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Article Excerpt
No language can describe, nor can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the widespread destruction of homes and property.--Columbia, South Carolina, Phoenix, 1865
Of course, the desolation of Virginia, even in the regions most exposed to the ravages of the war had been overrated.
--Whitelaw Reid, 1866
SPECULATIONS ON THE GROUND
The destructiveness of war is a familiar theme in the historical literature of the American Civil War. Because almost all of the significant combat and troop movements occurred within Confederate territory, the rebel states necessarily suffered most of the physical damage done by the war. Numerous contemporary accounts and some photographs of burned factories and houses, only their chimneys left standing, as well as torn-up railroad tracks and destroyed rolling stock, suggest massive, extensive devastation. But, how much physical destruction did the Civil War actually inflict on the South? An obvious enough question, it has had as yet no firm, empirical answer. (1)
Many southerners immediately following the war and for more than a century afterward attributed the South's relative poverty during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the war's destruction of their region's infrastructure. Characterized as the "great alibi" by Robert Penn Warren, and used by others to explain away manifold distortions in southern society, such reasoning merged smoothly with a Lost Cause ideology that sought to ennoble rebellion and make a virtue out of the seemingly enduring sacrifices offered in its service. (2) Incorporated into this version of events were stories of depredations by Union forces, acting either in obedience to a policy of Schrecklichkeit, terror directed against civilians, or on the orders of individual commanders and junior officers.
Irrespective of the impetus for the destruction, southerners reported that the devastation extended across their region and included the burning of an unspecified but presumably large number of southern cities and towns, the despoliation of southern agriculture, and the destruction of the greater part of the South's railroads. Damage on anything approaching that magnitude could conceivably have retarded the region's economic growth and development to the extent described in the Lost Cause/Great Alibi account of the war and its aftermath. Historians, even those who reject that interpretation of post-Civil War southern history, generally agree that the war inflicted severe material damage on the South, damage that had a significant role in setting back the region's economic growth and development. (3) That conclusion has also become the consensus among authors of United States history textbooks. (4)
Cliometricians have also addressed the question of southern economic retardation during the first few postwar decades. The first systematic examination of the evidence indicated that the war might have caused the loss of as much as $1.5 billion in physical capital in the South and a deep, long-lasting reduction in southern incomes. (5) Further work on the question, however, has sharply revised those findings downward. Analysis of data on capital investment, agricultural output, population, and income from the 1860 and 1880 federal census returns has led to the conclusion that, bad as the physical damage may have been, it was not a major reason for the South's economic woes during the decades following the war. (6) Instead, they found other, more important causes: a general deterioration of property due to neglect during the war; a combination of cotton market forces, specifically global conditions of supply and demand; and the economic, social, and political upheaval in southern society following the war, as a consequence of emancipation. (7)
Today most economic historians subscribe to the cliometrical analysis of the causes of southern postwar economic retardation and its conclusion that the degree of physical destruction attributable to the war was not of long-term economic significance. (8) As to the reasons for such damage, many historians agree that, though the Union army destroyed a great deal of southern public and private property, relatively little wanton destruction occurred. Instead, destruction resulted largely from the controlled application of a formal military policy to degrade the Confederacy's material capacity to wage war. (9)
In their analysis of the reasons for the South's post-Civil War economic retardation, cliometricians have relied primarily on data enumerated by the decennial census and have generally discounted the reliability of anecdotal and other textual evidence pointing to widespread and significant destruction caused by the war. Civil War historians, however, have used just such evidence, presented in the letters, diary entries, and memoirs by soldiers in both armies, by southern civilians who lived through the war and into the peace, and by northerners who traveled in the South immediately after the war. The fact that cliometricians and historians have used such disparate sets of evidence to examine much the same question perhaps explains why their respective conclusions about the significance of the destruction caused by the war have been so different.
Absent from both the cliometrical consensus and conventional historical accounts of the economic consequences of the war's material destructiveness are any measures of that physical damage. Instead, the results of the cliometrical analysis are in the form of dollars of income per capita and rates of growth. Historians who emphasize the war's destructiveness offer essentially qualitative assessments of damage, based almost exclusively on the impressions and recollections of individuals.
