Just how centralized was the Confederate government?

One of the big differences was that while the CSA Constitution allowed the creation of a Supreme Court by the national government, the CSA never created one.
Some efforts in the CSA Congress were made to establish one, but they all failed. Reasons given are 1) the exigencies of the war; 2) distrust of giving a central, national court the powers that the US Supreme Court had.
In practice during the war, it was the 11 state supreme courts that ruled on constitutional issues. Thus in practice guaranteeing state input into Constitutional rulings.
Whether a US-style Supreme Court would have been established AFTER the war is anyone's guess.

Desert Kid said:

I mean in principle, it's supposed to be a mesh of a Jeffersonian/Calhoun-ian state, even says as much in the preamble of the Confederate constitution.

But, excluding the fact that they were at war, and war powers came into effect, add into the fact that state governments needed go-betweens with the Richmond government and vice versa for government correspondence.

Just how much of a centralized state did the CSA become compared to the Union?

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I am surprised that you haven't received more replies. I don't think the Confederates ever where able to centralize their war effort. Tax collection was lax. States printed their own money. States diverted resources into popular, but ineffective ironclads. It was a significant struggle in the US for the federal government to get control of the state efforts.
A major part of the power of the states was that communication and transportation was not cheap or instantaneous. State capitals and the state governors were still very powerful.
I don't think the Confederate government ever had complete control of the war effort. In the US, by March 1863, the federal government was in control. By that time the advantage of the existing government relative to the government in the making was more obvious.

@Desert Kid ,

You might want to check out the book, Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism, by Mark E. Neely Jr.

The book lists the enforcement of a Confederate internal passport system needed for citizens their domestic travels, the imposition of martial law to suppress drinking and alcohol, the suppression of those citizens with pro-Union sentiments.

It also addresses the thousands of political prisoners seized and held without bail or trial.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

wausaubob said:

I am surprised that you haven't received more replies. I don't think the Confederates ever where able to centralize their war effort. Tax collection was lax. States printed their own money. States diverted resources into popular, but ineffective ironclads. It was a significant struggle in the US for the federal government to get control of the state efforts.
A major part of the power of the states was that communication and transportation was not cheap or instantaneous. State capitals and the state governors were still very powerful.
I don't think the Confederate government ever had complete control of the war effort. In the US, by March 1863, the federal government was in control. By that time the advantage of the existing government relative to the government in the making was more obvious.

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Like Frank Owsley said, the Confederacy "died of states' rights."

Louisiana State University
LSU Digital Commons
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Graduate School
2015

To Begin Anew: Federalism and Power in the Confederate States of America
Geoffrey D. Cunningham
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected].

ABSTRACT
The leaders of the Confederate States of America proved eager and desirous of the power of the federal government. Rather than constituting an anomalous, ironical, or revolutionary episode in American political history, the Confederacy sought to conserve their definition of American liberty and democracy, with its racial grants, privileges, and sanction of slavery, through the power of government. The embrace of federal power was an intentional, central, and desirable feature of government, and one that Confederates embraced in order to sustain and project their nation and its vision of American democracy.


Cheers,
USS ALASKA

John Hartwell said:

Like Frank Owsley said, the Confederacy "died of states' rights."

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"I like to think of their position on the matter as "states' rights with benefits." - Kevin Waite

...to state the case in modern vernacular...


Cheers,
USS ALASKA

USS ALASKA said:

"I like to think of their position on the matter as "states' rights with benefits." - Kevin Waite

...to state the case in modern vernacular...

The Southern Slaveholders Dreamed of a Slaveholding Empire an interview with Kevin Waite | Slavery as the Cause for Secession

https://acwm.org/wp-content/uploads/shop-154224-west-of-slavery.jpg An interesting article interviewing Kevin Waite for his book 'West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire' The Southern Slaveholders Dreamed of a Slaveholding Empire an interview with Kevin Waite. Jacobin...

civilwartalk.com

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

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Be careful with links to socialist sites like Jacobin.

That's be like if I cited a pro-Confederate anything from a Steve Bannon website.

It's hard to know what the structure of the CSA would have been if it had been able to fully establish itself. Certainly a lots of the trends it took during the War didn't resemble the loose confederacy that some hoped for. Was that caused by the War or did they realize such lax bonds made for difficult management?

