Ersatz in the Confederacy , livre ebook

Ersatz in the Confederacy

S OUTHERN C LASSICS S ERIES
John G. Sproat, General Editor
Ersatz in the Confederacy
Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront
by MARY ELIZABETH MASSEY
with a new introduction by Barbara L. Bellows


U NIVERSITY OF S OUTH C AROLINA P RESS
Published in cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina
Copyright 1952, 1993 University of South Carolina
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press in cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society, 1993
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2021
www.uscpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-0-87249-877-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64336-244-1 (ebook)
CONTENTS
General Editor s Preface
Introduction
Preface to the First Edition
I. The Problem of Supplies
II. Causes of Shortages
III. Governmental Policies
IV. Food and Drink
V. Clothing
VI. Housing and Household Goods
VII. Drugs and Medicine
VIII. Transportation, Industry, Agriculture
IX. The Little Things of Life
X. The Balance Sheet
Notes
Bibliography
Index
GENERAL EDITOR S PREFACE
The Southern Classics Series returns to general circulation books of importance dealing with the history and culture of the American South. Under the sponsorship of the Institute for Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina, the series is advised by a board of distinguished scholars, whose members suggest titles and editors of individual volumes to the general editor and help to establish priorities in publication.
Chronological age alone does not determine a title s designation as a Southern Classic. The criteria include, as well, significance in contributing to a broad understanding of the region, timeliness in relation to events and moments of peculiar interest to the American South, usefulness in the classroom, and suitability for inclusion in personal and institutional collections on the region.
* * *
On one level, a factual description of the make do homefront economy of the wartime South, Mary Elizabeth Massey s Ersatz in the Confederacy suggests as well a plausible answer to the intriguing question of why the South lost the Civil War. Massey gave her book an awkward title; but, as Barbara Bellows observes in the introduction to this new edition, her research was prodigious, her reasoning meticulous, and her contribution to southern history significant and lasting.
Bellows also provides readers of this Southern Classic with a perceptive and poignant commentary on the difficulties pioneer women historians like Massey encountered in having their work-and themselves-taken seriously by their male colleagues in the profession.
John G. Sproat General Editor, Southern Classics Series
INTRODUCTION
Rich in detail, thoroughly researched, and deeply empathetic, Mary Elizabeth Massey s Ersatz in the Confederacy tells the story of southern ingenuity during the Civil War. Her broad-ranging study of the homefront chronicles the trials of civilians struggling to overcome wartime shortages of such basic commodities as food, clothing, and medicines. She gives her readers a penetrating insight into the impact of total war upon individuals by vividly demonstrating the ways that this conflict touched every life in the South.
Massey makes it clear that the Civil War exacerbated, but did not cause, the economic weaknesses that pushed the South s leaders to choose between guns and butter. The region s historic antipathy toward commerce, resistance to industrialization, and addiction to cotton as a cash crop all forced overdependence upon external markets. Domestic production languished because of the southern tendency to import everything from the food they ate to the books they read. Stubborn agrarians had vaingloriously ignored for more than a decade the warnings of southern Cassandras, such as editor James D. B. DeBow and manufacturer William Gregg, who urged diversification and self-sufficiency. So when the war came, the last-minute flurry of factory building and establishment of retail stores ultimately proved futile in the face of the South s ravenous wartime demand for goods, the ever-advancing Federal forces, and ineffective methods of distribution. With civilian needs deemed secondary to those of the military, the Confederate government conscripted domestically made products for the use of its soldiers. The army also laid first claim to food crops that had been painstakingly produced with scarce seed, little fertilizer, and much-mended tools. The Federal blockade of Confederate ports grew more efficient with each passing year. Hoarding and speculation pushed the price of food beyond the ability of most southerners with their worthless dollars. The Confederacy, as Massey explains, was always hungry. 1
The Confederate government s inability to relieve the gnawing deprivation of its citizens more surely led to its demise than did defeat on the battlefield. Massey contends that the southern cause was not lost at Gettysburg or in any other military engagement, but rather when dressed rats hung alone in Richmond butcher shops and the term Confederate came to mean something bogus and second-rate. Southern civilization, as most had understood it, seemed to be slipping away despite the desperate efforts of women to preserve tradition in the face of the most primitive conditions: sawdust substituted for soap, decorated pigs tails and ears adorned skimpy Confederate Christmas trees, and thin cows ate their bits of grain from mahogany bureau drawers. With no ropes or nails, the Confederacy quite literally fell apart. By the time Sherman made Georgia howl, the homefront had sunk from austerity and innovation to starvation and despondency. Massey argues that the unrelenting hardship and destruction inherent in warfare combined to vanquish the southern people. They surrendered before Lee did. By Appomattox, the Army of Northern Virginia had shriveled to a fraction of its strength of even six months earlier. Every day more soldiers left the battlefront to care for their families, victims of the war at home.
The South has yet to recover from the relentless poverty visited on the region by the Civil War, poverty that, Massey concludes, has been the conflict s most enduring legacy. Written during the flush years after World War II when historians identified prosperity as the most powerful force shaping America and its people of plenty, her work underscores the distinctive experience of southerners. Only after learning a harsh lesson about economic dependency taught by wartime shortages, did they grudgingly accede to Americanization. As they embraced the New South ethic of industrialization and diversification of agriculture, southerners swore they would never be hungry again.
Published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1952, Ersatz in the Confederacy broke away from the battles and leaders school that had dominated historical writing about the Civil War. Massey benefited from the pioneering work of Charles Ramsdell s Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy , Ella Lonn s Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy , and Bell I. Wiley s The Plain People of the Confederacy , but hers was the first work to focus exclusively on the effects of shortages upon the civilian population. A deep feeling of respect and compassion for wartime sufferers enriches her narrative; yet Ersatz in the Confederacy avoids romanticizing the starving. As in her subsequent book Refugee Life in the Confederacy , Massey clearly outlines the hellishness of war, a vision easily imagined in the aftermath of World War II. 2
One sign that Massey was breaking new ground with her close description of home life and shortages during the Civil War was the excruciating difficulty she had coming up with an appropriate title. She confessed to Robert Ochs, a historian and an editor at the University of South Carolina Press, that The title is a worry. She suggested Ersatz in Dixie: Shortages and Substitutes on the Confederate Homefront to him, but guessed correctly that he would not approve. William D. Workman, a Columbia radio news editor at the time, responded to a plea from the USC Press and submitted an alternative, The Confederate Homefront, that was judged misleading for such a specialized undertaking. The inability to define her work in brief threw Massey into such despair that she even contemplated offering a prize for a good title. Sympathetic friends and colleagues rallied to help but only contrived equally horrible titles, such as Homefront Ingenuity in the Confederacy. 3
Reflecting her desire to use history to study the common experiences that linked the Civil War generation with her own, Massey settled on the title Ersatz in the Confederacy. Ersatz , hardly a household word in our contemporary culture of consumption, was probably the household word during the time Massey was writing her study. Finding substitutes for butter, sugar, and other scarce commodities had occupied the entire population during World War II, but few connected this anachronistic German word with the southern cause. One bookseller puzzled over the title of the volume and confessed: That s one general I never heard of. 4
Technically, Massey used the term ersatz incorrectly. By midpoint in the war, according to her research, more people were