The Confederacy: Life In The South

Summary

American History Hit: The Confederacy – Life in the South

Episode Release Date: March 10, 2025
Host: Don Wildman
Guest: Aaron Sheehan Dean, Professor at Louisiana State University

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Introduction to the Confederate Home Front

In the second episode of the series on the rebel states, host Don Wildman delves into the everyday lives of individuals living in the Confederate States during the American Civil War. Joined by historian Aaron Sheehan Dean, the discussion explores the societal structures, economic challenges, and profound changes that permeated the South from 1861 to 1865.

Population and Military Manpower Disparities

The Confederacy consisted of 11 seceded states with a combined population of approximately 9 million, comprising 5 million white southerners and 4 million black southerners (03:47). In stark contrast, the Union boasted 22 million inhabitants, highlighting a significant manpower disadvantage for the South. Dean notes, “There are 1.5 million white men of voting and military age in the South. That is not a lot of people to be fighting against a massive force up North” (04:02).

This disparity indicated the Confederacy’s reliance on the assumption of a short war, banking on the belief that Northern resources and manpower were finite. Additionally, the South placed considerable hope in the global power of cotton to secure diplomatic recognition and support, particularly from European nations.

Agrarian vs. Industrial Societies

The South’s commitment to an agrarian-based Jeffersonian republic clashed with the North’s budding industrialization. While the North was rapidly developing its industrial capacity, the South remained predominantly rural, focusing on agriculture and maintaining the plantation system. Dean explains, “The northern states have a much more dynamic economic system not based on slavery, that becomes a tremendous asset for the North” (05:07).

Despite this, the Confederate economy was not entirely devoid of industry, with areas like Tredegar Ironworks playing a crucial role in munitions production. However, the South’s reluctance to embrace extensive urban growth limited its industrial expansion, making it increasingly difficult to sustain a prolonged and costly war effort.

Foundational Ideals and White Supremacy

The Confederate States’ constitution explicitly protected the institution of slavery and was rooted in the ideology of white supremacy. Dean references Alexander Stevens’ cornerstone speech, which rejected Jeffersonian ideals of equality, stating, “Its cornerstone rests on slavery. And so if you believe that biology has organized the races and determined the fitness of those races, then it is logical to build a government that reflects that” (07:14).

This foundational belief not only justified secession but also shaped the Confederate social order, striving to maintain a hierarchical and racially segregated society.

Women’s Roles and Social Dynamics on the Home Front

As the war dragged on, the absence of men profoundly impacted Southern society. With enlistment rates between 70% and 90% of military-age men, communities were predominantly led by women. Dean highlights, “These communities were almost entirely headed by women, resulting in significant changes in economic production and social structures” (13:27).

Women took on roles that were traditionally held by men, managing plantations, overseeing enslaved laborers, and maintaining households. This shift not only altered gender dynamics but also planted the seeds for future social changes, challenging the rigid patriarchal norms of the South.

Economic Hardships: Hyperinflation and Food Shortages

The Confederacy faced severe economic challenges, including hyperinflation and food shortages. By 1863, the price of flour in Lynchburg, Virginia, had skyrocketed to $275 per barrel, a staggering figure at the time (31:43). Dean elaborates on the dire economic conditions, stating, “The war imposed a command economy where resources were managed by the state, leading to food scarcity and rampant inflation” (30:07).

These hardships fueled civilian unrest, culminating in events like the 1863 Bread Riot in Richmond. Dean recounts the chaos of the riot, where women, armed with axes and clubs, confronted Confederate authorities demanding access to scarce food supplies (34:18). This rebellion underscored the growing internal tensions and the population’s increasing desperation.

Social Change and the Legacy of the Confederacy

The prolonged conflict inevitably led to significant social transformations. Women’s increased responsibilities and the destabilization of traditional hierarchies foreshadowed future movements for gender equality and civil rights. Dean posits, “Southern women learned they could not rely upon men or the state, leading to a divergence from the expansive human rights-based women’s movement seen in the North” (20:19).

Moreover, the Confederacy’s failure to foresee the erosion of its societal structures highlighted the unpredictability of war’s impact. Dean reflects on Confederate leaders’ overconfidence, remarking, “Jefferson Davis was enormously overconfident about the security of his region's position” (40:10). This miscalculation contributed to the South’s inability to sustain its societal model amidst the immense pressures of war.

The Lost Cause and Historical Memory

Post-war, the narratives crafted by organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy sought to romanticize the Confederacy, ignoring the internal conflicts and economic struggles experienced by its citizens. Dean critiques this distortion, noting, “The Lost Cause presents a unified force of white Southerners on behalf of the Confederacy, eliding the real tensions and hardships” (42:03).

This selective historical memory facilitated the preservation of Confederate ideals and monuments, perpetuating a skewed understanding of the South’s wartime realities and the profound social changes that occurred.

