It is the custom of historians to measure the relative strength of North and South chiefly in terms of population. The North numbered 23,000,000 inhabitants; the South, about 9,000,000, of which the slave population amounted to 3,500,000. But these obvious statistics only partially indicate the real situation.
Not what one has, but what one is capable of using is, of course, the true measure of strength. If, in 1861, either side could have struck swiftly and with all its force, the story of the war would have been different. The question of relative strength was in reality a question of munitions. Both powers were glaringly unprepared. Both had instant need of great supplies of arms and ammunition, and both turned to European manufacturers for aid.
Those Americans who, in a later war, wished to make illegal the neutral trade in munitions forgot that the international right of a belligerent to buy arms from a neutral had prevented their own destruction in 1861. In the supreme American crisis, agents of both North and South hurried to Europe in quest of munitions. On the Northern side the work was done chiefly by the three ministers, Charles Francis Adams, at London; William L. Dayton, at Paris; and Henry S. Sanford, at Brussels; by an able special agent, Colonel George L. Schuyler; and by the famous banking-house of Baring Brothers, which one might almost have called the European department of the United States Treasury.
The eager solicitude of the War Department over the competition of the two groups of agents in Europe informs a number of dispatches that are, today, precious admonitions to the heedless descendants of that dreadful time. As late as October, 1861, the Acting Secretary of War wrote to Schuyler, one of whose shipments had been delayed: "The Department earnestly hopes to receive...the 12,000 Enfield rifles and the remainder of the 27,000, which you state you have purchased, by the earliest steamer following. Could you appreciate the circumstances by which we are surrounded, you would readily understand the urgent necessity there is for the immediate delivery of all the arms you are authorized to purchase. The Department expects to hear that you have been able to conclude the negotiations for the 48,000rifles from the French government arsenals." That the Confederate Government acted even more promptly than the Union Government appears from a letter of Sanford to Seward in May: "Ihave vainly expected orders," he complains, "for the purchase of arms for the Government, and am tempted to order from Belgium all they can send over immediately.... Meanwhile the workshops are filling with orders from the South.... It distresses me to think that while we are in want of them, Southern money is taking them away to be used against us."At London, Adams took it upon himself to contract for arms in advance of instructions. He wrote to Seward: "Aware of the degree to which I exceed my authority in taking such a step, nothing but a conviction of the need in which the country stands of such assistance and the joint opinion of all the diplomatic agents of the United States...in Paris, has induced me to overcome my scruples." How real was the necessity of which this able diplomat was so early conscious, is demonstrated at every turn in the papers of the War Department. Witness this brief dispatch from Harrisburg: "All ready to leave but no arms.
Governor not willing to let us leave State without them, as act of Assembly forbids. Can arms be sent here?" When this appeal was made, in December, 1861, arms were pouring into the country from Europe, and the crisis had passed. But if this appeal had been made earlier in the year, the inevitable answer may be guessed from a dispatch which the Ordnance Office sent, as late as September, to the authorities of West Virginia, refusing to supply them with arms because the supplies were exhausted, and adding, "Every possible exertion is being made to obtain additional supplies by contract, by manufacture, and by purchase, and as soon as they can be procured by any means, in any way, they will be supplied."Curiously enough, not only the Confederacy but various States of the North were more expeditious in this all-important matter than Cameron and the War Department. Schuyler's first dispatch from London gives this singular information: "All private establishments in Birmingham and London are now working for the States of Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, except the London Armory, whose manufacture is supposed to go to the Rebels, but of this last fact I am not positively informed. I am making arrangements to secure these establishments for our Government, if desirable after the present State contracts expire. On the Continent, Messrs, Dayton and Sanford...have been making contracts and agreements of various kinds, of which you are by this time informed." Soon afterward, from Paris, he made a long report detailing the difficulties of his task, the limitations of the existing munitions plants in Europe, and promising among other things those "48,000 rifles from the French government arsenals" for which, in the letter already quoted, the War Department yearned. It was an enormous labor; and, strive as he would, Schuyler found American mail continuing to bring him such letters as this from the Assistant Secretary of War in October:
