After having failed to win recognition as a sovereign state in 1861, the Confederate States face the prospect of a long war in early 1862. The Union’s forces were much larger and were beginning to get organized enough to conduct large scale offensive operations that would be difficult to turn back. The Confederacy needed more soldiers, and the nation’s fledgling Congress began taking steps to raise the needed forces. 150 years ago today letter began going out to the governors of the Confederate States making it known that they were expected to organize more troops for the war. One governor who found himself in that position was John Gill Shorter of Alabama.
Shorter was originally from Georgia, where he was born in 1818. In the 1830’s his father moved the family west to Alabama, where he founded an estate and made the Shorters one of the wealthiest families in the state. John Shorter eventually became a lawyer and ran a practice with his brother. Shorter began a political career in 1845 when he won an election to Alabama’s State Senate. He was eventually appointed as a judge, and was in that position when Alabama seceded in 1861. Shorter was a strong proponent of secession and this helped him win Alabama’s first governor’s race as a Confederate State.
Shorter entered office in August of 1861. On February 2nd, 1862 after 6 months in office he was sent the following letter from Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin.
Above: Image of Judah P. Benjamin as a U.S. Senator before the war.
All told, the Confederacy’s recruitment goals were summed up in this chart:
Totaling up the total required column, the numbers add up to 239,264. Let’s compare that with numbers of recruits already armed and in uniform in George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac about the same time:
As we see from these returns, if the Army of the Potomac alone had all of its men in one place at one time, it would almost equal the entire quota of troops from every state in the Confederacy. All of the units listed would not remain in the Army of the Potomac when it left for its first real campaign on the Peninsula in the spring, but the numbers are still very telling. The Confederacy would need to recruit every single able bodied white male in the south to hope to come close to these numbers and, as we’ll see next month, the Confederate Congress had legislation in the works beyond the voluntary recruitment discussed above which would work toward that goal.
John Shorter had been a politician before the war but had little experience in actual governance. He only served one term as Confederate governor of Alabama, which may indicate the job was not a good fit for him. He lost the 1863 election in a landslide to Thomas Hill Watts. Shorter supported the Confederacy as a private citizen for the remainder of the war. Afterwards he returned to a private law practice and worked until his death in 1872. He is buried in Shorter Cemetery in Eufaula, Alabama.