Among the many folks who decry monuments to the Confederacy there are undoubtedly quite a few who say they favor socialism over capitalism. They would probably be hard pressed to define either of those two systems, but never mind.
There's a small bit of irony here, because the Confederacy was in large part, socialist. See Chris Calton's article, War Socialism and the Confederate Defeat. As you can tell from the title, he contends that socialism may have helped the Union win. Here's an excerpt:
By the end of the war, President Jefferson Davis nationalized Southern railroads, steamboats, and telegraph lines. The Confederate bureaucracy, by 1863, boasted a whopping 70,000 employees. The foundation for such a swollen bureaucracy was the Confederate Constitution itself, which made it illegal for the president to fire government workers (this clause was included to try to prevent political patronage).
War socialism was implemented at the state-level as well, as states intervened in the agricultural economy, hoping to stimulate food production. Limits were placed on the production of cotton and tobacco, for example, but taxes to the central government were also payed “in kind,” meaning that the government quickly became the largest cotton merchant in the global market. As the economy was thrown into chaotic misallocation from the heavy-handed and rapidly implemented government controls, inflation ensured that the central authorities had first access to any goods.
Despite all of these problems, it is the nationalization of the Confederate economy that historians point to as an impressive success. Yet no connection is made between these many government controls and the shortages of food that plagued the Confederate economy, which led to increasing numbers of deserters. On April 2, 1863, the capital city of Richmond suffered the infamous bread riot that did not end until President Davis turned Confederate troops against the rioters. Historians correctly recognize this as a symptom of logistical problems that plagued the Confederacy and helped secure Union victory in the war, but the connection between the bread riots and the supposed successes of nationalized industries is rarely observed. ...
In explaining the outcome of the war, historians have yet to include Confederate war socialism as among the factors contributing to the CSA defeat.
Very interesting theory. It's plausible, but to this blogger, the news that the South resorted to socialism in the first place is the shocker. Then again, maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise since they were mostly Democrats.
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1:54 PM 12/30/2017
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