Conclusion: The Unintended Consequences of War

The episode concludes by emphasizing the profound and often unintended consequences of the Civil War on Southern society. Dean underscores the resilience and adaptability of the South’s population, particularly women and black Southerners, who navigated the chaos of war to forge new social dynamics and economic realities. He reflects, “The pressures of war compelled both white and black Southerners to think creatively, laying the groundwork for future societal transformations” (43:58).

Don Wildman wraps up the episode by highlighting the complexity of Confederate life, shaped by warfare, economic turmoil, and evolving social roles, offering listeners a nuanced understanding of the Confederacy beyond the battlefield.

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Notable Quotes

• Aaron Sheehan Dean: “There are 1.5 million white men of voting and military age in the South. That is not a lot of people to be fighting against a massive force up North.” (04:02)

• Ryan Reynolds: “To be sure, the Confederates were quite clear both in the explanations of secession, that is the articles of secession that Mississippi and South Carolina pass in which they say we're doing this to protect slavery.” (06:59)

• Aaron Sheehan Dean: “The Lost Cause presents a unified force of white Southerners on behalf of the Confederacy, eliding the real tensions and hardships.” (42:03)

• Ryan Reynolds: “The war imposed a command economy where resources were managed by the state, leading to food scarcity and rampant inflation.” (30:07)

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Final Thoughts

This episode of American History Hit paints a vivid picture of Confederate life, highlighting the profound societal shifts and economic challenges that defined the South during the Civil War. Through insightful discussions with Professor Aaron Sheehan Dean, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and unintended consequences of the Confederacy’s fight for survival.

For those eager to explore more facets of American history, American History Hit offers a rich array of episodes that illuminate the past’s enduring influence on the present.

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Note: Advertisements and non-content segments have been excluded to focus on the episode’s substantive discussions.

Transcript

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The year is 1864. We're heading right down Main street here in Richmond, Virginia. You may have seen this place before, but it is a whole different city now. Richmond's the capital of the Confederacy, and it shows. The place has been transformed by the war. We got soldiers, government officials, all mixing with laborers. Come to where the work is, where the munitions are made. Look up the hill ahead. That's the Capitol building where the state government of Virginia stands shoulder to shoulder with the Confederate Congress. Packed in like sardines, they say. And down there to the left, that's the Tredegar Ironworks on the James River. Those hulking buildings spewing smoke. Hard as it is now, you should be glad you weren't here last year in April. The protests, the looting, grabbing whatever they could get their hands on. Flour, shoes. It was a mess. And things haven't settled down much since. Drunken sailors, wounded Soldiers on the mend or not. By the way, keep your hand on your wallet. There are pickpockets everywhere. Sure wasn't like this back before the war all across the South. Makes you wonder if it'll ever come back. Hello, and welcome back to American History Yet I'm your host, don wildman. From 8 February 1861 until the spring of 1865, 9 million people of the 11 seceded states were ruled from the Virginian State Capitol building in Richmond. In this second episode of our series on the rebel states, we're leaving the grandiose halls of Richmond behind, instead veering into the everyday lives of everyday people in the Confederate states. Joining us once again is Aaron Shendine. Aaron is a professor at Louisiana State University. And we're going to explore what the Confederates planned for their society and what life was really like on the home front in the South. Hello, Aaron. Nice to have you back.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah, thanks for having me again.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Okay, so we have 11 seceded states population of which was how much?

[Ryan Reynolds]

9 million total. So that's. There are 5 million white southerners and 4 million black southerners.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Compare that to 22 million in the Union states. Boy, right there you have a huge disparity to fight a war with.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You do. And so you fight that war if you think that that manpower difference. And it's about a 5 to 2 manpower difference in terms of military age. Men. You only invest in that if you think this is going to be a short war.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And you're not going to actually need to call on all of those men because Lincoln has a basically unlimited supply of men.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

There's 1.5 million white men of voting and military age in the South. That is not a lot of people to be fighting against a massive force up North.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's true. And so I think. I mean, that tells us something about their expectations. They are also banking very heavily on the power of cotton to shift the kind of diplomatic position of the Confederacy and compel recognition. They initiate a boycott, famously. We can talk about that because that has enormous ramifications inside the Confederacy, although it was directed outside.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

This is one of the big differences. I mean, certainly culturally, but technologically, even between the north and the south at this point. And it's happening everywhere in the world. The difference between an agrarian versus an industrialized society. The north and the south are on two different roads.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They are. I wouldn't necessarily call the north yet industrialized. It is industrializing. But the overwhelming majority of Northerners are still living in rural places and they're earning their living from agriculture. But the north has already done a lot more work to develop its industrial capacity. And the disparities are quite important for the war. So, for instance, there are 100,000 industrial workers in the south and there are 100,000 industrial facilities in the North. And again, if the war lasts six weeks, that doesn't really factor in. But. But over four years of expensive modern war, having that industrial base, having a much more liquid and dynamic economic system not based on slavery, that becomes a tremendous asset for the North.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The ideal in the south, of course, is the Jeffersonian republic, which is of course agrarian based. This is how they want to live. This is the plan, huh?

