Alfred Roman, The military operations of General Beauregard in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865

[675] upon the point that there were four millions of bales of cotton in the country at the time of the formation of the Confederacy; this point he seems to admit, while Mr. Trenholm attempts to show that the entire crop of 1860, amounting to less than four millions of bales, had at that time been shipped from the South, either to the North or to Europe, and that there was no surplus on hand. If Mr. Trenholm was right in his figures and facts, then why need Mr. Memminger, who was at the time at the head of the Treasury Department, have said what he did in defence of the Administration against the charge of negligence or a blunder in policy? Why need he have argued that there was no way in which the Government could have got possession of this cotton except by ‘seizure, purchase, and donation,’ and the utter impracticability of the Government getting possession of the cotton in any practicable or feasible way? This argument implies the presence of the cotton within the limits of the Confederacy at the time. Then, with Mr. Trenholm's figures and facts, what becomes of Mr. Memminger's argument that it would have required four thousand ships to have removed the cotton, which was impossible, while Mr. Trenholm claims that it had already been done? He claims that 3,800,000 bales had actually been shipped, and was already beyond the reach of the Confederacy before its formation. How these gentlemen, with all their great eminence and ability, can reconcile these views, I leave for them and others to settle.

Then again, how fallacious and delusive is Mr. Memminger's argument attempting to show the difficulties attending the payment for the cotton in Treasury notes, and in this way flooding the country with a depreciated currency. The truth is, the plan advocated by me and my associates on this line of policy, from the beginning, was not to issue Treasury notes, to be given in payment of the cotton, but it was for the Government to offer as much as ten cents a pound for all the cotton then in the country, to be paid for in bonds running for years at eight per cent. per annum. It was believed by us that at least two million bales of cotton would have been sold by the planters at these rates, taking the bonds as an investment running for twenty or thirty years, as might have been thought best. These bonds would not have been thrown upon the market as currency, for there was far too much currency in the form of Treasury notes already in the country: the planters would have held these bonds as an investment. This at least was my view of it. Some might have sold their bonds, just as many people afterwards sold their Confederate bonds, given under what was known as the Confederate Produce Loan; and just as many persons to-day sell at a premium United States bonds; but these do not in this way become a part of the currency or tend to depreciate it.

What Mr. Memminger says about the short time from the formation of the Confederacy in February and May, when the blockade was declared, is equally without point or force; it is well known that the blockade so-called, during the summer and fall of 1861, and the winter of 1862, was nothing but a paper blockade, it, did not amount at all to an effectual closing of our ports; it was not until after the early part of 1862 that the blockade was made effectual along the southern coast, from Savannah to New Orleans. In the mean time it appeared to me that, of the crop on hand, whether two or three millions of bales of 1860,