Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War.

By David G. Surdam. Studies in Maritime History. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xxiv], 286. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-407-9.)

This is an important book for scholars of the Confederacy. Its pages of charts and graphs depicting David G. Surdam's economic analyses make parts of it difficult for the non-economist to read, but many of his insights are significant to our understanding of the effects of the northern blockade on the Confederate war effort, especially the restrictions on supply and credit it induced. (I consulted a colleague in economics, Anthony J. Greco, who found the book generally well based.)

Focusing on the southern economy during the late 1850s and the war years, Surdam considers grain, swine, and cattle, as well as railroads, wagon transport, and the coastal trade. Almost half of the book, however, is about cotton production and the northern blockade. He demonstrates that the blockade, combined with the prohibition of Union-Confederate trade, substantially harmed the ability of the Confederacy to wage war. By early 1862 the blockade had reduced imports and exports to a trickle and virtually eliminated the coastal trade, which was an important part of the peacetime distribution system. The entire burden of moving goods fell on the railroads, which were barely capable of meeting the challenge during 1861 and even more so thereafter. Wartime concentrations of people and cavalry and draft animals around the Army of Northern Virginia combined with strains on the railroads and the distance from the available sources of meat and grain to require, quite early in the war, Lee's army to be on reduced rations--a situation that also worsened as the war progressed. Had the coastal trade not been eliminated by the blockaders, these problems would have been greatly reduced.

Surdam also presents convincing evidence that more attention must be paid to the impact of the blockade in dramatically reducing cotton exports. Not only did this reduce the Confederacy's ability to purchase needed war materiel in Europe, but it also immediately put cotton producers in an economic bind, for few southerners wanted to buy cotton that could not be exported. The increased costs of getting cotton through the blockade kept cotton prices in Confederate ports at (or only slightly above) their prewar real prices, despite high wartime prices for cotton in New York and Europe. Thus, he argues, the Confederate economy did not benefit substantially from these high world-market prices.

Finally, Surdam utilizes counterfactual analysis to assert that, had there been no blockade, the Confederacy could have utilized its world cotton price-setting capabilities to export a restricted amount of cotton, thereby increasing its revenue from cotton exports by $500-700 million and freeing up thousands of men for the army or food production. I do not find this counterfactual analysis very illuminating. Surdam refers repeatedly to a Confederate "informal embargo" on cotton exports in late 1861 and early 1862 (e.g., p. 159), although Douglas B. Ball has demonstrated that there was never any cotton embargo, formal or informal, by the Confederacy (Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat [Urbana, Ill., 1991]). Nor does Surdam's macroeconomic approach to cotton export revenues exclude the possibility that government-sponsored blockade-running operations that began in early 1863 reaped the benefits of high cotton prices. And although Surdam generally pays attention to previous scholarship, he may have benefited from the work of Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer on France and the Civil War, Mary Ellison on Lancashire and cotton, and Harold D. Woodman on the marketing of American cotton.

JUDITH FENNER GENTRY
University of Louisiana at Lafayette