Category: Costs of War

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

Virginia’s historic colonial capital, Williamsburg, was established upon the former Middle Plantation in 1699 and named in honor of England’s King William III. In 1722, the town was granted Royal Charter as a “city incorporate” which is believed to be the oldest charter in the United States. The College of William and Mary is older than the town, founded in 1693 under royal charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II. It is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the US and ninth oldest in the English-speaking world.

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

“The early morning of February 6th [1864] found us in line, and we marched into Williamsburg. [Our column] was comprised of 139th and 118th New York regiments, two regiments of colored troops, and I believe a single battery, all under command of Col. Samuel Roberts.

As we marched through the town it was plain to be seen that it had suffered from the effects of the war; few inhabitants were left, many houses deserted and many burned. William and Mary, one of the oldest colleges in America, had also been destroyed by Union soldiers in revenge, it was said, for having been fired on from its windows. Though the walls were mostly standing, it was completely ruined.

Our picket line extended from the York to the James Rivers, about four miles; and with gunboats on either flank was a strong one. The object of the expedition seems to have been making a stand at Bottom’s Bridge while the cavalry made a dash at Richmond and burning the city if possible.

One of the pickets posted at Williamsburg was at the old brick house one occupied by Governor Page of Virginia. It was built of brick imported from England. The library in the mansion was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, and the walls had been covered with books from floor to ceiling; but now the shelving had been torn down, and the floor was piled with books in wretched disorder – trampled upon – most pitiful to see. In the attic of this old house the boys found trunks and boxes of papers of a century past – documents, letters, etc.

Among the latter were those bearing the signatures of such men as Jefferson, Madison, Richard Henry Lee; and one more signed by Washington.”

(25th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Samuel H. Putnam. Putnam, Davis and Company, Publishers. 1886, pp. 245-250)

Mankind’s War Fetish

 

English author and commentator H.G. Wells began writing newspaper articles in August 1914 commenting upon what was to be termed the “World War”; the articles would become assembled in a book entitled The War That Will End War. Arguing that the Central Powers led by Germany and Italy commenced the war, he saw that only the destruction of German militarism could end the conflagration.

American intervention – pursued by a president who was elected on a promise of keeping us out of the war – was decisive as cash advances to Britain, France and Russia amounting to some $9.6 billion stoked the fires. Postwar, America became the world’s banker with net foreign assets of around $11 billion by the end of 1919.

In 1918, Germany was defeated, its Kaiser banished, and punitive peace terms burdened the German people. Predictably, a nationalist arose within Germany who rebuilt his country’s military and ironically with French assistance through the Czech’s Skoda Works. Only twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, it was back to war. What is called World War Two – more accurately called the second half of the World War – led to an estimated 56 million military and civilian deaths, and an additional 38 million dead from war-related disease and famine.

Below, author Emil Ludwig cites the costs of the war to end war.

Mankind’s War Fetish

“The World War, which was on the verge of breaking out in the very first opening years of the opening century, is the great liquidation of debts created in the previous era and we desire and demand that it be associated with the nineteenth century. The second Hague Conference of 1907 was only a farce. During the weeks for which the third meeting was set in the summer of 1915, oratory could no longer be heard in The Hague due to the nearby thundering of cannon in Europe.

The cost of armament during the years from 1910 to 1914 amounted to 1.8 billions of dollars for Austria and Germany together and 2.4 billions for France and Russia – more than 4 billion. Yet these were small sums compared with those piled up by the War. On land and sea and in the air, 12,990,570 soldiers were killed in the World War. The war cost the combined combatants 250,000,000 billions of dollars – half of their combined national wealth. Thus, within four years, for no reason and without any essential consequences, Europe had sent up in smoke half of all it had gathered together during the preceding centuries. How should we characterize an act of this kind on the part of a large bank or a powerful family?

