Confederate States Army

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Confederate States Army came into existence on the 28th of February 1861, when a provisional congress authorized a volunteer force and handed command authority to a man named Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate and former U.S. Secretary of War who had once led a volunteer regiment in Mexico. Within weeks, Davis was directing troops surrounding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, where a small U.S. Army garrison under Major Robert Anderson held out against a rebel militia siege. On April 12, Confederate artillery under General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire. Two days later, the fort fell. The Civil War had begun.

  What followed was four years of conflict that would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides, strain the resources of a new nation that had never quite organized itself, and force the Confederacy into contradictions it could never fully resolve. How many men actually served under Confederate colors? Why did those men fight, and what drove so many of them to stop fighting? And how did a military force built partly on the ideology of slavery come to debate, in its final desperate months, whether to arm the people it held in bondage? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Force Built on Paper

  ›

  The Confederate States Congress actually chartered two separate armies. One was the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, meant to exist only for the duration of the war. The other was the Army of the Confederate States of America, a permanent regular force authorized to include 15,015 men and 744 officers. That second army, the ACSA, never truly existed beyond its own paperwork. Its organization never proceeded past the appointment of some officers, and three state regiments that were nominally denominated as Confederate had no real effect on how the army actually functioned.

  Virtually every officer and enlisted man preferred the provisional force. The reason was straightforward: the Provisional Army allowed officers to achieve higher ranks than the permanent structure permitted. So the ACSA existed mainly to ensure that the most senior generals, men like Samuel Cooper and Robert E. Lee, technically outranked all state militia officers. The gap between the Confederate Army on paper and the one in the field would remain a defining feature throughout the war.

  Reports from the Confederate War Department showed roughly 326,768 men under arms at the end of 1861, rising to 449,439 in 1862 and 464,646 in 1863, before falling to 400,787 in 1864. Because the central records repository in Richmond was destroyed in 1865, historians today can only estimate total enlistments across the entire war at somewhere between 1,227,890 and 1,406,180 men.

• 3. The Conscription Crisis

  ›

  In April 1862, the Confederacy passed the first military draft law in American history, predating any Union conscription act. The Conscription Act made all able-bodied white men between the ages of 18 and 35 liable for a three-year term. Railroad workers, telegraph operators, teachers, miners, and druggists were among those exempt from service, on the grounds that the home front needed them.

  The act was amended twice before the year was out. On the 27th of September 1862, the upper age limit rose to 45. On October 11, the Confederate Congress passed what became known as the Twenty Negro Law, exempting anyone who owned 20 or more slaves. Among men who owned no slaves, resentment was immediate and lasting. The law made plain that the burden of fighting fell disproportionately on men who had the least stake in the institution the Confederacy was defending.

  More amendments followed. In December 1863, Congress abolished the practice of substitution, by which a wealthy drafted man could pay someone else to serve in his place. In February 1864, the age limits expanded again, this time reaching from 17 to 50. Five state supreme courts heard challenges to the conscription laws; all five upheld them. Estimates suggest that the percentage of Confederate soldiers who were actually drafted was roughly double the 6 percent figure recorded for the Union Army.

• 4. Why They Fought

  ›

  Historian Michael Perman, writing in his 2010 book Major Problems in the Civil War, noted that scholars remain divided on what drove millions of men to endure four years of combat. Some emphasize political ideology. Others point to the defense of home and family, or to the bonds forged between men who fought side by side. Most agree that whatever drew a soldier into the war, the experience of combat itself changed his reasons for continuing.

  Religion was a significant force. The Southern Baptist Convention sent 78 missionaries to the army beginning in 1862. Presbyterians contributed 112 missionaries in early 1865. Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans added their own. Military historian Samuel J. Watson concluded that Christian faith was a major factor in combat motivation; it consoled men for the loss of comrades, diminished fear, reduced drinking and fighting in camp, and deepened bonds among soldiers separated from their families.

  Princeton historian James M. McPherson, in his 1997 book For Cause and Comrades, analyzed the letters of 429 Southern soldiers and found that only 20 percent explicitly stated proslavery convictions in writing. But McPherson argued this understated slavery's centrality. Confederate soldiers did not debate the subject, he concluded, because they took it as given. Among soldiers from slaveholding families, 33 percent stated proslavery purposes; among those from non-slaveholding families, the figure was 12 percent. Crucially, none of the hundreds of letters McPherson examined contained any anti-slavery sentiment at all.

  John S. Mosby, the celebrated Confederate cavalry commander, reflected on the war in an 1894 letter to a friend and was blunt: "I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause than slavery."

• 5. Desertion and Collapse

  ›

  By September 1864, President Jefferson Davis publicly acknowledged that two-thirds of Confederate soldiers were absent from their units, and that most of them were absent without leave. The problem had been building for years, particularly in mountain districts where Unionist sentiment lingered and distrust of the slaveholding class ran deep. Soldiers from poor families faced an impossible choice as Union forces occupied more Confederate territory: remain in the ranks or return home to feed and protect families who faced genuine starvation.