Emory Thomas looks at this question in _The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience_:



A few quotes from the above:

"The hallmark of a centralized, national state is and was the bureaucracy which implements the government's policies. Bureaucrats had been scarce in the antebellum South, which adhered to the maxim 'the government which governs least governs best.' Nevertheless, by 1863 confederate civil servants were 70,000 strong. Ironically the Richmond government employed more civil servants than its counterpart in Washington." Page 70


"Taken as a whole the activities of the Davis administration constituted a genuine revolution in Southern Politics. During the few harried years of its life span the Confederate government raised and sustained a national army and initiated conscription a full year before its enemy began the practice. The Davis administration suspended habeas corpus and used martial law to create police states in some localities. The government directly and indirectly managed broad segments of the Southern economy and engaged in income and confiscatory taxation." Page 70


"The Confederates sacrificed a states rights polity and embraced centralized nationalism. The Davis Administration outdid its northern counterpart in organizing for total war. Economically, the nation founded by planters and to preserve commercial, plantation agrarianism became, within the limits of its ability, urbanized and industrialized. A nation of farmers knew the frustration of going hungry, but southern industry made great strides." Page 134

Desert Kid said:

Just how much of a centralized state did the CSA become compared to the Union

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The Confederate state was torn between two opposing forces: the stranglehold of "states rights" vs. the imperative to fight an existential struggle by wielding centralized power. Strong governors such as Brown in Georgia and Vance in North Carolina and various news outlets railed against conscription, using manpower beyond state borders, and acted in general opposition to the Davis administration. But concurrently, war necessities forced the central government to impose those type of top down policies including impressment of slave labor and foodstuff, the requirement to override state governors hankering for manpower for their own territorial defense, and eventually placing limits on allowable blockade shipments. The tension between local and central control was never settled satisfactorily, and is often given as one of the causes of Confederate defeat.

Desert Kid said:

I mean in principle, it's supposed to be a mesh of a Jeffersonian/Calhoun-ian state, even says as much in the preamble of the Confederate constitution.

But, excluding the fact that they were at war, and war powers came into effect, add into the fact that state governments needed go-betweens with the Richmond government and vice versa for government correspondence.

Just how much of a centralized state did the CSA become compared to the Union?

Click to expand...

You can't exclude the war because the Confederacy's existence depended on war, once the war ended so did the Confederacy. The Confederate Constitution was nominal only. It became big government from its inception and infringed on every civil liberty in the process: slavery, impressment, famine, conscription, taxation and hyperinflation. The Confederacy was a kleptocracy that needed walls to keep in and out. It was way more centralized than the Union. It controlled every aspect of life.

I was reading that one thread, was the Confederacy intended to be a monarchy?" The one member posted one most inexplicable posts I ever read. He was claiming how laughable and ridiculous it was for someone to think such stupidity. But he never explained why. He explained the difference from the Confederacy structure of government and a monarch, but failed to see they both had the same policies, which was laughable. Pretty much a monarch usurps power from the people from civil liberties to economics, and that's all the Confederacy did. If I were to give the Confederacy government a modern political science name it would be: Totalitarian-Plutocracy.

jackt62 said:

The Confederate state was torn between two opposing forces: the stranglehold of "states rights" vs. the imperative to fight an existential struggle by wielding centralized power. Strong governors such as Brown in Georgia and Vance in North Carolina and various news outlets railed against conscription, using manpower beyond state borders, and acted in general opposition to the Davis administration. But concurrently, war necessities forced the central government to impose those type of top down policies including impressment of slave labor and foodstuff, the requirement to override state governors hankering for manpower for their own territorial defense, and eventually placing limits on allowable blockade shipments. The tension between local and central control was never settled satisfactorily, and is often given as one of the causes of Confederate defeat.