[Ryan Reynolds]

It is. Although there are younger people who push against this. That is the kind of the generation that comes of age in the 1840s and 1850s who experience railroads and also slavery, and they think those things are compatible. They are certainly not imagining a world without slavery, but they would like to be able to incorporate technology in their world in a way that will enable the success of slavery. An older generation, as you say, really pursued sort of exclusively an agrarian ideal. And the result is very small cities compared to northern cities. Richmond is the second largest city in the Confederacy. It has 40,000 people.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Right.

[Ryan Reynolds]

There are probably two dozen cities in the north larger than that. New York has a million. Boston, Philadelphia, 750,000. I mean, these are. They're bigger by several orders of magnitude.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah, right. Obviously, enslavement figures prominently in this plan. I mean, it's an absolute necessity as far as the plantation system is going. And this is inscribed in their new Constitution. Right.

[Ryan Reynolds]

To be sure, the Confederates were quite clear both in the explanations of secession, that is the articles of secession that Mississippi and South Carolina pass in which they say we're doing this to protect slavery. And as you say in the organic law itself.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Alexander Stevens is the famous one who makes the cornerstone speech that everything that we are basing this on is based on their understanding of white supremacy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes. I mean, he basically denounces Jefferson and Jefferson's contention that all men are created equal and then says this government is founded on exactly the opposite idea. Its cornerstone rests on slavery. And so if you believe that biology has organized the races and determined the fitness of those races, then according to Stevens, it is logical to build a government that reflects that rather than pushes against the inevitability that biology will produce.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

I've always wondered this. Was this going to be the name of this country? The Confederate States of America? Even if they'd won, that was the.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Name in all of the kind of official material. And so it would have been. Yes, I mean, officially, it's the csa, The Confederate States of America.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Interesting. The Confederate States of America only existed during this war. So we're doing a bit of speculation here, But I want to know how they saw the home front developing after the fact. You know, had they won the war, how was life in the Confederate states going to be?

[Ryan Reynolds]

So there is an expectation, because southerners grow things that they anticipate they will be able to provide for themselves both during the war and after the war. And they imagine a kind of a very rosy future in which the control of cotton gives them tremendous power around the world. And in 1860, that looks to be the case. Britain And France derived 70% of their cotton from the Confederate states, that is the Southern states of the United States, in 1860. And so it's sort of logical that they would imagine that gives us a kind of clout that the north can't match, selling wheat and sort of odds and ends. In fact, Europe was actually quite dependent, particularly Great Britain, on the northern wheat crop during the Crimean War. The. The exports from the northern states to northwestern Europe for wheat become very important. And so losing that actually becomes a key part of the leverage during the war.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

And they do see developing industries, of course, catching up with the North.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah, I mean, they believe that those industries that are necessary basically, to enable what they do. So textiles, and there's already a textile industry in places like Savannah and other parts of the lower South. Much of the textile manufacturing happened in the northern states, and southern leaders would have liked to relocate. That actually happens after the civil war. In the 1880s and 90s, all of the textile manufacturing in the US moves out of the mill towns of New England and down to both sides of the. Of the Appalachian mountains, and then eventually to Texas and then Mexico and, of course, today, Indonesia. So they do anticipate industrialization, but have a very limited amount. And also they do not want the kind of big urban growth that defines so much of the late antebellum era in the north. The growth of huge cities that leads to the growth of a white working class that may not see its interest in line with slavery. So there is deep reluctance to have serious or to imagine really serious and urban growth.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Sure. It's interesting to speculate on the development of unions in the South. All sorts of things that happened in the north would have to happen in the south as well. The support for the war effort in general is not as complete as we think. Of it as being. Is it so?

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's certainly not as complete as the lost cause would tell us. So that is the post war mythologizing of the Confederacy gives us a portrait of every white Southerner uniformly expressing solidarity through all of the war. There are important pockets of unionism all over the south. And these are both in places, big regions like eastern Tennessee and parts of western North Carolina and parts of western Virginia. And then there are sort of isolated Unionist enclaves in Atlanta, for instance, or in Mobile in New Orleans. That being said, the vast majority of white southerners do, in fact, support the Confederacy.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The.

