all up here. There are so many of them. Virginia in particular, because they are in the middle of it all of the time, enacts additional state laws that add to this. For example, in virginia, they put their own spin on the conscription laws. The conscription law, which i mentioned but not but did not really talk about the , conscription law for the confederacy says if you have 20 or more slaves, you get one exemption from conscription. There are a lot of rules placed on this. By the end of the civil war, confederate conscription covers all white men ages 17 to 55. But if you have 20 or more slaves, you get an exemption. You are supposed to use the exemption for the overseer, the owner, the person who maintains the farm or who runs the farm on a daytoday basis. The reason for this is, you have to keep feeding people. You have to keep the farm going. You cant keep the farms going if there is no one making the slaves work. The conscription policy is designed to make sure there is someone on the ground making sure the slaves are doing the work and growing the food that the army needs to eat. What we will see is the states putting their own spin on conscription laws and saying, if you dont grow a food crop as your primary crop, wheat, corn, you raise pigs or cattle, whatever it is, if you are not growing food