The numerical strength of the Confederate army Part 4

CONCLUSION

There are two remarks of General Adams to which, before closing, I should like to call attention. He states that the foreigners in the Union army were more than counterbalanced by our drastic conscription ("Military Studies," p. 246). Now it appears from official reports that there were 494,000 foreigners in the Union army, so that he must have supposed that the conscription law produced about 500,000 soldiers. It actually produced, east of the Mississippi, 81,992 men from February, 1862, when the first law was pa.s.sed, to February, 1865. We cannot suppose that the additions from the States west of the Mississippi--Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas--could have been even one-fourth as numerous. The military population was about one-third as large, but by 1863 that territory was overrun by the Federal armies. But if we put these at 20,000, we have only 101,992, instead of the half million which Mr. Adams supposes. And if we should add the 76,000 men which the conscription officers, magnifying their diligence, _guessed_ had been driven into the army by enlistment to avoid conscription we would then have only 177,993.

Again, General Adams says:

"As respects mere numbers, it is capable of demonstration that at the close of the struggle the preponderance was on the side of the Confederacy, and distinctly so. 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. This is the record:

Officers and men in _all_ the Confederate armies, February, 1865, aggregate for duty, 160,000; aggregate present and absent, 358,000 (W.

R., iv. iii. p. 1182).

General Marcus Wright, an expert authority, estimates the strength of the Confederate army _at the close of the war_ thus:

Present 157,613 Absent 117,387 ------- Total 275,000

And of the Union army thus:

Present 797,807 Absent 202,700 --------- Total 1,000,507

If General Adams is right, one cannot but ask, where were the other 542,000 men, over and above the 358,000 shown by the official report alluded to have been on the rolls? The 90,000 men in Northern prisons will not help the situation, for they were not exactly available as part of the "fighting strength of the Confederacy." Compare also the fact that there were mustered out of the Union army at the end of the war 1,034,000 men; and there were, in all the Confederacy, surrendered Confederate soldiers to the number of 174,000 only, and this included all who were paroled, whether in hospital, or at their homes, as well as those in arms.

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 General 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.

When immediately after the surrender at Appomattox General Meade asked General Lee how many men he had in his army, the latter replied that he had on his entire front, from Richmond to Petersburg, not more than 29,000 muskets. "Then," said General Meade, "we had five to your one."

On the whole I think we may still claim for the armies of the Southern Confederacy the encomium penned by Virgil nearly two thousand years ago:

"Exigui numero, sed bello vivida virtus."

POSTWORD

The arguments adduced in the preceding pages are believed by the writer to be valid and sufficient to refute the conclusion reached by Colonel Livermore, the Hon. Charles Francis Adams, and others, that there was in the Confederacy a "minimum of 1,160,000 effectives, to which we must add 117,000 men from the Border States, giving a total Confederate strength of 1,277,000." I have not attempted to give definite figures as to the actual enrollment in the Southern armies. My argument is of necessity largely based on the probabilities of the situation,--it does not profess to be demonstrative, or final. But "probability is the guide of life"; and I believe I have blazed a path by which future students of the subject, having before them the muster rolls of the Confederate army will be able to reach more definite conclusions in this important subject--conclusions, however, not seriously at variance with those stated in these pages.[15]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Gen. Adams says: "Computations based on the census returns tend to show that at the very lowest estimate the increase of time of military service would represent an increase of at least 30 per cent. in effectives." Id. p. 284.

[2] Our critic has made an error here: 12 per cent, of 1,000,000, i.e., 120,000, so that his aggregate should be 1,420,000.

[3] See Merivale's History of the Romans, III, 416, and IV, 298 and 343, and V. 386.

[4] In the first edition of Col. Henderson's work, cited above, he actually stated that the element of foreigners in the Southern armies was almost as large as in the Northern armies!

[5] Gen. Marcus J. Wright puts this number at only 65,387. But cf.

Mansfield's Life of Grant, p. 338.

[6] See a valuable discussion of our subject in a pamphlet ent.i.tled "Acts of the Republican Party," by Cazenove G. Lee, who wrote under the _nom de plume_ of "C. Gardner," Winchester, Va., 1906, pp. 59-69.

[7] I acted as adjutant of the Third Brigade A. N. Va., in the Gettysburg campaign. Even then, in the third year of the war, and in that best equipped army, the returns showed only 1480 muskets to 1941 men in the brigade. One-fourth of the command was without arms.

[8] "The Government, at the opening of 1864, estimated that the Conscription would place four hundred thousand men in the field." Lee did not share this belief. By the end of the year it was, in his opinion, "diminis.h.i.+ng, rather than increasing, the strength of his army."--Letter of Dec. 31, 1864. See "R. E. Lee, Man and Soldier," p.

591, by Thos. Nelson Page.

[9] Thus, to quote that able and expert authority Gen. Marcus J. Wright: Battles around Richmond (1862), Lee, 80,835; McClellan, 115,249. At Antietam, Confederates, 35,255; Federals, 87,164. At Fredericksburg, Confederates, 78,110; Federals, 110,000. At Chancellorsville, Confederates, 57,212; Federals, 131,661. At Gettysburg, Confederates, 64,000; Federals, 95,000. At the Wilderness, Confederates, 63,981; Federals, 141,160.

[10] A consideration of the portentous difference between the number of men borne on the regimental rolls and the number actually available on the battlefield, suggests that it may be in large degree accounted for by the number of men detailed for service in the industrial army.

Thus in the army of Northern Virginia just before Fredericksburg, Nov.

20, 1862:

Aggregate present and absent 153,773 Aggregate present for duty 86,569 Soon after Gettysburg: 1863: Present and absent 109,915 Present for duty 50,184 Before Wilderness campaign: 1864: Present and absent 98,246 Present for duty 62,925 On reaching Petersburg, July 10, 1864: Present and absent 135,805 Present for duty 68,844

As to exemptions it was customary to exempt farmers who engaged to raise a certain amount of corn.

Again the practice was extensively pursued of granting furloughs for recruiting service. Such men continued to be borne on the rolls of their commands in the field.

[11] Aggregate available military population 792,000, of which 350,000 in the army January, 1862. Above figure is 2-1/2 per cent. of remainder, viz. 442,000.

[12] Col. Livermore's method of computation, if applied to the true available number 760,000, with additions and deductions noted above, yields a very similar result, about 790,000. See his book, p. 23, but note on p. 21 an error of calculation, where instead of 265,000 he should give 246,872.

[13] The ten per cent. addition for extension of military age is too high an estimate in this and the following tables, when we remember that the conscript law lowering the age to seventeen and raising it to fifty did not go into operation until February 17, 1864, by which time the territory of the Confederacy was greatly contracted.

[14]

WAR DEPARTMENT, WAs.h.i.+NGTON, May 18, 1912.

DEAR DR. MCKIM, I think your estimate of 50,000 as representing the total number of troops furnished by the Border States is about correct. It can never be definitely ascertained.

Very truly yours, MARCUS J. WRIGHT.

[15] I have not in this Monograph taken account of an argument sometimes put forward, drawn from the alleged fact that the census of 1890 showed that there were then living 432,020 Confederate and 980,724 United States soldiers (or including sailors and marines 1,034,073). But the Report on Population, 1890, Part II, p. clxxii, states that the figures first quoted are approximate only, and "have not been subjected to careful revision and comparison." No positive conclusion, therefore, can be drawn from them. Their unreliability is shown by the fact that at that very time the War Department estimated that there were then living 1,341,332 Federal soldiers.