1861: “The Blue and the Gray” at a Glance
On paper, the Confederate situation seemed hopeless when the war started. In numerical terms, it is astonishing that the Confederacy was able to prolong the war for four long years. The Union was larger, wealthier, more modern and mechanized, better educated. The Confederacy was still a rural, farming society dependent on slave labor, much as it had been in Thomas Jefferson's day. An estimated 20 percent of white Southerners could not read or write. Outside of its cotton, tobacco, and other crops, it produced little of what it needed. Everything else had to be brought in, either from the North or from Europe.
As London banker Baron Rothschild succinctly put it early in the war, the North would win because it had “the larger purse.”
Of course, wars are not fought on paper as the British in America, the United States in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan all learned. That is why, even against these seemingly impossible odds, the Confederacy was able to survive as long as it did in the most costly of American wars.
23 UNION STATES
(*denotes a Border State—the four slave states that remained in the Union)
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California |
Minnesota |
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Connecticut |
*Missouri |
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*Delaware |
New Hampshire |
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Illinois |
New Jersey |
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Indiana |
New York |
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Iowa |
Ohio |
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Kansas |
Oregon |
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*Kentucky |
Pennsylvania |
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Maine |
Rhode Island |
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*Maryland |
Vermont |
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Massachusetts |
Wisconsin |
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Michigan |
The states of West Virginia (1863) and Nevada (1864) were added during the war. The rest of the country was organized into seven large territories—Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nebraska, Washington, and Indian Territory.
Population: more than 22 million; 4 million men of combat age. Two million men joined the Union army and navy.
Economy:
* 100,00 factories, including nearly all the country's weapons factories and ship makers, employing more than 1 million workers with a high degree of literacy.
* 20,000 miles of railroad (70 percent of the U.S. total) and 96 percent of all the country's railroad equipment.
* the vast majority of coal mines and canals for efficient transportation of the coal that powered the mills and ships in the new Steam Age.
* $189 million in bank deposits (81 percent of the U.S. total).
* $56 million in gold.
11 CONFEDERATE STATES
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Alabama |
North Carolina |
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Arkansas |
South Carolina |
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Florida |
Tennessee |
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Georgia |
Texas |
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Louisiana |
Virginia |
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Mississippi |
The combined area of the Confederacy was approximately 750,000 square miles, larger than all of Western Europe, with 3,500 miles of coastline.
Population: 9 million (5.5 million whites; 3.5 million slaves); approximately 1,140,000 men of combat age, of whom 850,000 fought for the Condederacy.
Economy:
* 20,000 factories, employing about 100,000 workers. (The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, had more spindles turning thread in 1860 than did the entire Confederacy.)
* 9,000 miles of railroad.
* $47 million in bank deposits.
* $37 million in gold.
The Union states outproduced the Confederate states in every agricultural category except for one—cotton, raised by slave labor. But a misguided strategy of withholding cotton from European markets only hurt the Confederate economy. By the time that policy was abandoned, the Union naval blockade had become more efficient, further crippling the ability of the Confederacy to sell its most important cash crop.