In dealing with present-day calamities, no disaster relief agency would make determinations of the degree of property damage on the basis of such nebulous accounts or, for that matter, on interpolated valuations of property. In the absence of readily assigned dollar values of destroyed or damaged property, disaster-response workers recover valuable information about the amount of destruction by compiling figures on the number of damaged or destroyed buildings of various types. Standard procedure in the initial assessment of damage caused by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornados, or earthquakes requires first and foremost a quantification, both in cardinal and ordinal terms, of the intensity and geographical area of the devastation. (10) We can apply something of the same sort of procedure to get at the level and extent of material destruction caused by the Civil War and, in doing so, produce some useful results.
Without specific, well-grounded estimates of the physical damage done by the war to the South's private and public capital stock, the postwar economic and social implications of the war's destructiveness must necessarily remain unclear and in dispute. Just such estimates can be arrived at by examining and analyzing three species of the Confederate South's physical capital: public, or social overhead, capital, embodied in county courthouses, towns, and cities; individual agricultural capital, in the form of agricultural implements and machinery; and the corporate capital of the railroad industry. The measure of each of these types takes a physical rather than pecuniary form and, consequently, the estimates that result from this analysis can at least suggest the magnitude of the damage caused by the war.
The quantitative evidence that forms the basis of the analysis and conclusions presented here pertains to every one of the Confederacy's 833 counties (counties that existed in 1860), each of which I investigated and determined to have been a war county or a nonwar one. Map 1, a county-level map of the entire Confederacy, distinguishes between the two types. The criteria used here to define a county as war or nonwar are rather expansive. If it was the scene of a major engagement, a minor battle, a skirmish, or even a federal scouting expedition, then the county is of course classified as a war county. But a county through which Union army units moved or that Union troops occupied is also considered a war county because, even in the absence of combat, the potential existed for destructive action by Union forces.
This county-level evidence is presented in four tables, in which the data are aggregated on the level of each of the Confederacy's eleven states. Table 1 provides geographic and demographic figures on the proportions of each state's area and population groups directly affected by the war. Measures of the war's impact on each state's social overhead capital--that is, its towns, cities, and county courthouses--are presented in table 2. Tables 3 and 4 offer detailed comparisons between nonwar and war counties of the value of farm implements and machinery and railroad mileage and stations.
WHERE THE WAR WAS FOUGHT
Readers of Civil War histories often infer that all or most of the Confederate South was a war zone. That impression has perhaps contributed to the notion of a South materially devastated by the war. It is, as table 1 and map 1 indicate, an exaggeration. Only 36 percent of the total land area of the Confederacy had any direct experience of the war, either as an arena for battles and skirmishes or as geography over which the Union army moved or on which it sat in occupation. Even in Georgia, through which Sherman's army made its deliberately destructive way, only 37 percent of the land area was an arena for combat or Union army movements. In only four states--Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia--did much more than half of the land area lie in the war zone and of those, only Virginia was largely overtaken by the war.
Still, the figure of 36 percent actually understates the war's geographical scope because of the inclusion of the two states largest in area, Florida and Texas, each of which saw hardly any fighting and only a minor Union army presence. If they are excluded from consideration, the proportion of the remaining rebel territory over which the Union army moved or fought rises to 57 percent. Eliminating them still leaves a substantial part of the core territory of the Confederacy untouched by the war's actual or potential destructiveness.
Of course, the fact that much or most of a region was not scourged by war does not necessarily mean that large parts of its civilian population and physical property were as fortunate. But, in the case of the Confederacy, that was indeed the case. Fifty-four percent of the free population of 5,645,071 (1860 census) lived in those parts of the Confederate states overtaken by the war; excluding Florida and Texas from the calculations increases that proportion to 63 percent. (11) Of the Confederacy's 312,802 slaveholders, 59 percent (63 percent, if Florida and Texas are not included) resided in such areas. The situation for a majority of the enslaved population was comparable, and 60 percent of the 3,502,577 slaves in the Confederacy (64 percent, if the 244,149 slaves held in Florida and Texas are not included in the calculations) were held initially in areas that comprised the war zone. (12) Taken at face value, these figures suggest that the war inflicted widespread destruction on the South, though as a characterization of the extent and intensity of the damage done, the word "widespread" is too imprecise to be useful. Certainly,...
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