Strength of the Confederate Army

The total cost of the war to the North was well nigh incalculable. The sum total would include bonds issued from time to time by the government and bought by the people to the amount of nearly three billion dollars, and a large percentage also of the eight hundred million dollars received from duties-internal revenue and customs, to say nothing of the heavy war debts incurred by states, counties, cities and towns. The South was literally impoverished, the value of its slave population, estimated roughly at two billions of dollars in 1861, being wiped out at a stroke.

At the end of the war the Union forces numbered not far from a million men; those of the Confederacy had dwindled to scarcely a fifth of that number. The whole number of individuals in service in the Union army and navy during the Civil War was estimated in 1905 by the Adjutant-General's office to have been 2,213,365. The estimates of the total number in the service of the Confederacy vary from 600,000 to 1,500,000. A fair consideration, however, of the facts given by Thomas L. Livermore in his Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America leads to the belief that the total number of enlistments in the Confederate army was not far from 1,200,000.

From this estimate deductions would have to be made for re-enlistments which might bring the total number of individual men who served in the Confederate army down to 950,000 or perhaps 900,000. Most Southern writers contend that the actual number was between 600,000 and 700,000. These, however, are obviously underestimates. For, as Charles Francis Adams in his Studies Military and Diplomatic has pointed out, the Confederacy, under any recognized method of computation, contained within itself, first and last, some 1,350,000 white men capable of doing military duty; and to maintain that only about one-half of this possible force was utilized proves too much - proves that the South was lacking in loyalty to its cause, which is the reverse of the truth.

While many battles were won by the South, every Southern victory was rendered fruitless by the overwhelming numerical superiority of the vanquished. The Southern victors found themselves on every occasion confronted by new armies, and deprived of the fruits of victory by the facility with which the broken ranks of the Federal enemy were replenished. The smaller losses of the South were irreparable, the greater sacrifices of the North were of less consequence in the eyes of a Government which lavished the lives of hired rowdies and foreign mercenaries, in the knowledge that money could repair all that folly and ferocity might destroy.

The South perished by exhaustion - by sheer inability to recruit her exhausted armies. Whatever errors may have contributed to hasten her fall; whatever may be due to the fatal march into Tennessee, and the incomprehensible policy which laid Georgia and the Carolinas open to Sherman, the struggle was decided by the relative numbers of the belligerents; by the fact that the Federal recruiting field was relatively unlimited, while that of the Confederates was too small to supply the losses of each campaign.

It may console the heroic soldiers of the South to remember that their whole force was never equal in number to the Union forces; but the lesson which this war has taught is one of disastrous augury for mankind. It can hardly be hoped that any people will show greater devotion than the Southerners; that any country will send forth braver armies or greater generals; and the fate of Secession assures that valor and strategy may be vain when opposed to numbers.