  Historian Mark Weitz contends that the official count of 103,400 deserters is too low, and concludes that the primary driver was a soldier's sense that his duty to his family outweighed his duty to the Confederacy. A Confederate officer at the time captured this in plain terms, noting that deserters belonged almost entirely to the poorest class of non-slaveholders, men whose labor was indispensable at home, and that "when the father, husband or son is forced into the service, the suffering at home with them is inevitable."

  North Carolina lost nearly a quarter of its soldiers, 24,122 men, to desertion, the highest rate of any Confederate state. The Confederate Army executed roughly 230 deserters over the entire war, while the Union Army, facing a larger total problem, executed approximately 147. General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, on the 19th of August 1862, personally approved the court-martial execution of three deserters, rejecting clemency pleas from their own regimental commander, in an effort to hold a volunteer force together under the threat of enemy occupation.

  Samuel Clemens, who would later become known as Mark Twain, deserted the Southern army early in the conflict, long before his literary fame. Author Neil Schmitz has examined the deep unease Twain carried about losing his honor, his fear of facing death, and his rejection of a Southern identity as he built his career.

• 6. Supply and the Long Unraveling

  ›

  The supply situation for most Confederate armies was dismal even when they won on the battlefield. The central government lacked funds. State governments were often unwilling or unable to fill the gap. Railroads were overloaded and vulnerable to Union raids that destroyed track, engines, cars, bridges, and telegraph lines, knowing that the Confederacy had no capacity to replace them.

  Confederate soldiers rarely wore a standard regulation uniform, particularly late in the war. Armies on the march displayed patched-together regulation dress, homespun garments dyed with butternut, and civilian clothing. After successful engagements, Confederate troops regularly took uniform parts from captured Union supplies and dead Union soldiers, sometimes causing confusion in later skirmishes.

  Food was the most acute problem. There was no shortage of meat in the Confederacy, but shipping it to Lee's army in Virginia, at the end of a long and tenuous supply line, proved nearly impossible. The Union victory at Vicksburg in 1863 cut off supplies flowing from Texas and the west. By that same year, Robert E. Lee was spending as much time searching for food as he spent on strategy. His Pennsylvania campaign, which culminated at Gettysburg, was driven in part by the army's need for the rich agricultural resources of southern Pennsylvania.

  In 1864, Confederate forces burned the Pennsylvania city of Chambersburg after it refused to pay an extortion demand during a raid, the city having been raided twice before. General Sherman's march through the South systematically destroyed the farms, plantations, and railroads that fed both the armies and the civilian population, accelerating the Confederacy's inability to sustain itself.

• 7. The Question of Black Soldiers

  ›

  From the earliest days of the war, some voices within the Confederacy raised the idea of arming enslaved men as soldiers. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate administration refused to seriously consider it until manpower shortages became critical. When Robert E. Lee publicly advocated for arming slaves in early 1865, historian Gary Gallagher writes, he did so as a desperate measure that might only prolong Southern military resistance.

  The debate that followed was furious. Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb declared the idea "suicidal", arguing that African Americans were innately unfit as soldiers and that their use would drive Confederates to quit the army. Cobb went further, stating that if slaves made good soldiers, "our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Former Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs called it a surrender of the entire slavery question. The Georgia newspaper Atlanta Southern Confederacy opposed the measure as late as January 1865, writing that such an act would be "a stigma on the imperishable pages of history, of which all future generations of Southrons would be ashamed."

  On the 13th of March 1865, General Order 14 passed the Confederate Senate by a single vote. Jefferson Davis signed it into law. The order was issued March 23. Only a few African American companies were ever raised, in the Richmond area, before the city fell to U.S. forces. Historian James M. McPherson, writing in 1994, concluded that no black soldiers actually fought for the Confederacy in any organized capacity. Appomattox came a few weeks after the order, and none of the men enrolled under it ever went into combat.

• 8. The Final Surrender

  ›

  The Army of Northern Virginia, the largest and most celebrated Confederate field force, surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on the 9th of April 1865, with the formalities completed April 12. The remnants of the Army of Tennessee and other units under General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered April 18, officially April 26. Other Confederate forces across the south and west laid down their arms between April 16 and the 28th of June 1865.

  The Confederate government had already effectively dissolved by then. On April 3, President Davis, members of his cabinet, and their traveling party fled Richmond by railroad, heading southwest. They moved from Richmond to Lynchburg, Virginia, gradually losing communication with the remaining armies and ceasing to exercise any real authority over them. Davis and his group were captured near Irwinville, Georgia, a month later in May 1865.

  At the end of the war, 174,223 Confederate soldiers formally surrendered to Union forces. The best estimates of Confederate military deaths stand at roughly 94,000 killed in battle, 164,000 dead from disease, and nearly 26,000 deaths in Union prison camps. One estimate of the Confederate wounded reaches 194,026. The incomplete and often destroyed Confederate records mean that these figures carry wide margins of uncertainty, a fitting final reflection on an army that was, from its earliest days, more real in intention than in documentation.