[Ryan Reynolds]

There was a kind of period, I would say, in which historians wanted really to look for evidence of white Southerners resisting the Confederacy and the overwhelming number of men. I mean, the enlistment rates in the army are astronomical beyond anything we could possibly imagine today. And although there's coercion involved in that, there is Also, particularly in 1861, 62, a great enthusiasm to support this new nation. And one of the interesting things is that places that were slow to secede, like the Shenandoah valley of Virginia, are often then the places that generate the most support over the course of the war for the Confederacy. Yes, when they convert, they convert pretty hard to becoming Confederates.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

You can see in that secession process a bit of a sort of microcosm of what it would be like down the road as far as moderates versus conservatives and the way the CSA would have played out, certainly in its approach to the north, to the United States.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Both in approach to the north and to the South. And so this is one of the stories that the Lost Cause in particular tried to ignore was the degree to which there were conservatives in the antebellum south who saw secession as an opportunity to basically roll back some of the Democratic gains of the 1840s and 50s. This is the period when universal white manhood suffrage emerges, when there are more elected offices, as opposed to appointed offices. And in Georgia and in Virginia, during the secession convention, and mind you, those are convened only to consider the question of secession. And yet they basically expand their orbit on their own capacity and begin talking about changing the rates of taxation for slaves to lower that rate of taxation, to kind of reorganize in a much more hierarchical way the society of the Confederacy going forward so that it will look much less democratic than it was as a part of the southern United States. Those don't generally pan out, but we see the kind of impulse there during that period of secession.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The Civil War has some little bit of the effect that World War II has on America where the women are left at home and have to sort of fill in for a lot of the men. That had happened in a big way throughout the Confederacy during the war.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes, I mean, this is the other side. So the enlistment rates vary in most southern states. Between 70 and 90% of military age men, which is. I mean, compare that to today's United States. There are one and a half million people in uniform in a country with 330 million. I mean, there's hardly any country today that has an enlistment rate even among military. The military age population higher than 10%, 25% is unimaginable. And these are places three times that. And the result is that it means that in many Southern communities there are effectively no white men between the ages of 15 and 50. That's effectively the catch age barriers for the Confederate draft. So these are communities almost entirely sort of headed by women. And it produces all sorts of changes in the way that economic production happens. The question of who disciplines enslaved laborers. That burden now falls to women who had generally not been a part of that. Although there's been good writing recently on female slaveholders. Women move into industrial work. They certainly do a great deal of the agricultural labor that had previously been done by men.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

And it's going to have an effect, you know, had they won the counterfactual, gee, women are now going to have a bigger role in this society than they ever had before, which is going to fly in the face of all those white men who want to steer, turn the clock back.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Well, I'll tell you, one of the favorite letters that I ever found in an archive was from a Florida soldier sort of along the panhandle of Florida on below Alabama. And he wrote to his wife, this is 1863, and he said, you tell me you have raised near a hundred head of hogs. Ain't that doing well? You're a better farmer than I am. So he just sort of plainly admits, I've never been able to get a hundred head of hog. Whatever you're doing, you're obviously doing it better. And so then the question that I have is, what happens when he returns after a war and wants to sort of restore himself to the head of the household. But in fact, his wife is better at being a farmer and managing this household. 100 head hogs, pretty good size herd. It's a complicated enterprise. And he's not the only one that's aware of these shifts. And so in a way, not that we want the Confederacy to have Extended any longer in time. But it would be fascinating indeed to know sort of what do the gender dynamics look like?

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

In the south, when these men come back after four years of women having done industrial work and office work and.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Tons of agricultural work, Nevermind the racial dynamics. I mean, it's unthinkable, of course, to put the genie back in the bottle here, but if you did, I mean, everything has changed.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes. So the nature of slavery, and there have been great studies of this over the last many years of what happens during war, the kind of erosion of authority that happens even in places where the Union army isn't. Wherever the Union army is, that erosion proceeds at a very rapid pace. But even in, let's say the middle of Alabama or the middle of Georgia, where Union forces don't reach until late in the war, the absence of white men, the kind of tenuous control that white women are able to exercise over huge numbers of enslaved people, and of course, the resistance of enslaved people that has been omnipresent since the beginning of slavery means that those dynamics have changed enormously. And what that would look like in the post war period is quite hard to say. I mean, there's a great. Another letter series between a husband and wife in Alabama. And the woman is writing to her husband, trying to reassure him that although it's just her, the slaves on the plantation are sort of quiescent and things are okay. And she basically has deputized one of the older enslaved men to manage the labor force. In every couple of letters, she observes that somebody escaped and ran away, but that things are generally quite calm. And it's clear if you read these letters in sequence that this man was managing the exodus of all of the slaves. Because the last letter that she writes is he left and now no one is here. And you know, that kind of resistance was extremely hard to manifest in the pre war United States. And wartime opens up all sorts of sort of weird possibilities.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

I'll be back with more American history after the short break.