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I think this post points in the right direction. Although the Confederacy extended government control downward into defense industries, and outward into agricultural serfdom, my view is that such extensions were ineffective. The disease of local autonomy first showed its symptoms in the secession of western Virginia, and the refusal of Kentucky to join the Confederacy despite Kentucky's shared interest in preserving slavery.
The southern areas that joined the Confederacy did not have the same telegraph capability, nor the first class railroads that would allow the central government to control remote areas.
Once the US was as far south as Corinth, MS, there was very little east/west communication with Texas and Arkansas. Tennessee was dropping out of the Confederacy. Florida was mostly undeveloped semi-wild land.
The problem may have been that the big growers thought of themselves as independent lords, and had as little regard for the Richmond government as they had for the US government.
I suggest that it was hard enough for the US to gain control over recruitment and support of the army. State governors in places like Illinois were essential in the early months. The US had an advantage in both transportation and communication. And the US navy was an existing completely national institution.
In places like Mississippi, during the Vicksburg campaign, did the central government exercise any beneficial control? Or was it simply sending out demands that had no relevance to conditions in the theater?
Great thread.

wausaubob said:

The problem may have been that the big growers thought of themselves as independent lords,

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I think the same problem extended to the military forces. Kirby Smith essentially became a "sovereign" overload in his own right in the trans Mississippi; but even in the eastern and middle Confederacy, a large problem with southern command and control was that the Davis government ceded much authority to quasi-independent chieftains (e.g., Lee, Bragg, both Johnston's), which led to problems in determining national military goals, allocating scare resources, and coordinating troop movements in time and space.

jackt62 said:

I think the same problem extended to the military forces. Kirby Smith essentially became a "sovereign" overload in his own right in the trans Mississippi; but even in the eastern and middle Confederacy, a large problem with southern command and control was that the Davis government ceded much authority to quasi-independent chieftains (e.g., Lee, Bragg, both Johnston's), which led to problems in determining national military goals, allocating scare resources, and coordinating troop movements in time and space.

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They may have little choice in the matter. Telegraph communication was slow and brief. In person visits were rare even by April 1862.
The same rural conditions that caused so much trouble for the US, also made communication in the Confederacy ineffective.

I don't think you can exclude the fact that the Confederate government was at war to answer this question. Most governments become more centralized during warfare (see WWI and WWI, etc.). The fact that the Confederacy was born into war it never was able to de-centralize. The Union already had several decades of republicanism so when the federal government became more centralized for the war effort, it had a lot further to move to that point than the Confederacy.

wausaubob said:

They may have little choice in the matter. Telegraph communication was slow and brief. In person visits were rare even by April 1862.
The same rural conditions that caused so much trouble for the US, also made communication in the Confederacy ineffective.

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For sure. The vaunted Confederate offensives of September in Maryland and Kentucky were not only uncoordinated, but Lee in planning his Maryland incursion, may not have even been aware of what Bragg and Kirby Smith were up to in Kentucky around the same time.

It seems to me that early on the U.S. was joined into a confederacy with a weak central government under the Articles of Confederation. For some reason or another this was found to be unsatisfactory for an entity composed of independent political units (with poor communication infrastructure,not much in the way of railroads or telegraph networks for sure!) The members of the confederation then designed and implemented a model with a strong central government built on checks and balances. To ensure that all states of the confederation signed-on, a number of concessions had to be made and this is how the institution of slavery was brought into the United States based on the constitution that we are familiar with today. Obviously there were problems and weaknesses with the confederation approach to government that showed up right away and were intractable enough that the confederacy model was shed in favor of a strong central government approach. What did the organizers of the Confederate States of America do to avoid the problems that contributed to the rejection of the Articles of Confederation and ratification of the Constitution in 1788?

R. Porter said:

It seems to me that early on the U.S. was joined into a confederacy with a weak central government under the Articles of Confederation. For some reason or another this was found to be unsatisfactory for an entity composed of independent political units (with poor communication infrastructure,not much in the way of railroads or telegraph networks for sure!) The members of the confederation then designed and implemented a model with a strong central government built on checks and balances. To ensure that all states of the confederation signed-on, a number of concessions had to be made and this is how the institution of slavery was brought into the United States based on the constitution that we are familiar with today. Obviously there were problems and weaknesses with the confederation approach to government that showed up right away and were intractable enough that the confederacy model was shed in favor of a strong central government approach. What did the organizers of the Confederate States of America do to avoid the problems that contributed to the rejection of the Articles of Confederation and ratification of the Constitution in 1788?

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Didn't they pretty much copy the US Constitution with a few major modifications in order to hit the political ground running?

unionblue said:

Didn't they pretty much copy the US Constitution with a few major modifications in order to hit the political ground running?

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Aside from barring the Richmond government from interfering in the slavery issue and allowing any Confederal territory to be open to slavery a la Dred Scott. Not too much.

Line Item Vetoes were not too bad of an idea as well as the preamble going into a long screed about each state's sovereign character.