Andrew F. Smith - Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War

Contents

Prologue

American farms of the late eighteenth century had much in common with European farms of the Middle Ages. By nature, farmers were conservative, and little had changed on American farms and plantations since early colonial times. Farming was labor-intensive: Fields were cultivated, plowed, and harrowed with horse-drawn equipment, while the crops were seeded, weeded, harvested, threshed, and winnowed largely by hand. Farmers ate much of what they grew; excess produce was sold to or bartered with people they knew at local markets.

A major challenge for America was how to acquire the labor needed to operate farms and plantations. Slavery existed in both the North and South, but only in the South did it flourish. In colonial and early America, slaves were particularly efficient on large plantations that raised cash crops, such as tobacco, indigo, and rice, and to a much lesser extent on those that grew cotton. The cotton gin, invented in 1793, radically changed Southern agriculture. The gin efficiently removed seeds from the cotton balls, a task previously done by hand. Cotton grew easily in the South, where slaves could cultivate and harvest it. Low-cost cotton became the fabric of choice in the United States, as well as in England and France. No other place in the world at the time could produce such high-quality cotton in such vast quantities and at such a low cost as did the American South, and slave-produced cotton became king in Southern agriculture.

Local economies shaped regional lifestyles, affecting, among other things, what people ate. As a result of the cotton-slavery connection, Southern per capita income rose steadily during the first decades of the nineteenth century; by 1860 it was almost twice that of the North. Southern wealth, however, was distributed disproportionately. The rich were very rich, and this wealth was manifested in their culinary lives as they enjoyed generous servings of meat and expensive imported foods accompanied by the best European wines and spirits. The second social rung consisted primarily of rural whites who relied on what they could grow and raise on small farms. It was extremely difficult for small farmers to compete with large plantations powered by slaves. The third rung consisted of poor whites, whose subsistence diet was supplemented with game and fish they killed or caught themselves. The lowest group in Southern society consisted of the enslaved blacks, who in many places outnumbered the whites. They ate what their owners gave them and whatever garden crops and livestock they could grow or raise on small plots of land.

The Line of Civilization Moves Westward

The North also needed agricultural labor, but slavery was not the answer, and Northern states gradually abolished slavery before the Civil War. The North was, however, the beneficiary of massive immigrations, especially from Ireland and Germany, beginning in the late 1840s. Immigrants supplied the North with low-cost labor that fueled its industrialization, and factories were established throughout the region. When the Civil War began, many immigrants joined the Union army. Others worked on construction crews building the railroads that were rapidly expanding throughout the North and Midwest. Immigrants who settled in the Midwestern cities, such as Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, established stockyards, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing facilities, which would become essential to the Union war effort.

Before the Civil War, the prairies of the Midwest were opened for settlement and vast new areas began to be converted into agricultural land. A self-polishing steel plow, patented by John Deere in 1837, made it easier to break up the sod, and prairie farming expanded. Widespread adoption of this and other equipment signaled a change in American agriculture from hand power to horse power.

Harvesting grain was one of the farmers most vexing challenges. Farmers had some flexibility in deciding when to plow, sow, weed, winnow, and thresh their grain, but harvesting was a high-stakes task that had to be completed within ten to fourteen dayssometimes less, depending on the weather. In 1830, farm workers harvested wheat by hand, an arduous and exhausting task. That soon changed, however. Beginning in 1831, Cyrus McCormick, a farmer in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, invented, refined, and patented various designs. Since slavery dominated Southern plantation agriculture, there was less interest in the South in a labor-saving device such as a mechanical harvester.

There was great interest in reapers and other mechanical devices in the Midwest, where labor was scarce and land was cheap. Recognizing this geographical advantage, McCormick moved his operation from Virginia to Chicago in 1847. Due largely to its strategic location as a transportation hub, the city was growing rapidly. In this more advantageous environment, sales of McCormicks reapers skyrocketed. By 1860, thanks to the mechanization, wheat production in Midwestern statesOhio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowasoared to half the national total. In 1860, William H. Seward, a U.S. Senator at the time and the future Secretary of State under President Abraham Lincoln, concluded, Owing to Mr. McCormicks invention, the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each year.

Transportation Revolution

It was relatively easy for Midwesterners to send their agricultural goods to the South via the Mississippi River system, but in the mid-nineteenth century the river was filled with rapids, and shifting sandbars, while low water obstructed travel for much of the year. Midwesterners faced an additional problem when it came to sending grain to market on the East Coast or overseas. The shallow mouth of the Mississippi prevented large ships from steaming upriver to pick up or discharge goods. Midwestern grain had to be transferred at New Orleans from river boats to small coastal freighters that would then sail to Eastern cities with deepwater ports, such as New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, where their cargo would be transferred again to larger oceangoing vessels for shipment to Europe. If Midwestern farmers could send their agricultural commodities directly to the East Coast, transportation costsand thus the cost of foodwould drop dramatically.

The North invested vast sums of money in constructing canals and railroads to tap the agricultural wealth of the Midwest. In New York, for example, construction of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie was the largest single public works project in America up to that time. The canal was a financial success well before its completion in 1825. After the canal opened, trade between New York and the Great Lakes and the Midwest escalated exponentially. The financial success of the Erie Canal set off a frenzy of canal building, but there were relatively few places where canals were cost-effective. In the decade beginning in 1830, canal mileage swelled from 1,270 miles to 3,320 milesand most of this new construction was in the Midwest. These canals and waterways created aquatic superhighways that permitted goods to be transported quickly and inexpensively from the Midwest to the South and the East Coast.

The success of canals spurred the construction of railroads, which could connect places that were unreachable by canals or navigable rivers. When the steam railroad engine Tom Thumb went into operation in August 1830, there were only 23 miles of track in the United States. Within a decade, this had surged to 2,800 miles. By 1860, the United States had more than 31,000 miles of railroads, 90 percent of which were in the North and Midwest. With railroads located closer to farms, farmers could now grow specialty crops to which their land was best suited instead of only those crops needed for subsistence. As a result, farmers began specializing in particular crops, livestock, or related industries. More food was produced and farmers used increased profits to purchase new equipment, which increased their crop yield even more.