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

As the, you know, lost Cause unfolds and generations forward. You got the Daughters of the Confederacy. I mean, this new generation of women. You wonder how much were those attitudes formed in the absence of men, you know, these hardened attitudes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

One of the great conclusions that Drew Gilpin Faust, the famous Civil War historian, made many years ago in thinking about the nature of the women's rights movement in the United States, which was led overwhelmingly by Northern white women. Southern black women were pursuing their own strategies. But we're thinking now about the 1880s and 90s and 1900s, and her argument was that the women who went through the Civil War learned they could not rely upon men or the state. The Confederacy itself failed them as well. And so they do not participate in the kind of expansive human rights based women's rights movement that we know as the women's movement today. Instead, they pursue sort of household autonomy, and they pursue through their own self discipline, the protection of the people around them. And so it's a sharp divergence in sort of historical experience. And it grows, as you say, from the failures during the war of the promise of paternalism that had always been the obligation in the pre war south is if women sort of participate in this or are compelled, at least Southern white men provide protection. And during the war, they fail, protection fails. And that's the chief goal of paternalism.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The south is a huge geographical area. How much of that territory was involved in the war versus left to its own devices?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah, I mean, the war comes very episodically to places obviously along the coast, along the rivers, the avenues of invasion, but huge swaths of the Confederacy, even central Virginia, sort of south, central, what we call call today Southside Virginia, that region is not touched until 1865. That is kind of south of Appomattox. Famously, Edmund Ruffin, who fires the first shot in the war, his plantation is sacked by Union soldiers in March of 1865. And until then it had remained its own enclave. And that's true certainly for much of the Deep south, where Union soldiers didn't reach until 1864 or 1865. Those places aren't exempt from the pressures of war because the lack of food, the gross inflation, that was an endemic problem in the Confederacy from the beginning. We could talk about, about currency and these sorts of problems, and then the effect of the boycott, limiting the movement of goods, and the Union capture of railroads. But those are places operating without military pressure. They are, they are changing as a result of kind of the big tectonic forces of war.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

And of course, they're fighting for the right for states to be the focus of this nation rather than the nation itself. I mean, that's the whole idea of the Civil War, is to defeat federal power or at least minimize it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes. I mean, one of the many ironies of this is that in fact, the Confederacy becomes a bigger leviathan than the Union government does. The Confederacy imposes a tax in kind. They impose a draft. The first draft in American history is imposed by the Confederacy. The first income tax, a whole raft of taxes. And the result is a sharp divergence and split, which we talked about a Little bit in Southern politics. The day to day effect of that is that civilians felt quite beleaguered because the tax in kind was not a tax that you paid in currency, but a tax in goods. So they could look at an 1860 census, the tax officers here, and see, in 1860, you produced 40 sides of bacon. We expect that maybe you were only producing 20, but that means we get to claim 10% or 2. So we're going to now take two of your bacons. There's a good chance that you don't have even that many left. And so the result of the tax in kind was a great deal of paranoia and justifiable paranoia that government agents were coming to take things. People are hiding foodstuffs. They're running cattle and hogs into the woods to avoid impressment agents. And it sets up a very adversarial relationship between southern citizens and the Confederate state. Yeah, in a time of war, when what you need is solidarity and participation, the pressures, and these are legitimate pressures, the Confederate army needs food. And so you requisition that from the places where it exists, but the result is less food for civilians. And that creates enormous internal tensions in the Confederacy.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

As the war drags onward, the graph line of fear among the populace just skyrockets. I mean, they're realizing that this is an entire destruction of their society at hand.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah, I mean. I mean, this is one of the fascinating things about war, is it is hard to see that if you are in it for us only four years of war, we can sort of see the arc of that conflict very clearly. The erosion of slavery. A half a million enslaved people flee during the course of the war. That's a seventh of the whole population in slavery in 1860. Nothing remotely on that scale could have ever occurred without the war. And yet there are still three and a half million people enslaved. And so many white Southerners sort of cling to the belief that whatever wartime hardships or changes might be occurring, they can weather those. This is God testing us, and we will see our way through to victory. And then sort of magically, things will return. And of course, as we're talking here today, like, the scale of changes, it's hard to imagine, even with Confederate victory, anything like an antebellum south returning in social order or economic relations or anything.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

They move from being sort of naively hoping that this is only gonna be a short war and not affect them very much to realizing they're fighting for their survival, for the survival of this society and this system. In the most Dire circumstance. How much was that felt in real time by the everyday person?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Certainly, I think the people on the home front in some ways felt that more acutely, particularly as the shortages of food, as inflation made it harder to access food. Soldiers were delivered resources by a quartermaster.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And they were not sufficient resources. And there are lots of complaints about rations, but those rations are available because the Confederate state really takes over the food supply in many parts of the Confederacy and is reallocating that to soldiers at the expense of civilians. And so you can. I mean, there is a sense in which you see civilians in a way, coming to a realization of the scale of change that's being forced upon them before soldiers who are sort of continuously hoping for another climactic battle that will suddenly shift the course of the war and will lead to Confederate victory. And then with victory, a sequence of other things will happen. And if you had a. A wife or a mother or a sister at home, who was, who was talking to you, you might have. You might know what's actually happening, but you might not. And you might sort of be inside the bubble of the army.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

