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treasury, or what laws were passed, the result would have been the same.”3
Ball’s account is very critical of Memminger and argues that his shortsighted
policies and lack of fiscal leadership were major factors in the Confederacy’s
downfall. Vandiver sums up Ball’s position in his preface, “Christopher G.
Memminger, is shown as a confused, recessive misfit; executive policies reveal
either abysmal ignorance of American financial experience or egregious
optimism.”4

Though Ball’s book is a remarkable piece of scholarship, it fails to fully
place itself within the historical realities of the time. Memminger’s weak policies
were a compromise between his own financial strategy and that of Congressmen
representing the desires of their constituents. Ball also suggests that
Memminger should have implemented an overly-ambitious tax policy, one that
never would have passed a House dedicated to softening all burdens on the
planting community. Finally, in his counterfactual appendices detailing “A More
Effective Financial Policy,” Ball forgets that Memminger was only one man. In
Charles W. Calomiris’s review of the book, he states, “Ball expects a great deal
of activism from Memminger—regulation of bank loans and bank fund transfers
and central management of commodity markets—but the country was fifty years
from the creation of a central bank and from significant centralized control over a
wartime economy.”5

3 Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat, 16.
4 Ibid., x.
5 Charles W. Calomiris, “Review of Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat, by Douglas B.
Ball,” Journal of American History, 79 (December 1992): 1179-1180, 1179.

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