Page 8 - Beyond the Capacity of Any Man

Introduction

Christopher Gustavus Memminger faced the insurmountable task of
financing the Confederate States of America. Appointed Secretary of the
Treasury in February, 1861, Memminger was unprepared for the realities of war.
A poor leader, he pursued a financial policy that drove the Confederate economy
into arrears. Few historians, other than his biographer and Chief Clerk Henry D.
Capers, have defended him. Some have chastised him. However, most
historians acknowledge a myriad of factors in the Confederacy’s financial
collapse. In his foreword to Douglas B. Ball’s, Financial Failure and Confederate
Defeat (1991), Frank E. Vandiver writes, “ ‘Conventional wisdom’ has long held
the convenient view that the Confederacy collapsed from myriad causes; those
historians who could deduce one more possible cause deserved a gold rung on
the scholarly ladder! Indeed, the more complex the mélange, the sounder the
theory…. considering the normal complexity of historical causes, this view has
obvious merit.”1

Confederate financial problems had their roots in the antebellum South.
As the world’s largest supplier of raw cotton, the bulk of the southern economy
was at the hands of a small number of wealthy planters. The slaves who picked
the cotton represented 19 percent of the antebellum United States $16 billion

1 Douglas B. Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1991), x.

1