That's what I. That's why I'm asking about the awareness throughout the entire south, because, you know, so much of this is about perception. And so if you are living in an area which is a lot of the south, where you never saw these burned out farms, or you never saw the marching troops, and of course, there's no television, there's nothing else except newspapers occasionally telling you that it was real bad up there in Virginia, you wouldn't have the reaction that we think people would naturally have at this point.

[Ryan Reynolds]

No. And it's important, I think, for listeners to remember just how sort of decentralized the 19th century is, as you say, in terms of media, how local most people's lives are. And so, I mean, this becomes the major fault line in Confederate politics is the people in areas where they have been invaded and occupied are willing to empower a very strong Confederate state to do what it needs to preserve itself. And the critics of the Confederate state tend to be in those places where the Union army has not reached. So they are not feeling the pressures of war in the same way. And the result is they are generally antagonistic towards Davis and his kind of nationalizing efforts to capture the resources that are necessary in order to present the war.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

But where it does affect them, where the war is landing, is horrific. And I cannot imagine that the average citizen in this area of the country had any clue what was coming. This was a Full on, all out war. And they didn't expect that to happen.

[Ryan Reynolds]

No, certainly nothing on the scale of this. And you can see this both north and South. When Lincoln makes his militia call after the firing at Fort Sumter, he calls up 75,000 90 day men. So he expects 75,000 troops to be enlisted for three months and that should solve the problem that he calls an insurrection. Eventually the Union will put under arms 2.1 million men and they will fight over the course of four years. So it's a far cry. And the Confederacy puts, you know, probably 900,000 men in total under arms and fighting for this way. And the death toll is hard to imagine. And this for me is really the kind of most fascinating and horrifying part, is the way in which you gradually commit yourself to a conflict that eventually consumes an unimaginable number of people. The contemporary figure that most historians agree on is 750,000 dead as a result of the Civil War. An equivalent mortality toll in a conflict in today's United states would be 5.5 million. Yes, and that number is so hard to comprehend. The American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, in terms of battlefield losses is 4200 or 4500. Many more dying from suicide in the years after. But even, Even Vietnam was 55,000.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And so we're not. I mean, the scale of it is really incomprehensible. And yet both Southerners and Northerners sort of invested themselves gradually and often almost willfully blinding themselves to the true scale of what was happening. Until you arrive at a figure of 750,000 dead.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Well, again, it would be only in the newspapers that so many people had read that kind of stuff. And horrifying as it was, it wasn't necessarily affecting them where they were. One thing that is endemic throughout is this. The starvation crises that come down the road, the resources that are dried up because the armies are using so much and hyperinflation starts and all sorts of things cause great waves of riots even in Richmond.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So there's a huge amount of suffering, to be sure, among civilians because of access to food. I tend to think that there is not it. And admittedly it's hard to prove that someone died of starvation because they would typically have contracted a disease because their vulnerability decreases and people don't typically narrate the death from starvation. You just sort of fade out. That being said, it's the war is in still, in relative terms only four years and it's in an agricultural place, so that there are in Fact still resources that are keeping people alive, though, with great suffering. And as you said, there are riots, famously, in Richmond, the bread riot of 1863. There are riots in other Southern cities. Expressions of real anger and frustration among particularly women on the home front who see that there is grain stockpiled in warehouses that's intended to be used for soldiers and is not reaching them. Now, again, that having been said at the local and state and federal level, there are sometimes creative responses, even within this most conservative Confederacy, to thinking about public welfare. The state does react, and they recognize soldiers, wives, particularly widows. The widows and orphaned children need to be protected, if only for kind of rhetorical purposes in the. In the newspaper, so that we can claim that. That men who have fallen, that their families are taken care of. And so there are efforts at all those levels of government to target resources. This then produces what's effectively a kind of command economy in which the labor and all of the resources are really being managed by the state. That irony is generally left unnoted by both contemporaries and. And later historians.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