In so far as the victorious powers are concerned, France was a creditor nation to the extent of 30 billions before the war and a debtor to the extent of 31 billions afterward. During the struggle, the French national wealth decreased by a third; that of England by one fourth. Even the United States government had to expend during two years more than it had laid out in the course of over a century; and if in spite of this fact it remains today the creditor of the world, the reason is not participation in the second half of the war but rather abstention during the war’s first half. The smaller countries which remained neutral are in a relatively better position than any of the imperialist states.

With the exception of America, all the warring countries lost millions of men and billions of money; and any territory gained in the process at the expense of the conquered peoples is of intrinsic worth only in the case of new states established at the end.

Even the single positive result of the World War – the destruction of four realms anachronistically ruled by emperors, and the creation of eleven republics – was therefore purchased at a price which, in civil life, only an insane person would pay.”

“We punish an individual guilty of assault or murder, but the massacre of a people is considered a glorious deed.” Seneca

“Standing armies should in time cease to be, for they constitute a perennial threat of war to other states . . .”  Immanuel Kant

(Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Charles A. Beard, editor. Longmans, Green & Company, 1928, pp. 178-179)

 

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

Late-war and early postwar Northern propaganda attributed the basest motives to the American Confederacy as the Republican Radicals prepared their punishments for the defeated. They asserted that “it was not merely the Southern people . . . they were abetted by their government . . . a congressional investigation reported that “there was a fixed determination on the part of the rebels to kill the Union soldiers who fell into their hands.” The US Sanitary Commission declared that “the conclusion is unavoidable . . . that these privations and sufferings [in prison camps] have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authorities of the rebel government.” Both reports were publicized by the North’s infamous “Loyal League.

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

“Northern opinion was thus rigidly shaped in the belief that “tens of thousands of national soldiers . . . were deliberately shot to death, as at Fort Pillow, of frozen to death at Belle Island, or starved to death at Andersonville, or sickened to death by swamp malaria, as in South Carolina.” Horror passed into fury and fury into a demand for revenge.

The New York Times insisted that “every rebel official who had been concerned, directly or indirectly, in the torturing and murdering of our prisoners” should be excluded from the terms of presidential pardon. Secretary of War Stanton ordered officers of armies advancing into the South to arrest the “inhuman monsters” most prominent in management of prisons. The archfiend of iniquity, for so the North considered him, Major Henry Wirz, was hanged as a murderer.

It was not until 1876 that the publication of R. R. Stevenson’s “The Southern Side, or Andersonville Prison” and J.W. Jone’s “The Confederate View of the Treatment of Prisoners” gave to such unbiased minds as might wish to know an adequate exposition of the Southern side. It was not difficult to find, however, material in these years that indicates the South received the Northern charge with sullen hatred. Typical is an article contributed to the Southern Review of January 1867:

“The impartial times to come will hardly understand how a nation, which not only permitted but encouraged its government to declare medicines and surgical instruments contraband of war, and to destroy by fire and sword the habitations and food of non-combatants, as well as the fruits of the earth and the implements of tillage, should afterwards have clamored for the blood of captive enemies, because they did not feed their prisoners out of their own starvation and heal them in their hospitals [devoid of medicines].

[When the facts of the deliberate and inexorable non-exchange of prisoners and refusal of food and medicines for Andersonville prisoners is realized], men will wonder how it was that a people, passing for civilized and Christian, should have consigned a Jefferson Davis to a cell, while they tolerated Edwin M. Stanton as a cabinet minister.”

So, the endless argument continued. The wounds remained unhealed festering their poison in unforgiveness. While Northerners blamed the evil genius of slavery for the war, Southerners pointed the finger of responsibility to “those men who preached the irrepressible conflict to the Northern people” and “helped to bring on that unlawful and unholy invasion of the South.”

(The Road to Reunion, Paul H. Buck. Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 46-48)    

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.

The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.

The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.

He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.

These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”

As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”

Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.

Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)

The Irish Brigade

Ironically, New York’s Irish Brigade was led by Thomas Meagher, a rebellion leader in the 1848 drive for Irish independence. Captured and sentenced to death – though commuted to life in prison – he escaped to America and organized a unit of New York Irishmen. Many Irish emigres served in the Southern armies, greatly concerned that northern victory would bring a flood of emancipated slaves northward to obtain the low-paying jobs on which they depended.

