October 2023
General Cooper reported to President Davis that he counted 233,586 men present for duty. No one knew the Yankees’ numbers, but they could be guessed as far higher. (They indeed were— 496,783 at the end of ’63.)3
Then there were the casualties. In May 1864 the Intelligencer estimated that during the first two and a half years of war, to September 1863, some 120,000 Confederate soldiers had died of disease, and that just under another 30,000 had been killed— numbers that were well on their way to the estimated 258,000 Confederates who died during the war.4
Loss of territory was another index. At the end of 1863, of the 700,000 square miles of land in the eleven seceded states, perhaps a quarter of it was under Federal control: all of Tennessee, almost all of Arkansas, half of Louisiana, a third of Mississippi and a quarter of Virginia, plus coastal pockets along the entire Southern coast.5
The Confederacy’s travails at the start of 1864 extended from the war front to the home front. Most families were experiencing shortages of essential goods, both agricultural and industrial. Food was being produced in sufficient quantity, but with Southern
railroads worn out or broken by the Yankees, and many Southern rivers under enemy control, distribution of life’s essentials was difficult and uneven.
The Confederacy’s main financial problem was inflation. When goods were available, they were often set at such exorbitant prices as to be unpurchasable. At the start of the war, one could buy a dollar in gold for three Confederate ones. At the end of 1863, one had to pay twenty.6
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, no foreign recognition, Yankee emancipation and slavery’s threatened demise: the list could go on and on. Yet through all of this, John Steele’s gaze was still on peace and Confederate independence. At the time of his writing in early May ’64, the editor exulted in such Confederate victories as Olustee and Mansfield, Forrest’s ride into Paducah, Democratic successes in the North, Yankee soldiers’ unwillingness to re-enlist:
“All of these things indicate, as we think, the beginning of the end of this wicked war, and presage for us a triumphant conclusion of the sanguinary strife.”7
Be of good cheer, then, for
though our hearts no doubt will be made to mourn, in the next few months, for many friends in battle slain, yet, we think it is safe to say, that putting our trust in God for deliverance, we will behold, before another year expires, the rainbow of peace spanning our heaven-blessed land and hear our young men and maidens, and our little ones singing, “This cruel war
“PRESS ASSOCIATION,” ADI, March 2, 1864.
“We are at a loss…” (editorial), ADI, May 7, 1864.
Steven H. Newton, Lost for the Cause: The Confederate Army in 1864 (Mason City IA: Savas Publishing, 2000), 1.
“LOSSES IN THIS WAR,” ADI, May 4, 1864; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 257.
Charles H. Wesley, The Collapse of the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001 [1937]), 37; Henry Steele Commager, ed., The Defeat of the Confederacy (Princeton NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), 142.
Albert D. Kirwan, ed., The Confederacy (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959), 129; Clifford Dowdey, The Land They Fought For: The Story of the South as the Confederacy 1832-1865 (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1955), 303.
“We are at a loss…,” ADI, May.
“I Thank
Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931)
the Lord I
War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
Yankee...”
have won several prizes, including the Fletcher received a strong education and was
a successful writer and educator. Her surely ranks among the most observant and intelligent wartime memoirs by a Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride.
Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes on Confederate General John Bell Hood
Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
Intelligencer Covers the Civil War, with Bill Hendrick, is one of the few that treats a single Southern wartime newspaper. He has also edited the wartime and postwar journals of Eliza Frances Andrews, who began writing her diary in December 1864 at the age of 24. Today, when evidence of Confederate patriotism is being quashed by the national culture, Miss Andrews’ writings stand out spectacularly.