The numbers are pretty extraordinary. Hyperinflation makes food just unaffordable in certain areas. Flour, $275 a barrel in Lynchburg, Virginia. That's incredible. That's a huge amount of money back then.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah. You wouldn't pay that today.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I mean, I think in Richmond, in fact, by the very end of the war, it's actually four or five times that amount. Thousand dollars for a barrel of flour.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And what it tells you is that the most common staple, resources are unavailable. I mean, I've seen, you know, I've seen letters from soldiers advising their families to plant onions and turnips and cabbage things underground. Soldiers moving through won't necessarily take the fruit hanging from orchards. Soldiers take that, the corn, that sort of, you know, you can. You can stay on your horse and harvest it. All of that invading soldiers take or Confederate soldiers take. And so there is this turn sort of inward. That's kind of 1863. 64. The question, I think, I'm sure that if the war had persisted through the winter of 1865. 66, there would have been terrific starvation.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And a horrible fatality toll from the destruction of resources. Particularly if you think about Sherman coming through Georgia, where he's destroying resources simply to deny people access to them.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

He admits 9, 10 of the destruction is simple waste.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

I want to illustrate the bread riot that you're talking about. I mean, the date is April 2, 1863. And these are massive riots with militia called out, orders to open fire. They didn't because the women went home. But these women were armed with axes and clubs and knives, chanting bread or blood. You know, this is a major emergency. And it's this kind of dissent, which is a nice word for it, that causes more controls to be, you know, imposed upon the people by this government.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's true. And I mean the bread riot really comes at the end of a very bad week for the Confederacy in Richmond. The public, the public water system fails and people have to start going up to the old colonial era. Well, on Capitol Hill to get water. There is a huge two days before the bread riots, there's a huge explosion on Brown's island that wakes everybody up in the middle of the night. Brown's island is out in the middle of the James river. And it was a, it was a, basically an ordinance depot factory that had exploded. And what shocked Richmond residents was that it was staffed almost entirely by women. So these are women doing industrial work and dangerous industrial work who are effectively casualties of the war in the, in this capacity. I mean, the, the production of gunpowder is a very dicey business in the 19th century. And then we reach the bread riot itself in which women are angry because they know that, as I say, bread is flour has been stored in government controlled warehouses, but they cannot find it on the shelves. And during the riot in which soldiers are called out And Jefferson Davis himself comes out of the Capitol and sort of pleads with the women to go home and then. And then tells them that the soldiers have an order to fire on them unless they disperse. And they do disperse. But it's a remarkable crisis moment that the Confederate president, sort of obligated to this system of paternalism and the protection of women, would bring uniformed soldiers out to fire on Confederate women.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

It does not fit into the chivalric ideal that was pursued at the beginning of all of this.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The treatment in the newspaper is to represent these women as kind of harridans and witches. The caricatures of them are kind of scrawny and scraggly and hideous to kind of marginalize them as criminal women, as prostitutes.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And the Lost Cause then reads that as sort of ironclad. But in fact, we've had good studies. These are just ordinary women basically concerned about. Yeah. Concerned about feeding their families.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Exactly. It's a be careful what you ask for situation, because you've created a crucible, really, of social change by empowering these folks at home simply by the absence of these, you know, white masters. The white men are gone. So therefore, here we go. You know, it happens every war. Things happen on the home front that alter things after the fact.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Confederate leaders are clearly not anticipating what the pressures of war, as you say, in a crucible, will do. There is this expectation that they will be able to manage this conflict with no challenge into the standing social order. I mean, the purpose of the Confederacy is actually to kind of fix in time the social order as it existed in 1860, that this will remain forever, and that can't possibly happen as a result. And this is very much, you know, kind of unintended consequences and the unpredictability of the ways in which wars develop and evolve and what they do, particularly. I mean, we know this in the United States in terms of the Double V campaign, the efforts of African Americans to acquire civil rights during World War II. It can change the political landscape quite dramatically and often in the opposite way than the people that launched the war intended.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Sure. I'm sure that those. More conservatives. Confederates were thinking. Those leaders anyway, were thinking about the West. Thank goodness the west is going to be there because that's going to give them that. That place to go to all those new thinkers.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes. There's a widespread expectation that the Confederacy will be able to acquire not just the Western parts of the United States, but then perhaps parts of the Caribbean to seize Cuba or Haiti. These are still. Cuba is still a slave society in 1860. And they have terrific ambitions, sort of imperial ambitions in their classic form, that is looking south and west. And there are Confederate campaigns in the west. There is also the awkward relationship with the French invasion of Mexico, which happens during the American Civil War, in which Napoleon III's deputizes Maximilian to come and claim the throne back for kind of Latin Catholic Dom. And the Confederates are they more or less sort of tolerate that. That is the reintroduction of monarchy into North America after it had been purged. We thought for good by the second decade of the 19th century. And that also gives us some insight into the expected social order, that they will be comfortable with a monarch on the throne of Mexico, that that's better than a democratic Mexico.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