His brigade was decimated at Fredericksburg in December 1862 while advancing on Lee’s well-defended position at Marye’s Heights with 1600 men and soon retreating with barely 1000 able to walk. After further decimation at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Meagher’s brigade was reduced to well-under regimental strength with 600 men.

Postwar, Meagher was appointed Secretary of State for the Montana Territory by Andrew Johnson, and later as Territorial Governor. He fell off a steamboat and drowned in 1867 under mysterious circumstances, believed to be intoxication, suicide or possibly a political murder.

Irish Brigade

“At Fredericksburg the Irish Brigade was almost wiped out. When it became apparent to [its] leader that there was no prospect of being allowed to recruit new members for the New York regiments of the brigade, it was decided to consolidate the three regiments with perhaps 300 effective men into a battalion of six companies and muster out [unneeded] officers. General Meagher had previously asked leave to resign, as his brigade no longer existed except in name.

Meagher thought it a mockery to keep up a brigade with the few men left and great wrong to consolidate regiments that had attained great renown. Although its 63rd Regiment served through the Wilderness Campaign – its ranks being recruited by the addition of three new companies and by augmentations – as a distinctive Irish organization it may be regarded as nonexistent after Meagher’s resignation.”

(Foreigners in the Union Army & Navy. Ella Lonn. LSU Press, 1951. p. 122)

 

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)

The Horrors of Andersonville

It became clear in the postwar that both Grant and Lincoln were responsible for the excessive mortality in the South’s prison camps, especially Camp Sumter – aka-Andersonville. But northern politicians still “waved the bloody shirt” in 1876 with James Blaine of Maine claiming Jefferson Davis “was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Benjamin Hill of Georgia replied to him: “If nine percent of the [northern] men in Southern prisons were starved to death by Mr. Jefferson Davis, who tortured to death the twelve percent of the Southern men in Northern prisons?”

Prior to his release from postwar captivity, former Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was asked himself about the conditions at Camp Sumter, also known as the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

The Horrors of Andersonville

“Regarding treatment of prisoners at Andersonville and other places, which was brought up, I said that the matter had caused me deep mortification and pain. From all I had heard, the sufferings of prisoners were terrible. I had no idea, however, that these sufferings were by design or system on the part of Mr. Davis and other authorities at Richmond. Something akin to what might be styled indifference or neglect toward our own soldiers on the wounded and sick lists I have witnessed with distress. To this subject I have given a great deal of attention.

I had never seen in Mr. Davis any disposition to be vindictive toward prisoners of war. I had no idea that there was any settled policy of cruelty on his part to prisoners.

In all my conversations with him on the subject of prisoners, he put the blame of non-exchange on the authorities at Washington: he always expressed earnest desire to send home all we held upon getting in exchange our men equally suffering in northern prisons. Our prisoners, it was said, were treated as well as they could be under the circumstances; those at Andersonville were crowded into such a miserable pen because we had no other place in which to secure them. They had the same rations as our soldiers, who, to my own knowledge, suffered greatly themselves from food shortages, not only in our hospitals, but also in the field.

The advice I had given was to release all our prisoners on parole of honor, whether the authorities at Washington exchanged theirs or not. I had advised such a course as one of humanity and good policy.

Against it was urged that if we were to release all our prisoners, our men would be held and treated not as prisoners of war but as traitors and would be tried and executed as such; our authorities must hold northern soldiers as hostages for ours.  And I could not, after looking over the whole matter, come to any other conclusion than that some blame rested on the authorities at Washington.

War is at best a savage business; it never had been and never would, perhaps, be waged without atrocities on all sides. Hence, my earnest desire during the late conflict to bring about pacification by peaceful negotiations at the earliest possible moment.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 444-446)

Two American Generals with Such Perfect Rapport

After the absolute rout of the enemy at Chancellorsville, Lee rode into a clearing “where his soldiers rushed around him, waving their hats in celebration of the victory.” Some were in tears of worship, reaching out to touch him and his horse Traveller. Lee’s aide described the scene as “one long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief.” The aide mused that “it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods.”