It paints a pretty naive picture of these planners, doesn't it, that they didn't really see the changes ahead that were inevitably going to happen.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah. I think the generous explanation is that cotton is so powerful and it positions the south so dominantly in what seems like the global economy, that they can't imagine a world in which that doesn't produce success for them. And this, too, is a kind of cautionary tale about humility, about being able to take other perspectives. Famously, Ulysses Grant, In April of 1861, when the war has just barely started, he's writing to his father and he says, I don't understand what's going on. Don't Southerners know that if there's a rebellion, a slave rebellion, we would rally to their defense? And if they actually persist in this, Grant says what will happen during a war is that India and Algeria and parts of Egypt will come online as cotton suppliers, and it will drop the price of cotton globally, and it will decimate the South.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Grant is not the world's most capacious thinker. He's a fantastically effective general. But he is spot on in his assessment of what the war does to the cotton market and to the South. And if this, you know, if somebody like Grant could see that coming, then we ask, how did Jefferson Davis not see it? He is enormously overconfident about the security of his region's position.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yeah, right. It is a fantasy. They are living in the real final chapter. The final word on this, really, about everyday life in the Confederacy, is the emergence of women. I mean, we've already talked about it in certain regards, but it's very similar to what's happening in the north in terms of the empowerment of women, the vote coming down the road, all of what happens in the late 1800s into the 1900s is going to happen in the south as well, and is already happening because of the Civil War, isn't it?

[Ryan Reynolds]

It is. Although I think Southern women are processing that in a slightly different way, partly because they are experiencing it under the kind of catastrophe of loss. Right. Of military defeat. And so where Northerners exit the war in a kind of optimistic mode, looking to the possibilities that union and free labor will give to the world, Confederates learn, I think, that is, white Southerners learn a much more bitter lesson about caution and conservatism. There is a real turn back, even among leading white women in the south in the 1860s and 70s, to really restore a kind of male hierarchy in order to compensate for emancipation in some respects. That is, emancipation itself opens up the collapse of the whole Southern social order. And so for kind of elite white women, the Verena Davises of the world, the security that paternalism provides is at least one form of stability in this enormously unpredictable post war world.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

And they will be the ones that really tell that lost cause story. The Daughters of the Confederacy put up those monuments down the road.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah. The Ladies Memorial Associations, and then in the 1880s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, these big national organizations. And they tell a very selective history of what that war was like. Right. Eliding all of the discussion that we've had about the tensions that real people experienced throughout the war and presenting this as a kind of unified force of white Southerners on behalf of the Confederacy.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Yes. Trying to reclaim the power that they grew up with or that they heard about in previous generations, based, of course, on racist feelings. But it is an extraordinary similarity in some regards. Just because societies change, and certainly under the conditions of war, everyday life in the Confederacy was never going to be every day. It was born of chaos. It will end in chaos.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It certainly compels from people a level of imagination and creativity that we actually might not expect from white slaveholding Southerners. Certainly black Southerners had lived improvisatory lives for centuries. That is, the pressures of slavery had compelled them to think creatively. And we see this, of course, in the music and the art and the cuisine of the black South. And in a way, white Southerners aren't sort of compelled into that position until this, until the Civil War. And as I say, there are moments of kind of surprising creativity in terms of statecraft, in terms of policy making. Those things are not sufficient to protect the Confederacy or hold off defeat. And in a way, those efforts are really ignored by white Southerners. They sort of pretend like that didn't happen. And it's left to black Southerners to kind of maintain the tradition of self help, of problem solving in creative ways as opposed to the kind of rigidity and closed society that white Southerners build after the Civil War.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Within the African American society down there, you're having some similarity, some changes as well, within the genders, to be sure.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I mean, the famous memoir of Susie King Taylor who becomes a kind of launderer for the Union Army. This is in Charleston, South Carolina. Women who seize opportunities, just as some white women had done to either better their own status to protect their families, often in collaboration with the Union Army. And the Union army is not necessarily a friend to many black Southerners despite its intent on emancipation, but it is born of the bitter experience that self preservation and hopefully liberation will come at their own hands, that is at the hands of black Southerners themselves. And the pressures of war produce fascinating stories in all parts of the Confederacy. Black people opening stores and sort of finding moments of exploiting the kind of fluidity of war to acquire more autonomy to build their own resource base for a very uncertain post war.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Doctor. Aaron Sheehan Dean is a professor at Louisiana State University, having edited a companion to the US Civil War and the Civil War the Final Year told by those who lived it. What's to come in your writing, Aaron?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Well, this fall, I'm happy to say, University of North Carolina Press will be publishing a new book called Fighting with the how 17th century history shaped the American Civil War.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Fascinating. So glad to have you on the show again.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Thank you very much.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American history hit with me. Don Wildman, So grateful for your support.

[Don Wildman]

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

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[Ryan Reynolds]

What's up? Who's bragging?

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And we were in our swimsuits.

[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Again, not supermodels.

[Don Wildman]

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[Aaron Sheehan Dean]

Whatever.

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[Ryan Reynolds]

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