Two American Generals with Such Perfect Rapport

“If Lee, outnumbered and initially outmaneuvered, had been someone else, he might have tried anything else than a venture so dangerous. After all, there was a prudent alternative and honorable under the circumstances: retreat to a more defensible position.

Instead of that, he chose to risk disaster – because he was Lee, and because the man beside him was Jackson. Whether it was because his opponent was Joe Hooker is less clear. Lee had known Hooker in Mexico, where the young officer earned his reputation before he earned his nickname. But Hooker had not been in a command position there – instead, he was the eager executor of others’ decisions. Yet Hooker’s record since as an aggressive division and corps commander should have told any sensible opponent that it was foolish to chance destruction in detail by his powerful force.

For Lee, however, Hooker’s performance in the previous two days, twice pulling back on Chancellorsville when his generals wanted to drive on, must have outweighed the rest of that war record. If Lee had not firmly concluded that Hooker would stay behind his fortified lines, he was willing to gamble on it. The clinching reason was Stonewall Jackson.

American history offers no other pair of generals with such perfect rapport., such sublime confidence in each other. Jackson had said, “Lee is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfolded.” Lee, from the beginning, had insisted that he was fighting to protect the Virginia of his fathers; Jackson could say he was fighting now to recover his own Virginia, the mountain land that was cut off as a new federal State.

But Lee upped the ante at Chancellorsville when he proposed going all the way around to hit Hooker’s army from its far flank. Jackson, as if challenged, upped it again when he told Lee he not only would go, but he would also take all three of his divisions along to do it right. Lee, fully realizing that this would leave him to hold Hooker’s overwhelming force with about one-fifth its number, met that challenge when he said calmly, “Well, go on.”

This was the climax of two great military careers, each made greater by the other.”

(Chancellorsville, 1863: The Souls of the Brave. Ernest B. Furgurson. Random House, 1992, p. 146)

 

America’s First Welfare Program

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Dependent Pension Bill” which sought to reward a favored Republican constituency, the North’s veterans of the Civil War. Since 1865, the Republican party had created and expanded a virtual national welfare program to attract their votes. Viewing this bill as simply a “raid on the US Treasury” benefitting the Republican party, Cleveland incurred the wrath of Northern veterans as he believed it was charity, and his veto the honorable path to take.

The Daily Advertiser of Boston in early September 1865 contained the letter of an astute resident who advised the public to give veterans work and a full share of public offices. Otherwise, he feared, “we shall guarantee a faction, a political power, to be known as the soldier vote . . . I wonder if our State politicians remember that 17,000 men can give the election to either party.”

America’s First Welfare Program

Lincoln’s government initiated a military pension system in mid-July 1862 and included a $5 fee for Claim Agents who assisted veterans; attorneys could charge $1.50 if additional testimony and affidavit were required. The House of Representatives set this latter amount given the temptation for unscrupulous attorneys to take undue advantage of the pensioners. With this Act passed, practically every member of Congress became anxious to provide for soldiers, sailors and their dependents – more than a few began to take advantage of the political power that lay in the hands of the “soldier vote.” A Mr. Holman, representing Indiana in Congress, praised the 5,000 Indiana men “who gave up the charmed circle of their homes to maintain the old flag of the Union.”

As the war continued into 1864 and the spirit of revenge in the North increased, it was officially proposed to create a large pension fund for Northern soldiers by confiscating Southern property.  In September 1865, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a former slave-State, “proposed a plan whereby he hoped the government would realize over three and a half billions of dollars by confiscating Southern property. Although no such a measure ever became law, it reveals the attitude which several members of the House had toward the question of pensions.”

The abuse of the pension system by 1875 caused the commissioner, Henry Atkinson, to state that “the development of frauds of every character in pension claims has assumed such magnitude as to require the serious attention of Congress . . .”

(History of the Civil War Military Pensions, 1861-1865. John William Oliver. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 844, Vol. 4, No. 1. pp. 11-12; 14; 20; 41)